Re: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@acm.org>]

Pat Rogers wrote:
> Some baggage never gets lost...
> 
> This idea that development in Ada is more expensive than in other
> languages must be challenged whenever we come across it.  The tool
> costs can be very reasonable and in my experience (and others' as
> well) programmer productivity can be extremely high indeed.
> 
I would agree, but with a qualification. In some domains with some
development environments, you get lots of prepackaged, well integrated
services. The language itself (Ada) is going to be faster/better/cheaper
to develop in than (say) C++ or some other popular languages because of
ease of understanding, extensive checking to avoid bugs, easier
debugging, easier configuration management, etc. However, its hard to
compete with something like Microsoft Visual C++ for PC app development
simply because of the body of code leveraged through the MFC and the
really spiffy, well integrated IDE. While similar tools are available
with Ada to some extent, you don't get the whole thing in one nice kit,
so you'll lose time in pulling the tools together, integrating them,
figuring out how to use them, etc. For some domains you may not have
these tools at all.

Granted, this is not a "language" issue, but more of a "development
environment" issue. Some other language may be faster to develop in
simply because of the availability of the whole environment - not
because of the language itself.


> All other things being equal, in a contest between highly-skilled Ada
> programmers and highly-skilled C programmers, I'll bet on the Ada
> people to produce the final code faster.
> 
I'd bet the same way. There is a strong body of evidence to support
this. But the "All other things being equal" qualification is a big
issue.

MDC
-- 
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Take away the punchbowl just when the party gets going" 

        --  William McChesney Martin, Former Fed chairman, explaining 
            what a sound central bank must always do. 
======================================================================