Re: Teaching new tricks to an old dog (C++ -->Ada)

[Jeff C <jcreem@yahoo.com>]

Turamnvia Suouriviaskimatta wrote:
> I 'm following various posting in "comp.lang.ada,  comp.lang.c++ , 
> comp.realtime, comp.software-eng" groups regarding selection of a 
> programming language of C, C++ or Ada  for safety critical real-time 
> applications. The majority of expert/people recommend Ada for safety 
> critical real-time applications. I've many years of experience in C/C++ (and 
> Delphi) but no Ada knowledge.
> 
> May I ask if it is too difficult to move from C/C++ to Ada?
> What is the best way of learning Ada for a C/C++ programmer?
> 
> 
> 

This short tutorial appears to work quite well for C/C++ programmers I 
have used on my projects.

www dot adahome dot com/Ammo/cpp2ada.html

Note that everything at adahome is old and out of date since this 
website stopped updating many years ago. The front page of the website 
pretends to update every day by updating a date field so it tends to 
rank high on search engines (so I try to avoid linking to the website on 
a personal crusade to lower its rankings).

www.adapower.com
www.adaworld.com

are to good jumping off points that are maintained.

I still point to that tutorial for new staff though because for talented 
engineers it brings them up to speed very quickly.

I have been working with Ada on real projects for many years now. 
(genererally Embedded, real-time, distributed processing mid sizes 
projects of about 100K SLOC).

During that time I have had lots of different engineers come on and off 
projects. A few of them knew Ada. Most did not. In general, any (stated) 
a priori knowledge of Ada was not at all a good predictor of their 
usefulness to the projects.

Talented engineers are productive in any environment where the tools are 
  not garbage and the requirements are at least somewhat better than 
mud. Bad engineers write bad code in any language. This is true even 
after many years of being "professional" programmers.

(For some fun read these two papers:
   http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
   http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html)


Switching to a language where no one on the project has any experience 
IS however a risk. You can search through the literature and find plenty 
of examples of projects that failed (at least partly, and based on my 
previous comment perhaps not as much as the engineers would like to 
believe) because they were not familiar with the language (e.g. C++, 
Java, Ada)  they selected.

Whatever language you choose you should attempt have a champion or two 
on the project that has worked with it before. Perferably these people 
would actually be good at the language AND software design/architecture 
in general. Identifying these good engineers up front is left as an 
exercise for the reader.

Realize that no language is a magic bullet that "solves" all problems.


Finally, I recommend that after about 48/72 hours you put this thread in 
a kill file because I find it hard to believe that a cross-posted 
question like this is not going to turn into a flame fest.