Re: Alsys question + CAIS comment

[alden@spp1.UUCP]

Larry,

The arguement that "everyone knows MVS and IBM" so lets stay in the middle
ages is most likely not going to wash as a reason to get out of the
now Ada and soon CAIS requirement of DoD contracts.  Time will tell.  Most
programmers do not interface to a significant extent with the underlying
O.S. but rather use tool sets which differ from O.S. to O.S.: e.g. on
Unix the popular editor is VI, on VMS its ED, on CPM its Wordstar, etc.
Nothing precludes these tools being written in Ada and ported to the CAIS
if the cost of retraining a given staff is higher than rehosting these
tools.  

Thus from an O.S. point of view, I find the arguement of training
cost not valid.  The CAIS is to be used with Ada programs and the harder
of the two to learn is Ada, not the CAIS.  In addition, how much of the 
programming population writes tools?  Small portion. Most of the difficult 
parts of the CAIS lie in those routines that will support tool writers in 
writing tools and not for those writing code to be run on target machines.
The average programmer is not going to have to learn all that much to
survive and produce good reliable code.

If your complaint is that Ada can't be learned, that is another arguement.
Personally, it's been my experience that the transition is not as painful
as those who have yet to make the transition complain about.  Further,
for those who have worked on an Ada project, its been my experience that
they prefer the language over others.

Finally, no one has ever been able to show me statistics for a medium to
large scale project where the total time (design, cost, test, and maintenance)
was more using Ada VS other languages (Fortran, etc.) where the time
was due to having to learn Ada.

If Everyone agrees that there is a "software crisis" and that the cost
of developing software is too high, then these same people must not 
argue for doing nothing - which is what not having to learn something new
implies.

	...Tony Alden
           TRW


The above stated views are my own and do not reflect those of TRW or any
management connected to TRW or any person living or dead connected to TRW.