Re: Have you ever had a bug caused by...

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

What always confounds me about it is that even when you can make a strong
business case for using Ada based on higher reliability, lower development
and maintenance cost, etc., and actually back it up with data, you still
lose because management will end up asking their techies about it (fair
enough) and the techies don't like Ada or don't want the headache of
switching to Ada, so they recommend against it. A manager can't be expected
to know all the technical aspects and they've got to trust their techies to
make those decisions, so I don't really blame them. That's why it is
important to make the case with the techies and get them to want to use Ada.

There are circumstances where the business case collapses. When the whole
surrounding development environment is in some other language, its hard to
make a case for using Ada. If the tools & resources are in C or C++ or Java,
you've got a lot of stuff to leverage by sticking with those languages. The
fact that you can bind to it with Ada doesn't really help because it is
expensive and time consuming to try to maintain more than one language for a
development job. If Ada had a large institutional backer and/or a full-up
environment for at least *some* development jobs, it would fare better.
(Note that Ada has had some pretty fair success in application arenas where
it has been able to compete feature for feature with other languages, such
as some embedded targets. That's the "All Other Things Being Equal..."
factor at work.)

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/


"Preben Randhol" <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote in message
news:slrn9tanr7.i1.randhol+abuse@kiuk0156.chembio.ntnu.no...
>
> but if in stead of chasing bugs you could add new features which
> would improve the bussiness of the companies that buy the product... :-)
>