Re: Ada in Iraq

["John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net>]

"Mike Silva" <snarflemike@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:20619edc.0304250946.204a7ae1@posting.google.com...
> I think the best you could hope for is to do a part of the project in
> Ada and have great success while the rest of the project founders. :-/

Russ, Mike has the beginnings of a really good idea here, if you can find a
sympathetic, smart senior manager.

Your firm probably has some internal R&D budget laying around.  Take a good
look at the upcoming air traffic management project, find a chunk that can
be relatively easily carved out, that IS fairly central, not peripherally
trivial.  Put together a proposal package, containing the various success
studies from Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, and elsewhere, along with the
down-the-hall guy's diatribe, and some cost estimates, and go pitch a quiet,
back hallway IR&D, to FIND OUT whether Ada in fact is as good as Boeing and
Pratt say it is.  Take the same metrics as the mainstream guys are going to
take, track the same deliverables, and then, when the dust settles, see who
got thar fustest with the mostest, to paraphase someone or other from the
American Revolution.

Work from the same requirements specifications and interface control
documents as the C/C++/Java folks.  You want to demonstrate something that
will plug-and-play with their system.

Admit up front that there will be some training costs, but these other
studies (have them in your hands) show that it won't be that bad.

Play up the quality/reliability/maintainability stuff.  Note in passing that
the Ada programmers on the market tend to be MUCH more accustomed to working
in high-reliability applications than the typical C++ programmers.