Re: Ada used in General Aviation (GA) applications?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Keep in mind that I have done a study that showed a 50% reduction in 
development time and a factor of 4 improvement in defects. You may in 
fact be thinking of that very study here. I've made the statement here 
before.

However, a) it is difficult-to-impossible to claim (from my study) that 
Ada was the only factor and b) enough of it was an "all other things 
being equal" environment to make the claim believable/useful. It was an 
embedded system environment with virtually all of the code home-grown. 
It was *not* an environment in which the OS, GUI, Database, Support 
Libraries, Etc., were all written in C and all the development tools 
were designed with C programming in mind.

You want to take over - for example - Motorola cell phone applets? 
That's an interesting market, but you don't even have an Ada compiler 
supported for that environment - so all other things aren't equal. Then 
there's all the development tools & libraries around it and no similar 
suite of stuff for Ada. There is no "Development Kit" - so Ada can't 
play on even an equal footing - or play at all. All the abstract studies 
in the world citing double-your-productivity-and-reduce-your-bugs are 
useless unless and until you've got that development kit sitting right 
there available for use.

My argument is not to deny the productivity and defect gains, but to 
insist that Ada needs to target a lucrative market and give it 
everything it needs to take advantage of the potential productivity gains.

MDC


Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm aware of 2 real-world studies, in 2 different domains, of real 
> projects, done both in C and Ada, with good metrics, that show that Ada 
> reaches deployment in half the time/cost of C. As a result, I see no 
> evidence to support claims that C-like languages have better 
> time-to-market characteristics than Ada.
> 
> These same studies show Ada has a factor of 4 fewer post-deployment 
> errors, and a factor of 10 less time/cost to correct an error.
> 
> Note to MDC: All other things are not equal, but that was true of these 
> projects as well, and Ada still came out with a factor of 2 advantage on 
> time to deployment.
> 


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