Re: Ada and QNX

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

Igor Kovalenko wrote:

> Indeed, humor was good sometimes.

Humor or not, my impression of Siberia is that it is a place that is cold. I
grew up in Michigan and that's a place that gets reasonably cold - and lots
of snow! My address has been in Florida for a number of years now and I
intend to keep it that way.

Now to segue back to Ada..... :-)

While Ada definitely has its roots in the US DoD and is still used a lot
within the defense industry, I don't think its fair to characterize it as
"the language of thermonuclear hell" (see back up a few layers in this
thread). At least not anymore. It is used in many non-DoD related
applications. When I was with Pratt & Whitney, we had so much success with
building out military engine controls in Ada that our whole process
eventually got adopted by our bretheren in the commercial engine business up
in Connecticut. (It also gets cold up there, which is why I no longer work
at Pratt! :-) We were able to demonstrate with metrics that we had improved
our productivity to over double what it was and that we reduced our defects
by a factor of four. And this was hard-realtime, mission critical software,
so we had lots of the same design constraints people would have doing
operating system work. It gets hard to argue with that kind of success, so
the commercial side eventually adopted what we were doing on the military
side.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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