From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,11414a19b0e4a97a X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!feeder.news-service.com!feeder.erje.net!news2.arglkargh.de!noris.net!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsspool4.arcor-online.net!news.arcor.de.POSTED!not-for-mail Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:13:42 +0200 From: Georg Bauhaus User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.10) Gecko/20100512 Thunderbird/3.0.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Advice on selling Ada to a C shop References: <87hbkym4i2.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> <87aaqpmve5.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> In-Reply-To: <87aaqpmve5.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <4c1e8486$0$6759$9b4e6d93@newsspool3.arcor-online.net> Organization: Arcor NNTP-Posting-Date: 20 Jun 2010 23:13:42 CEST NNTP-Posting-Host: 20dc978f.newsspool3.arcor-online.net X-Trace: DXC=HGomfH27H;P<<0iRN7DLEQMcF=Q^Z^V3X4Fo<]lROoRQ8kF On 6/20/10 8:06 PM, Ludovic Brenta wrote: >> Unless you can come up with a programming platform/language/system that >> costs you less right now, in people, in hardware, in software, you have the >> snowball's chance in Hell of making it happen. Good doesn't matter, cheap >> wins every time. > > I'm not so pessimistic, at least I will not give in without a fight :) > > If you already know Ada, then to the evil bean counters, the training > costs zero; you can offer to give introductory training to a couple of > your colleagues yourself, reducing the immediate cost of training. If > you explain that your use of Ada saves you 20% of the development cost > *this quarter* and 50% the next quarter, you can win. Speaking of cost of training, what exactly is the substance of the arguments that try to relate cost to language choice? Java, C#, C, C++, and other favored "standard technologies" have grown reasonably complex. Mastering complexity is not a skill you can pick up next week end, can you? It needs to be learned, and exercised. Complex things simply cannot be easy to learn without effort. The "canonical" repertoire associated with a language is insufficient for productive work when the problem is non-trivial, as is usually the case: If you know C, you do not necessarily know p-threads or similar. Or libraries. Or your compiler docs. If you know Java, you do not yet known enterprise style Java, nor the concurrency construction library classes, nor the details of Java generics, nor annotations. If you know C# 2.0, there is news for you in C# 3.0 and C# 4.0 (LINQ syntax, parallelism in certain loops, task libraries, more syntax ...). If you know O-O C++, and possibly templates, you do not know the STL yet, nor Boost, nor advanced techniques that rely on compile time resolution mechanism of C++, I'd think. All of these skills need to be learned in order to to achieve proficiency in problem solving. Learning them is a time consuming process. But prior knowledge of core Java, C#, C, C++ cannot include the extra skills automatically, can it? What is the respective cost in all these cases? Does knowing the language actually save a substantial amount of time or money? Seen in this light, suppose someone insists on relatively low cost of a language. It is low allegedly, because inexpensive wage labor seems so easily available. This person must fear being exposed by the accountants! They might calculate the actual cost of training. Georg