Re: Ada student homework ?

[Nicolas Brunot <n.brunot@cadwin.com>]

Lao Xiao Hai wrote :

> HmmmMMMMMmmmm.    Are you suggesting that the "cost to maintain a team
> of Ada programmers"  is a function of the language?

No it is just a concern of the company it is to much difficult to find programmers and if their cost is
too high.
The company has to deal with the entire development cost, and availability of programmers and their
turnover has a cost.
It is quite easy and cheap to find a C++ team in comparison with an Ada team, just before you'll find a
bunch of C programmers for just one Ada programmer.

>    The final part of your
> sentence leads me to suspect you understand the benefits of Ada.

We have been developping 99,9 % in Ada for more than 10 years to develop complex CAD and database
applications.
So, yes we know something about Ada qualities and we have extensively used or at least tested nearly
every Ada compiler for DOS, Windows and Unix that existed for the last 10 years
We have about 1 000 000 lines Ada code for our products ...

> I am currently watching with amusement as hordes of otherwise intelligent
> programmers are forced to learn C++, when Ada is already in place.  One
> prominent member of the DoD software community said to me recently, "We have
> all this legacy Ada code that we need to port to Java technology."   He is
> making his decision on the recommendation of someone who, in my opinion,
> is not experienced enough in Ada or C++ to make such a judgement.   Another
> said, "In my last command they told me that Ada was pretty much dead since
> the mandate went away."

The history of computers is full of excellent products, far better than their competitors, which
disappeared because their users and promoters , however excellent they were, behaved nearly like Ada
community is doing by now.
We hope to go on with Ada in the future, but sometimes you have to fear that sames causes lead to same
effects ...

> Meanwhile, C++, a language which can best be characterized as "its own
> virus,"  is being stuffed down the intellectual maw of a lot of programmers
> who already know Ada 83 and need only to be updated on the technology
> of the current standard.   Transitioning good Ada to C++ is so silly that it
> defies belief.

If you want to convince C++ programmers to try Ada, It's not a good idea to tell them
"your language is silly, change it"
they would answer, if they take time to answer
"All right, so why do I have less than 1% of job offers in Ada ?, when it will reach 10%, may be I'll
start to think about learning it"

> The result will be more incidents such as the USS Yorktown, dead in the water
> from a software flaw originating in code written in C.    I find it scary that we
> plan to send our young men into battle depending on software created with the
> most error-prone programming language ever invented. Who will take the final
> responsibility for this folly once the finger-pointing begins?

Excellent software can be written in C, and very bad ones can be written in Ada.
If we want to see Ada more widely used, the first thing is to consider it as what it is : nothing more
than a TOOL
It is not realistic to say : this was a disaster because of C, and would not have been with Ada
And no tool is perfect for every purpose
Java is far easier to use for certain purposes than Ada
The biggest mistake of Ada 83 was to forget that it should have an "export" feature instead of thinking
the world would switch it Ada
I don't know if Ada 95 was not too late to correct that.