Re: Is the Ada World Embarrassed by the Defense Industry?

["Jean St-Pierre" <jstp.xremovethisx@cae.ca>]

Larry Kilgallen <Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam> wrote in message
news:cKo3$rZJqqvZ@eisner.decus.org...
> In article <8tmmat$e79$1@dns3.cae.ca>, "Jean St-Pierre"
<jstp.xremovethisx@cae.ca> writes:
> > This is a typical case of "being right, but being dead".
> >
> > You're right to say that an Ada programmer is forced to follow better
> > programming practices than your typical C programmer. However, I know at
> > least two companies that have rewritten the code of their software tools
> > from Ada to C++ mostly because they were not able to maintain a stable
team
> > of Ada programmers at a reasonable cost (to be fair, there were also
some
> > portability and compiler issues). Those Ada programmers were good, but
> > certainly not easy to find.
>
> So they hired guaranteed long-term C++ programmers who were incapable
> of learning Ada ?

No, the turnover rate was not lower with the C++ programmers but it did not
jeopardize the tool development and maintenance, which was the case with the
Ada version. It was simply a logistical and financial decision (availability
of programmers, cost of training, cost of maintaining multi-platform port,
cost of compilers and cross-compilers, etc). The cost of training was due to
the fact that it was very difficult to find Ada-proficient people at the
time, so Ada training had to be paid for.

I'm not saying it was a technically good decision (I guess we will see in
the long term), but it was almost unavoidable, considering the
circumstances.