Thoughts provoked by Ed Berard's articles

[CONTR47@NOSC-TECR.ARPA]

     I always enjoy reading Ed Berard's articles because they are
very thought provoking. I usually agree with his observations
and usually disagree with his conclusions and recommendations. The
recent 4 part discourse is not unusual in that respect. While reading
I mentally composed pages of response and wondered which responses, if
any would be worthy of net resources. Then I received a paper from the
SEI by Watts S. Humphrey titled "Software Process Management" which
contains a concluding thought that seems to sum up my possible
responses to Ed's articles. "There is a definition of insanity that
applies to software development. It is said that insane persons
believe they can continue doing the same thing over and over and get 
different results". Upon reading that I realized that I have been
insane most of my career. I was insane when I expected engineers and
managers to immediately see the advantage of transistors over
vacumn tubes. I was insane when I expected them to see
the advantage of computers over analog control. I was
 insane when I expected them to see the advantage of Ada over
Fortran until I said to myself "Self- That's enough- Only
deal with people who have already accepted that there
is an advantage and want help realizing the advantage." This
happened about the same time I started my own company and
became interested in profit. i.e.: There isn't
much profit in missionary work. I have a placard that
says "Never try to teach a pig to sing: It will waste
your time and it annoys the pig." I believe that Ed is attempting
to teach pigs to sing as I have often done. It is a form of
insanity according to Humphrey. It takes 14 or so years
for a new technology to be widely used in practice according to
SEI (from my memory) and I think it will be so for modern
software engineering/Ada and there isn't much Ed or I can
do about it. Hopefully the SEI can do something about it through the
software engineering curriculum design.
   So Ed, my reaction to your discourse is to not criticize
anyone for not immedialtely seeing the advantages of Ada,
work with the ones who ask for help. The 14 years will pas
quickly and you'll be working on the next tnew technology
by then.
regards, sam harbaugh
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