Re: Learning Ada (newbie)

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.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. 

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