Re: Is General Kind the harbinger of doom for the Mandate?

[eachus@dr_no.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <19930331.054448.56@almaden.ibm.com> jnestoriak@vnet.IBM.COM writes:

  > Anyone who graduates from a decent University with a degree in
  > Computer Science who can't learn a new programming language in less
  > than a month must have slept through too many classes.  Is it
  > really unreasonable to expect employers to give a few weeks of
  > education to their new hires (whether experience or from school)?

     Teaching Ada to anyone who knows software engineering is a
non-issue.  If you find software engineers today who don't know Ada,
it takes a week or two for them to learn the syntax.  However, such
people are becoming very rare...if they are good software engineers,
they have probably already learned Ada.  (Ten years ago the situation
was different, and a lot of us had the experience of teaching Ada to
good software engineers who had never been exposed to it.  It was
fun.)

      On the other hand software engineering currently is not, and may
never be, a science.  It requires among other things an ability to
recognize quality, or the lack of it.  About ten years ago I taught a
"random sample" of assembly language programmers Ada along with two
other instructors.  We each independently estimated that thirty
percent of the class would NEVER be productive Ada programmers.  (And
even though this was an eclectic group of students, they were all
working full-time as programmers.)

     Now from painful experience, I know that that class was selected
from a population which had a much higher percentage of potential
software engineers than most defence contractors.  (Or for that matter
most programming shops.  A computer manufacturer who develops and
supports their own operating systems and compilers needs a much higher
percentage of top drawer staff than an application house where
semaphores are things you see along railroads.)

     So when you insist on Ada, the what does a contractor do, if all
of his software engineers are already working on (mandated) Ada
projects?  Just think of it as evolution in action.  It ain't nice, it
ain't easy, but, in time, all the remaining quality-blind hackers will
be retired, writing video games, or flipping hamburgers.

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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