Re: Ada in Iraq

[john@nospam.demon.co.uk (John McCabe)]

On 24 Apr 2003 18:12:22 -0700, 18k11tm001@sneakemail.com (Russ) wrote:

>Let me follow up on my earlier post. Here is an excerpt from an email
>I recently received from a very competent and productive software
>engineer who works down the hall from me and who has great influence
>over our choice of language:

>Your continued obsession with Ada for purely academic reasons is a
>seemingly naive approach to real software development.

Your continued obsession with Ada appears to be more for practical,
safety and cost reasons!

>I have not seen any legitimate justification for switching to Ada.

It's hard to prove until you actually do it!

>Which feature of Ada critical to our **** development cannot be
>achieved with C/C++/Java?

Err - safety probably!

>There are several reasons why Ada is not practical.

No there isn't. There is only one reason why Ada can't be practical
and that is that you don't have the time to wait for, or the money to
pay for, a compiler to be produced that supports whatever unusual
processor you use. If a compiler exists for your processor there is no
reason why Ada isn't practical.

>First, there is no in-house large-scale Ada application development
>experience among the software developers or civil servants.  We can't
>wait around while 40 developers come up speed. Furthermore, i'll be
>blunt and say there was "little" in-house C++  experience when the
>**** was redesigned and we're still paying the price for that
>inexperience.

Interesting, and not surprising. If they had chosen Ada instead of C++
at the time he would probably be singing its praises!

>Second, the FAA does not use Ada for the rest of its
>FFP software development.

Means nothing to me!

>The bottomline is that in today's world, if
>you want to draw from the largest pool of talent, you better be
>programming in C, C++ or Java.  Call it inertia if you want. It
>doesn't matter really.

Nonsense. A talented software engineer will be able to program in
whatever language you ask him to. The only issue here is salary - a
young, inexperienced, but talented S/W Eng will choose to program in
the language that they perceive as being most financially rewarding.

>Ultimately, any truly critical Ada feature
>will eventually be added to C++ or Java.

While this is partially nonsense, the fact is that even if C++ and/or
Java had all of the features of Ada added, there is no way that the
amount of time and effort spent in getting those features *right* in
Ada will be done in C++ and especially Java! Java is a
flavour-of-the-month language - whatever feature is perceived to be
*nice* just gets added irrespective of the overall effect and
consistency in the language!


Best Regards
John McCabe

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