From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID
	autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,63ceef1cf4561e32
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
From: Scott Ingram` <scott@silver.jhuapl.edu>
Subject: Re: Customer balks at Ada -- any hope?
Date: 2000/07/18
Message-ID: <3974F7A1.E806B092@silver.jhuapl.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 648009214
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
References: <8l01s4$gnr$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8l2pqo$im7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
X-Accept-Language: en
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Complaints-To: usenet@houston.jhuapl.edu
X-Trace: houston.jhuapl.edu 963967089 20686 128.244.10.34 (19 Jul 2000
 00:38:09 GMT)
Organization: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
Mime-Version: 1.0
NNTP-Posting-Date: 19 Jul 2000 00:38:09 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 2000-07-19T00:38:09+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

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?