Re: F-22 ADA Programming

[rriehle@itu.edu]

On Sunday, October 26, 2014 4:55:40 PM UTC-7, David Botton wrote:
> > "Lack of Ada developers" is also a false complaint. 
> 
> There are overall very few developers when you are looking for "local" developers. I am not sure there is another Ada developer in all of South Florida I could hire if I needed :)
> 
> > Generally they want to hire lots of poor developers, since that maximizes profit on cost-plus contracts, and Ada  people tend not to fall into that category.
> 
> There is truth to this, but once they hired the handful of people we know they'd still have tons of seats to fill.
> 
> Also, not every project requires someone with the skill sets many of us have, projects of a large enough size may not justify that many senior level people.
> 
> David Botton

I recall from when I was actively teaching Ada that one large DoD contractor (one of the largest) decided to use C++ instead of Ada.  The reason?   We can hire C++ programmers right out of college.  This is rather strange.  Why would they think that recent  college graduates schooled in a clunky language such as C++, where they wrote mostly toy programs using features that we cannot allow (notice the long list of proscriptions for JSF), who need to be retaught how to use the language safely -- how can they think they are getting any benefit?   I used to ask they, "Why would you choose a programming language that is inherently error-prone and expect an outcome that is error-free?"  Answer: "Go away Richard.  We have made our decision."  

Ada is not that hard to learn.   Probably the most difficult thing to learn in Ada is the rules from Chapter Eight, Visibility Rules.  Those rules are what make Ada unique, and make it a powerful engineering-oriented tool for building dependable software.  Too often, I found, they just wanted to get code working as quickly as possible without too much thought to the dependability issues.  "We can find the problems during testing," is not a good approach to engineering.  Too often, when problems are discovered during testing, the design flaws need to be fixed with the equivalent of some kind of shim -- what I call a "software shim," reminiscent of putting a piece of folded napkin under a wobbly table, instead of creating a precise design from the beginning.   

Until we have software professionals who are also trained to think as-if they were engineers, they will not really appreciate Ada as we would hope they would.