Re: Learning Ada (newbie)

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Yes, but don't say "mere money". The *ONLY* reason I bother to show up here
every morning (work, that is) and the *ONLY* reason they bother to open up
the doors at all is because of money. If they stopped paying me, I'd be at
home, working on The Great American Operating System. (Or out at the Juno
Beach pier with a fishing stick in one hand and a cold one in in the other!
Its definitely toooooo gorgeous here today to be at work!!! :-)

If money stopped flowing in from customers, I doubt we'd be building our
products out of charity or because it makes a cool hobby. So from the
standpoint of making *business* decisions about what technology to use, Ada
makes sense (sometimes) because the early detection of bugs makes them
(sometimes substantially) less expensive to fix. (How much less depends on
how long your turnaround time is to get a new version fielded. That's why I
noted "sometimes".)

Of course, there are other economic factors to consider such as
infrastructure, knowledge base, tools, problem domain, etc. But with the
standard issue "All Other Things Being Equal" qualifier, Ada is a money
saver because of early error detection.

I agree with your point that there are more important things in life than
spending time chasing down stupid errors. Its a bad idea to sacrifice one's
marriage in order to spend hours in the lab debugging stupid C errors. Of
course, one's willingness to sign up for that on a consistent basis may be a
sign that one enjoys midnight debugging sessions (puzzle solving? sense of
self-importance?) and that's why one selects C instead of Ada. Either that,
or one has a wife from whom time away is a relief. :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:Hakz6.3384$jz.287874@www.newsranger.com...
> In article <9aiq8h$ik8$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
> >
> >You might want to note that catching errors early is not just a matter of
> >coolness or intellectual tidiness. It translates very directly into $$$$$
> >saved! (I'm currently doing a *lot* of C programming and getting quite
>
> That's very true, but I wouldn't even stop there. To a corporation time is
> indeed money. But to you and me as developers it can be much more than
that. We
> have personal lives to live, and interpersonal relationships to nurture.
>
> Many times integration has to happen at a customer site, far from one's
family.
> If its a relatively quick and smooth integration, that's no big deal. It
can
> even bit kind of fun. But once it starts to get to be more than a couple
of
> weeks or so, it can start to put a big strain on people's personal
> relationships. Thus pushing error-finding off into later phases of a
project can
> not only have monetary consequences, but social consequences as well.
>
> I had one very close friend whose marrige broke up as a direct result of
the
> exteneded separation imposed by integration of buggy C code. (One example
of a
> bug they found: An array out-of-bounds indexing error which would have at
worst
> immediately raised an exception in Ada, instead caused an odd intermittent
> symptom 2 networked computers away. It took them 3 *weeks* to track it
down.) I
> had another close friend working on the same project with *5* young kids
at
> home, whose marriage very nearly broke up, again directly related to the
> extended separation. Of course for you mercenary types, this also cost the
> corporation even more money. For one thing, all that site time living in
hotels,
> etc., isn't cheap. For another, neither one of these valuable developers
were
> very productive at work for the next 4 months while they desperately tried
to
> get their personal lives back in order. But I'd argue that there were (and
are)
> more important issues at stake than meer money.
>
> ---
> T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
>           home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com