Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..

["John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net>]

"Kevin Cline" <kcline17@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ba162549.0301040105.7d1a7ad6@posting.google.com...
> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:<694A0F8ED8C6BEE3.22D30132AB9CC656.F5BBD1A702580BDE@lp.airnews.net>...
> > I don't know whether I can use this as a counterexample or not.  My
> > recollection is that Silicon Graphics was using Ada internally VERY
early in
> > their life, and they were keeping this VERY quiet because it was helping
> > them, a lot, and they didn't really want anyone else to know.
>
> I'm skeptical that Ada was ever very widely used at SGI.

I don't have any data one way or the other to prove it.  I observe that SGI
had a complete Ada toolset for their machines long before any of the other
Unix workstation companies did.

> > Rational used Ada internally, and it helped them a lot.  They published
> > their numbers, but the reaction at GD/FW was that it just wasn't
possible to
> > get those kinds of numbers.
>
> At the time, Rational had an Ada compiler to sell, and not much else,
> so their numbers are suspect.

A few reports trickled out that other people using the R1000 were getting
similar numbers.

Also, it is very easy to reality-check the Rational numbers, to a rough
order of magnitude: Take the number of SLOC in the product, which they
reported, divide by the number of years the company had been in existence,
and you get SLOC/year.  From there, it is utterly trivial to divide by trial
values of SLOC/man/year to estimate the number of programmers involved, and
then compare them to the company headcount and money burn rate.

The short answer is that Rational's numbers stand up under reality checking.

> > McDonnell-Douglas had been using assembly language on F-15.  For the
> > IFFC/Firefly demonstration, they jumped into Ada with both feet,
> > enthusiastically, and reported very good numbers, for a digital flight
> > control application.
>
> I would certainly expect programming in Ada to be much more productive
> than programming in assembly language!

Their numbers were good even for high-order language development.

There is this, also.  At the time, the conventional wisdom was that Ada
would not EVER be suitable for "real" embedded work.  Using it for digital
flight controls *and* firecontrol, and doing a successful demonstration (gun
shootdown of a QF-102 drone from a 90 degree aspect: something that is
essentially impossible for a human pilot on his own), *AND* getting good
productivity numbers to boot, was a very solid counter to that belief.