Re: Have you ever had a bug caused by...

["Marc A. Criley" <mcqada@earthlink.net>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <9r3sen$dnj$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
> >
> >What always confounds me about it is that even when you can make a strong
> >business case for using Ada based on higher reliability, lower development
> >and maintenance cost, etc., and actually back it up with data, you still
> >lose because management will end up asking their techies about it (fair
> >enough) and the techies don't like Ada or don't want the headache of
> 
> Actually, I've seen more cases where the grunts like it, but management doesn't
> for whatever reason (I quit trying to analyze their reasoning process when I
> discovered it has little to do with reasoning).

When mentioning Ada to some developers where I used to work that were
working on C++ projects, I found that a number of them had used Ada in
the past and liked it.  But then, when new projects started up with C++
as the implementation language, they, being good engineers, simply
learned the new language and went to work.

The _strident_ calls for C++ (and now Java) often seemed to come from a
small number of opinionated individuals who were only too happy to get
up in front of management or the customer and beat the pulpit on how "we
have to go where the market is going!".  The majority of these
individuals were on-staff types who hadn't coded in years...but
certainly knew how it ought to be done!

I had a a perpetual smouldering battle against one such faction on the
project on which I worked, who advocated tossing out a measurably
high-quality, efficient, reliable, maintainable weapon control simply
because it was written in Ada, and redo it in C++.

In a follow-on program, I knew that there was no chance of any new
subsystems being written in Ada, but these techno-surfers were
advocating writing a soft realtime mission- and safety-critical portion
of the system in Java--and not today's Java, but 1999 Java.  Even the
skeletal version done for the proposal demo was unstable and a total dog
on performance.  I went ballistic over that and the blind advocacy fell
appart, with the system ending up being proposed in C++.  (And I knew
the lead designer was a very competent engineer, so I had less heartburn
than I might've otherwise.)

Marc A. Criley
Senior Staff Engineer
Quadrus Corporation
www.quadruscorp.com