Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

The metrics I've collected in the past didn't have anything to do with how
fast someone could code-up some routine. In that respect, Ada probably
wouldn't have any advantage over C or C++ - possibly even a disadvantage.
What my metrics demonstrated was that when the whole development cycle was
complete (requirements through formal testing) using Ada meant a reduction
in man-hours spent (by about 50%) and a reduction in bugs found (by a factor
of 4). My study was not alone. There was also the famous Ada/Model-Railroad
study that demonstrated an impressive improvement in productivity and
reduction in errors in a similar environment. (realtime controls)

I wouldn't claim that you couldn't code just as fast - or even faster than I
can code, given our favorite languages. I'll even go so far as to say that
you'd be in that "Any Competent C Programmer" category who never makes
stupid mistakes in coding that cost untold hours down the line in debugging.
But given a random selection of developers with varying levels of skills and
the need to work together on a large development project, you've got a
different animal on your hands. In that situation, there is data to indicate
that when other factors are equal, (id est, nobody gets huge libraries of
utilities or other leverage) Ada is more productive and results in fewer
errors over the development cycle.

MDC
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:1039618741.173427@master.nyc.kbcfp.com...
> Marin David Condic wrote:
>  > I think that this "Ada Mentality" is in some way blinding
>
> You know, no one loves C and C++ more than I do, but I
> don't think I would be any slower coding in Ada than in
> either of the above languages (once I got a good working
> knowledge of the language, of course). I think it's a
> fallacy cherished by Ada programmers that C or C++ will
> just accept any garbage, and therefore code can just be
> churned out in those languages.
>