Re: Ada in command / control systems

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> > Moreover, after spending some time in the mixed SW/HW environment, I
> > would never assume engineers from other domains to be less competent
> > than software engineers.
> 
> It was a long time ago, and they may have learnt from terrible
> programmers, but I've seen some really bad boot code implemented by
> hardware guys.

And yet the same guys went through some well-defined process designing their hardware. They made diagrams, they calculated everything before actually implementing anything (so they used formal methods even without referring to this process this way), they planned they physical aspects and carefully designed the layout, they cared about traceability and made sure nothing got lost on the way, they validated all connections top-down and bottom-up and even made the bill of material for production. Considering the high cost of errors, they have put a lot of effort not to make any.

And then they went to coding the crappy boot loader that works only by chance.

What I'm interested in is how this is possible. Of course, it is easy for us (and self-flattering, right?) to just assume that they are simply incompetent, but I see some deeper problem here.
I think that during the last decades we have made it possible to produce crappy software. It's too cheap to fix to bother to make it right. This is the comfort that other domains do not have and this is what makes the difference in how engineering in different domains is practiced.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com