Re: A question for my personal knowledge.

[Paul Whittington <paul@grep.net>]

When it comes to quality the question is not is it as good as it can
be, or could it be better; the question is "Is it good enough?"

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Siamak Kaveh wrote:
> > Accepting that Ada is one of the best available programming languages, the
> > following question comes to my mind: Why BIG PLAYERS of computer industry
> > (IBM, HP, COMPAQ(Digital), CRAY, Microsoft, SUN...) don't develop their
> > native ADA compiler? (or they disconnected their development).
> >
> > Do their engineers and managers understand that using ADA can improve
> > quality of their software?
> >
> This is always a subject that is bound to start a long chain of
> reactions. I'll get mine in early! :-)
> 
> I think you have to account for the fact that not all decisions are made
> on the basis of purely technical criteria. In some cases there are
> financial concerns. For example, an existing investment in
> infrastructure and training. You can't discount the purely emotional
> criteria used by the decision makers. If a lead engineer knows language
> X and has little knowledge of language Y, which way is he likely to
> lean? Or the fear of trying something new which might put your project
> at risk. And you always have the totally irrational factors of
> misinformation, rumors and hearsay which can take on qualities of "urban
> legend" - largely believed, yet without any basis in fact.
> 
> As for the "Big Players" not wishing to develop their own Ada compilers,
> ask why they don't want to develop their own compilers for almost any
> other language at the same time. To start with, these guys are
> *hardware* manufacturers and software in general is not their "core
> business". They need to have *some* software developed in house, but
> increasingly they want the job outsourced if it doesn't somehow create
> competitive advantage for their product. It used to be that all hardware
> vendors had their own proprietary operating systems. Now they mostly use
> some flavor of Unix, Windows NT or maybe a handful of other things. If
> they have in-house developed compilers, probably most of them have been
> around for a while and given the choice the hardware vendor would prefer
> that it be outsourced, except why bother once its already built?
> 
> The only exception I can think of is Java being a product of Sun. Its
> easy to figure out what the plot is there. If you get lots of people
> developing in Java which targets to a "virtual machine" rather than
> native hardware, you have created the excuse why people need to buy
> more/faster/bigger hardware, haven't you? Almost by definition, an
> interpreted pseudo-machine-language is going to have to take more cpu
> cycles than native machine instructions.
> 
> It's probably better for the industry if the big hardware vendors
> contract out for their compiler technology because it unbundles the
> interests of the compiler vendors & users from the interests of the
> hardware vendors. As for using Ada (or any other language for that
> matter) in their own internal development? I'd say it is their loss -
> they ought to consider it but may not for reasons I stated above.
> 
> 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.***
> 
> Visit my web page at: http://www.flipag.net/mcondic

-- 
Paul Whittington
GrepNet, Inc.
(208)523-7375
paul@grep.net

"Even if you're on the right track you'll get
 run over if you stand still."

Will Rogers