Re: The future of Ada

[Marin David Condic <condicma@bogon.pwfl.com>]

Scott Ingram wrote:
> 
> Unfortunately, this probably will not work for Gordon--as the program
> manager has already inserted a "six month slip" just for the
> conversion.  It might seem obvious to CLA readers that this "six month
> slip" is only the first of many, and I personally don't like explaining
> any slips at all...but a program that can tolerate six months may have
> an entirely different perspective.
> 
Yeah, but it is a 6 month slip that is completely unnecessary. The
argument that it is a risk mitigation just plain doesn't wash. You can
pretty much assume that you'll have a safe supply of Ada programmers for
- say - the next 5 years? In 5 years, you look again and if it looks
like the last Ada programmer on the planet is about to die, you pay him
to re-code it in C++ (or whatever!). Yeah, you've got verification
costs, but we're still talking about spending money now that you might
not ever have to spend - and doing so for very little risk mitigation.
If its a DoD system, then its even sillier, because in 5 years, if the
last Ada programmer augers in, you'll get the DoD to pay for the
conversion. In the end, it just plain won't cost that much to
custom-train some Ada programmers to maintain the system - certainly not
as much as this 6 month slip will cost, and you probably won't ever have
to spend that money.

We've got a very similar situation here, where we committed to the
Motorola M68040 ten or so years ago only to find out years later that
Motorola wasn't going to supply us with Mil Spec chips anymore. Guess
what? Somebody is going to have to pay us to convert the box to a new
chip. Actually, you're much more at risk long term for changes in
hardware technology rather than software technology. As long as you've
got the same hardware and a compiler, you can very cheaply keep someone
maintaining it. (Care to hear about our guys who are maintaining some
_very_ old systems in an obscure assembler language because the program
can't afford a hardware upgrade?) But let a critical hardware supplier
bail out on you and you're back to a total redesign of the system. It
happens and you just have to eat the cost. And it happens a _lot_ more
often than discovering that you can't find/train someone to maintain
some old code because it is in an obscure language.

MDC
-- 
Marin David Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
***To reply, remove "bogon" from the domain name.***

    "Software engineers are, in many ways, similar to normal people"

        --  Scott Adams