Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

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

My recollection of the R1000 was that it was extremely expensive and that
you had problems if you were targeting things other than the R1000. IOW
"Yeah. Great. It saves me truckloads of money - only after spending
truckloads of money. And tell me how do I get it to do the job I need it to
do???"

I didn't know they had some business case or study showing massive
improvements. The only case I knew of was that they had comparisons of
building/maintaining their Ada compiler in Ada vs. C that showed similar
productivity & defect results to my own study at Pratt. These numbers are
interesting but not always compelling. At Pratt, we were talking about a
very specific kind of software that does not compare favorably to the bulk
of software development situations for a variety of reasons. At the same
time, we were hardly maintaining "All Other Things Being Equal" - Ada was
only one part of what was changed over the life of the study, so it wasn't a
controlled experiment with Ada being the only variable. And even if it was,
software development was itself only a small part of the overall development
cost so that while it was still worth doing, the results to the bottom line
were not necessarily that dramatic.

For those reasons (while I still believe Ada helps productivity and defects)
I continue to suggest that additional leverage and capabilities be
considered as part of what Ada needs to do to gain increased acceptance. You
get an improvement, but it may not be significant enough to command change
because it may not be a big enough improvement to outweigh other factors.
If, for example, you had an Ada development kit that got garden variety PC
apps built in half the time as the other tools available, it would start to
become compelling. (By which I mean time to market - not overall lifetime
costs) Those who ignored it would be out-competed by those who didn't.
(Which also means us Ada advocates need to consider making products using
Ada rather than just trying to convince others to use Ada in their
products.)

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

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:F23B14A456899489.0502B771BABDEE1B.FFE1A3839E068A22@lp.airnews.net...
> That was PRECISELY what Rational did with the R1000, back in the
mid-1980s.
>
> I really wish I had taken the time to research the business case, and do a
> proper chart pitch on it, with supporting data in detail.  I sketched it
out
> on the back of some piece of paper or another, but I never got around to
> fleshing it out.
>
> The numbers Rational was disseminating, which were backed up by other
> organizations who gave the product an honest try, were just-plain
> phenomenal.  As in "you don't have to build a new building to house the
next
> project" phenomenal.
>
> I think I could have made the case JUST on parking lot costs at GD/FW.
>