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=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!gegeweb.org!usenet-fr.net!proxad.net!feeder1-2.proxad.net!cleanfeed3-b.proxad.net!nnrp1-1.free.fr!not-for-mail From: Jean =?iso-8859-1?q?Fran=E7ois?= Martinez Subject: Re: F-22 ADA Programming Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <3d5997a0-fc19-4265-9ca4-89b004974829@googlegroups.com> <7deda1bb-58a3-44a9-9f0b-05696bf13854@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: Pan/0.139 (Sexual Chocolate; GIT bf56508 git://git.gnome.org/pan2) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: 16 Nov 2014 09:57:07 GMT Message-ID: <546874f3$0$2908$426a34cc@news.free.fr> Organization: Guest of ProXad - France NNTP-Posting-Date: 16 Nov 2014 10:57:07 CET NNTP-Posting-Host: 82.225.39.24 X-Trace: 1416131827 news-4.free.fr 2908 82.225.39.24:49520 X-Complaints-To: abuse@proxad.net Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:23411 Date: 2014-11-16T10:57:07+01:00 List-Id: On Sat, 15 Nov 2014 13:28:57 -0800, Maciej Sobczak wrote: > Because in a safety-critical project it is not the language alone that > is responsible for the error-free outcome. The whole point of > re-teaching the graduates is to move out of that "inherently > error-prone" zone. I remind you that well-known example of a teacher who required of his students the task of programming a network of model trains. For five years no student or group students managed to produce a working solution despite the teacher doing an ever larger share of the work (over 50% in the last year). That was in C. Then he switched to Ada. First year he got 50% of working solutions. In later years he provided a tiny hardware abstraction (10% of the work) and success rate climbed to 90%. Now let's think about that in terms of probability and statistical tests. Let's take a conservative hypothesis of 5 groups per year, let's keep the 50% rate of first year in Ada ignoring the 90% of later years, let's also ignore the fact the teacher provided the C students a far larger of the job. Teacher is same using same teaching methods. University is the same one and hasn't suddenly begun attracting far brighter students. Now we for one side we have a sample of 25 (five per year for five per year) teams of students using C none of them managing to complete the project vs 25 teams of students using Ada, half of them managing to complete the job. The probability of this being just statistical being due to chance is astronomically low. Just for the fun, use the statistical tests about comparing two empirical mean. Hypothesis of equality will be blown out of the water. So it is either the ___average___ of students at that class became far better and brighter from one year to the next thus explaining the higher success rate either the language made a difference. QED And we have no reason to think it was the students that changed. --- Jean François Martinez