Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@attbi.com>]

Alexander Kopilovitch wrote:

> Just for coloring this your statement (which is certainly true) here is a
> funny story: an old friend of mine, a true software engineer (despite his
> pure mathematical education), who moved to USA 12 years ago and now work for
> one of so-called "giants" (which naturally have divisions in India), once wrote
> me (I translate from Russian): "Sometimes I receive a mail from one of those
> Indians, and after brief reading my first thought is to reply him: guy, first
> learn to cut your nails, and only after that try to approach a programming...
> but then I recall you, and reread the mail - and discover that the guy is not
> so stupid and dirty, in fact he wrote something quite reasonable."

Exactly.  It is often the case that I will look at an issue brought to 
the ARG and my software engineering tendancies get in the way.  I have 
to turn that off, and reread everything ignoring style and other 
cultural values.  And this is in Ada, where there is a fairly homogenous 
programming style.

The problem is when you run into managers who are not used to abstract 
domains, and have to try to explain why a common culture is important to 
a project.  (Again, this has nothing to do, as such, with ethnic 
background.)  I worked on one project where we had a very eclectic 
group, one person from Nigeria, one from China, a third from England, 
and a fourth was from Russia.  The rest of the team was from America. 
We all had problems with the Russian that had nothing to do with his 
background AFAIK.

We has rules for checking in software, and he would on a fairly regular 
basis run the full regression suite on some revision he made, and find a 
bug.  He would then fix the bug and check the software in without 
re-running the regression suite.

This was a serious problem, especially once we had real users for the 
compiler we were creating.  Fortunately the RCS would allow us to back 
out his changes when the bug fix didn't work or created new problems. 
The problem was not that he made mistakes, we all did.  But that 
particular repeated mistake on several occasions led to other team 
members bypassing the RCS and using a "known good" version of the 
semantic analysis code.

-- 
                                              Robert I. Eachus

"As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure." -- Jacques Chirac, 
President of France
"As far as France is concerned, you're right." -- Rush Limbaugh