RE: is ada dead?

[Vinzent Hoefler <vinzent@MailAndNews.com>]

Original Message From "Andrzej Lewandowski" <lewandoREMOVE@attglobal.net>
>"Michal Nowak" <vinnie@inetia.pl> wrote
>> On 01-07-07, at 17:37, Andrzej Lewandowski  wrote:
> >
>> Can be true, can be false. Program lifecycle is not only coding. There is
>> also maintnace, new versions developent. These phases are less money-
>> consuming in Ada than in other mentioned languages. One important thing -
>> you buy compiler one time and use it for long period. It is used for
>> writting many programs. So I think, that good compiler is worthy investing.
>
>I am sufficiektly familiar with the industry and business to respond
>just with single word: NONSENSE.

Sorry, that's no nonsense, it just looks to me like some business men didn't 
do their homework in math (ok, I did it neither *g*). For instance, at my 
company it would not make any difference in total cost if the compiler would 
have cost $10k+ instead of now using GNU-tools for the Linux-Version of our 
controlling software. It's three years of C++ development yet, paying two or 
three software developers all over the time a quite good amount of money per 
month and AFAIK until now something around 200k Swiss Franc (~$160k) for 
out-sourcing some GUI-code.

So please tell me about cost optimization, even if the cost of the compiler 
would have been equal to the cost of one or two months of the whole 
development time. This percentage value would show up quite near the end of 
the list in my profiler, I would consider it completely negligible - why 
don't 
use the same philosophy as used in software design for the whole department?

I don't think that this example is just one bad example. It's just the case 
that economists don't have the same profiling tools like me. :-)

Oops, almost forgot: I don't do professional developing in ADA. ADA is just 
a 
hobby for me (at the moment at least, perhaps this might change in the near 
future). I'm still doing ancient, but f* fast assembly code and to tell you 
about some success with that "consider it to be dead, too"-language, I got a 
50-60 _times_ (5,000%) speed improvement last week compared to some old 
code.


Vinzent.