Re: Customer balks at Ada -- any hope?

[Scott Ingram` <scott@silver.jhuapl.edu>]

wv12@my-deja.com put out some flame bait to which I responded:

> C has been known to control big, expensive hardware. One such

C has controlled big, expensive hardware...and people died.

> example is the mutinode Deep Blue capable of searching a few million
> nodes per second. Is the speed critical in this project? If so, I see
> on [sic]  reason to avoid Ada that checks every shift, rotate, add,
> multiply
> in your software.

Okay, I am feeling particularly pugnacious this evening after a day of
determining things like "are you big-endian?"  wv12, what possible
justification
do you have for implying that speed suffers when Ada is used?  I see nothing

in the ARM or the implementation supplied docco that implies processor
operations are checked at each iteration.  Further, I am rewriting speed
sensitive ATM code in Ada because nobody knows what the current (C
written in a Perl style) code does.

> > course strongly disagree with.  As I see it, the arguments are (1) Ada
> > will offer tangible benefits, both in reliability and in develophatment
> > time, and (2) a decent programmer can pick up similar languages fairly
> > easily, especially for maintainence.  (Perhaps I should show them some
> > Ada source...).  Ideas?

> Maybe you could try to sell the safety critical side of Ada. But
> software that does not get tested will crash, kill, dump core, etc...
> (Ariane comes to mind)

My proggies only core dump when they import buggy C code,
and most of the time I can recover from that if I am feeling defensive.
As for crashes, not in my lifetime--that is totally unacceptable.  As a
tech, my code has to be better than my programmers, otherwise they
won't believe me when I tell 'em the hardware is okay.

> You are not convincing me. Besides, the customer is always right.

Why the heck you threw this flamebait out is beyond me.  I doubt that
you wanted to be convinced.  And since I have years of experience
in customer service, I must note that you're correct; the customer is always

right.  It just sometimes takes a while to persuade them to do what is
in their own best interest.  (NB Mike Silva's thread regarding customers.)

And what kind of name is wv12 anyway?