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From: dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada Compilers
Date: 23 May 2002 08:50:43 -0700
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"John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message news:<2AEB9D17A335FB6F.78506B6494B0AFF3.EE290620571FE224@lp.airnews.net>...
> (The argument is something like this:  "Now, we all know that there really
> aren't any silver bullets, right?  There really aren't any magic wands you
> can wave, that will just like magic give you 2x productivity improvement and
> 1/4x defect density, right?  We all know that, don't we?  Well, what if
> there was one?  Suppose there WAS such a wand, such a super secret magic

For the record, to qualify as Brooks' famous "Silver Bullet", you
would have to have something that would improve things by a factor of
10, not just 2 or 4. Ada provides a package that is pretty close to
what Brooks termed a "Brass Bullet" in his essay "No Silver Bullet,
Refired". He was talking about OO languages in general, but C++ and
Smalltalk were used as examples. I'd say Rational's numbers prove his
argument nicely.