Re: Customer balks at Ada -- any hope?

[Joseph C Williams <joseph_c_williams@raytheon.com>]

"Stanley R. Allen" wrote:
> 
> but at least a couple (surprise,
> surprise) used to be programmers.  The head of my department used
> to teach Ada at the local university.  Another supervisor was a
> member of the Posix/Ada mapping review group.  Another likes to
> get his hands dirty with GNAT/Linux in his spare time.
> 
> Heck, one day even *you* might become a manager, like some
> other people that read this group regularly.

  To give Stanley credit (and I do that a lot), he is right.
Ada is intended to be used on 'reasonably' sized projects...
stuff that is not done in a week or two....stuff that can take
years to finally deploy.  This long lead time is not due to
Ada, but to the nature of the problems being solved (heck, the
NEXT space station we build will not be like this...).
  This means that some of today's floor engineers may someday be
tomorrow's team/group/IPT leads, maybe even work up to
upper management someday.  All while still working on the exact
same project or something very similar.  You (hopefully)
end up with a lot of corporate knowledge walking around in
the leadership ranks.  Your 1991 new-grad screwup may be your
2001 department manager.
  Agreeably, some of them still are mentally fighting the battles
of yesteryear.  But surprisingly, the same problems still are
applicable today:  CM issues, multiple baselines, memory
constraints, timing constraints, race conditions, plain bad
code, short schedules, employee burnout, customer expectations,
etc. etc. etc.
  Of course, everyone has employee turnover and such.  But with
a 'good' Ada project, I think your leadership ranks' average 
technical skill base will tend to increase over time.
They will have a certain sense of ownership in the project and
a personal knowledge of its history, both successes and failures.
  You probably would not see this on a short-term C/C++ project.
-- 
----------------------------------------------
Joe Williams 
Aerospace Engineering Services, RAYTHEON TECHNICAL SERVICES COMPANY
Joseph_C_Williams@Raytheon.com