Re: Working with incompetent adaists / unsafe typing war story

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Anonymous Coward <anonymous@coward.org> writes:
> I'd like to start with a war story:

[...]

> That story is just a sample of what I encounter too frequently in
> the Ada workforce.  It seems a /majority/ of ada developers have no
> formal Ada training, and are primarily C developers who picked up
> the Ada syntax on the job.  Consequently, ada principles are lost,
> and much of the ada code out there is only slightly safer than C
> code (but still safer primarily because even a poor Ada developer
> cannot write ambiguous code like they can in C).
>
> I've only worked on four or so workplace ada projects.  The projects
> with elaborate coding standards produced substantially better code,
> but I think it was just chance that those projects also had Ada
> enthusiasts who used private types, as the coding standard did
> nothing to promote private typing.
>
> Do you folks encounter this frequently?  And what's the solution?
> Management can never appreciate the benefits of concepts like type
> safety.  Strong typing is incorrectly viewed as "academic" and
> counter to progress.

At Barco, I am part of a small team that has been using Ada for the
past 8 years or so.  I've been there for only two years myself.  My
colleagues are software engineers, not just coders.  They all
understand the power of type safety, and their desks have badges with
the Countess' effigy and the motto: "In strong typing we trust - Ada -
1983 - 1995 - 2005".  Last year, I wrote the new version of the coding
standard, and everyone on the team has a culture of following it.  So,
my experience is quite exactly the opposite of yours, and as a
consequence I'm a happy software engineer :)

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.