Re: Ada The Best Language?

[James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net>]

codesavvy wrote:
> 
> Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com> wrote in message news:<3B55C6B0.C2ED36@san.rr.com>...
> > codesavvy wrote:
> > >
> > > I don't care if you think I'm trolling, I'm not.  I think the answer
> > > is rather obvious, Ada has nothing to offer that is substantially
> > > better than what C++ offers.
> >
> > Does C++ offer built in and portable multitasking, protected objects,
> > real-time performance, built-in portable interrupt interfacing,
> > distributed programming?
> 
> No but do you have any data that measures how much more productive an
> Ada developer is using these features?  BTW I like these features in
> Ada 95 a lot.  I doubt, however, that producitivity is increased
> significantly by having them available.

I do not have a study, but I do have an example from my own experience.

I worked in a company doing real time robotics development. Part of 
that work involved active participation on the Working Group for the
US Army's Joint Architecture for Unmanned Ground Systems. Other
participants represented other companies, the Army, the Navy, 
the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, and some universities. My group was the only group
using Ada. All the other groups were using C++. Over a period of
two years my group was able to implement, from the ground up, a
complete system using the initial version of the JAUGS architecture
standard. No other group came even close.

Now, it could have been the size of our development team. After all,
we had the advantage of doing all our work with a three person team.
The other groups were hampered by the existence of much larger
teams. We were also the only team to attempt a design using
concurrency. Our system had about 75 tasks running on the 
vehicle control unit and another 50 tasks running on the operator
control unit. All the other teams were using very rigidly designed
nested control loops.

Now, I know this probably is no measure of productivity, but our
solution was also highly configurable in terms of the complexity
of our target vehicle. No recoding was needed to move the controls
from a bulldozer to a forklift, even though the control algorithms
for tracked and wheeled vehicles are quite different. No other 
team even attempted such flexibility.

One small example of Ada productivity advantage was the development
of a generic protected bounded queue. It took less than one day to 
code and test this little item, which was a critical element both 
in our design and in the overall JAUGS architecture. The equivalent
functionality in C++ took other teams weeks to code and test.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA