Amusing anecdote

Amusing anecdote

[Stanley R. Allen]

I could not resist passing along this story, told to me
today by a new employee at our site.

He said that he was on a military (Navy) Ada project for
'cooperative engagement' (ship-to-ship communications)
in St. Petersburg, Florida.  The company was concerned
that there would not be enough people to hire for Ada
development "because the interviewees want to work in C++"
(this was in the 1995-1996 timeframe).

So they decided to look into the possibility of converting
the project to C++.  A professor from the local university
was hired to teach C++ to some of the senior developers.
This professor turned out to be an Ada-basher.  He couldn't
stop bad-mouthing the Ada language, and constantly praised the
C++ language.  He would give examples of C++ programs, and claim
"This can't be done in Ada" or "With Ada this would take twice
as much memory and be three times as slow."

One of the Ada-friendly developers decided to take the
challenge.  He went back to his office and implemented one
of the professor's programs both in C++ and Ada (Ada 83).
He came back with the results and confronted the teacher
during the next class session -- the Ada version was faster
and smaller, even with extra functionality.

The professor sputtered, etc., but it became clear as
time went on that he had no project experience -- all of
his understanding of Ada was second-hand.

The story has a happy ending.  That professor stopped teaching
the course.  In the opinion of the person who related the story
to me, it was because he was too embarrased by these results.
A survey of the developers after the course indicated that they
saw no advantage to moving to C++.  The company agreed with the
opinion, expressed by developers in the survey, that "every few
years there will be some new language to come along which college
graduates will want to work in; we can't keep changing our project
language all the time to attract these students".  The project
remains in Ada today.

-- 
Stanley Allen
mailto:s_allen@hso.link.com