Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

[wardi@rsd.bel.alcatel.be (Ian Ward)]

In article BtV6FAgTpsyEwmR@phaedsys.demon.co.uk, Chris Hills <chris@phaedsys.demon.co.uk> () writes:
>In article <32A4368E.41C67EA6@escmail.orl.lmco.com>, Ted Dennison
><dennison@escmail.orl.lmco.com> writes

... snip ...

>
>>You
>>must then staff the project with people who know how to properly use the
>>tools, or it is all for naught. 
>>
>This is probably the real bottom line. A good assembler programmer could
>turn out a safer program than a cowboy with Ada?

There goes that 'could' again. While strictly true, your sentence picks 
an extreme case.

What I would say was more accurate, would be that for any given person,
they have a more or less fixed level of programming ability. (Which is 
function of how good a problem solver they are, their experience, interests,
intelligence and several other things which are largely fixed. Oh, and
how far away they stayed from subjects like Sociology and Classics at
college :-)

The ability of your programming team does not change, drastically, when
using different programming languages, unless the programmers dislike the
language for some reason. It follows then, that for any given team, more or
less, how good a job they do is largely dependent on the language.

So it is true to say that a really thick chump, using Ada, may not do as
good a job as a brilliant engineer, using Assembler. However, a really
thick chump will do much better with Ada, than he will with assembler.

Likewise, in the general case, so will the talented engineer.

No-one would ever say that we should stop equipping our GI soldiers with
guns because a blind deaf man with a gun, would almost certainly lose
a fight to a non-handicapped man with a knife, because in the general
case, the soldier will usually do better with a gun. (No comments about
having to be quiet please, that is a specific case, which requires a
specific solution.) People make the analogy with programming languages
all the time.

>
>I have seen a project (in C) where all the compiler warnings were turned
>off because "they were not ERRORS" and besides there were 100's of them
>ad it would take too long to sort them and any way the program ran (they
>said "worked"). 

I believe you.

>
>In reality it comes down to the skill of the project team. As I said
>previously the Ariane 5 rocket used Ada but the same crash could have
>been achived with any language (but more efficiently in C :-) as the
>real problem appears to have been with the project control.

True here, but the project control problem most likely would have 
happened anyway, regardless of the language. The fact that Ada was 
used over 'C' simply meant that less development dollars went into
the sea.

Have a good christmas,
Ian.

---
Ian Ward's opinions only : wardi@rsd.bel.alcatel.be until tomorrow night.