Re: Multiple reasons for failure of Ariane 5 (was: Re: Ariane 5 - not an exception?)

[Sandy McPherson <sandy@wgs.estec.esa.nl>]

Dear Ken and Robin,

Can't you guys get your own newsgroup, use email, the phone, or get
married or something. I used to be amused by your sometimes ungrounded
mutual accusations, however it is wearing a bit thin now. The Ariane 5
incident will go down Space Industry in history as the most spectacular
software failure so far. The reasons behind it are manifold, but I can't
remember the last time this thread mentioned Ariane 5.

I tended to think Robin was taking part in that well known (at least to
British, Aussies Kiwis etc.) activity of mug-baiting: you make an
outrageous statement wait for someone to take it seriously and then have
a good laugh watching them get wound up. However I'm not sure anymore.
If this is a real discussion, I think it is quite clear that neither of
you is going to win.

I don't think there has been one scrap of evidence to support Robin's
claims for divine superiority of homo PLIs, how can a NEW PL/I
programmer be any better than a NEW Ada programmer, does he download
experience from the manual? If Robin's point is reduced purely to
experience in the industry, then the the language become less important
as the number of years experience increases. Most people don't core dump
and forget their previous experience when they are required to use a new
language. Unfortunately there aren't many programmers around with
30+years of experience in any (programming?) language, who actually work
at the "coal face", so we will never know if the 50+ PL/I guys would
have done a better job than the 50+ Ada guys, but I think we could prove
that the 50+PL/Iers would do a better job than the usual bunch of 25-30
year olds who generally do the coding (and whose main ambition is to
stop coding as soon as possible, take up a management post and be able
to make the decisions which make the headllines).

I am not in a position to judge if the exception handling in PL/I is
better than that in Ada, I do object to this statement though:

++robin says:
---On the contrary, they do, because they have had more experience
in using the exception capabilities on a daily basis, not just
in dedicated real-time systems.

The very first Ada I wrote more than 8 years ago used the exception
capabilities and I have used it regularly since (but not on a daily
basis), I have also never used Ada in an embedded system, only on big
clunky machines with big clunky operating systems. There are certain
(non)features of Ada which had me pulling my hair out, but these seem to
have been fixed by Ada95- the exception handling wasn't one of them.

The only PL/I program I have seen was such a pile of garbage, (it was
more then 5000 lines long with no indentation no comments and no
sub-programs), it was an operational analysis tool which happened to
prove the invincibility of the air force, because the random number
generator was broken. Not even the cleverest of exception handling
capabilities would have been able to rescue pilots from the mess this
thing would have gotten them into. This does not lead me however to the
conclusion that PL/I is crap. IMO it is complete nonsense to trash Ada
(or any other language, including PL/I), simply because people make
stupid management/ design/ coding decisions, because we would quickly
have no languages left to use!!

It takes two to cause an argument, but only one to step out and stop it.
Would one of you please come to your senses and spare the rest of us.

Sandy