Re: PL/SQL -> Ada

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

Bill Meahan wrote:
> the iTek building. Seems Ada has a reputatation (around most of the auto
> industry, anyway) of being a language for missle programmers and/or
> anal-retentive types who spend more time arguing chapter and verse of
> ARM or ARM95 than actually coding anything useful. Sorry, but that's the
> image TPTB have of Ada. They'd rather throw up crap "Web applications"
> quickly than build robust systems. Code quality ain't Job 1. If it were,
> our "enterprise architecture" would not be 100% Microsoft, that's for
> sure :-(
> 
Behold! I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves. :-)

Most wrong impressions of Ada come either from rumors based on
misunderstandings or from experiences people have had misusing the
language. (Even us missile guys get it wrong sometimes) But someone has
to stand there and gently make the case for Ada as a viable tool. I've
had young fresh outs who've asked me why we didn't just scrap Ada and go
use C/C++ like the rest of the world, to which I respond that we can't
run mission critical software with the reliability of your average
Windows app. I could point to solid metrics that demonstrated an error
reduction by a factor of four and to numerous other studies that showed
C/C++ code to be far more error prone in ways that Ada code cannot even
get to. You then ask what is the cost of failure. Corporate dollars down
the tubes? Aborted missions? Deaths and lawsuits? Ada starts to sell as
cheap insurance - something your average businessman can understand.
Keep trying to make the case.

BTW: I'd have to agree about the language lawyer types as being a
negative sell for Ada. While I understand the value of language lawyers
when it comes to language design and implementation, I have often been
frustrated by them getting in the way of getting my job done. I've
sometimes tried to do something which looks perfectly reasonable from
the programmer's perspective only to have the compiler puke over it and
get told by the experts "Well the compiler is doing something perfectly
legal...." Maybe its legal but the law doesn't get the job done. Maybe
what we need to help avoid this is get the Ada language lawyers on
Valium or something so that when the programmer wants something
reasonable from the compiler, the response is more one of "Hey dude! No
problemo!" :-)

MDC
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