Re: employment with ada

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

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in message
news:3EB5BC52.99E7C75E@adaworks.com...
>
> Au contraire.  In this case, the focus is to build the best quality
aircraft
> possible.   Knowing the engineers at LMCO as I do, I have not doubt
> they will do everything possible to do just that, regardless of what
> programming language they are required to use.
>

Keep in mind also that LMCO has to be extremely cost-conscious on the JSF
program. The DoD is looking at a base sticker price on the ATF in excess of
$200m a pop (IIRC - it is at least a really big impressive number). When
they went for the JSF, one of the goals was to make sure that the price on
the showroom floor would be a lot more affordable. That is probably a
significant factor in the selection of components and tools for the
avionics.

Consider that they want to have a lot of flexibility in choosing processors
for various avionics boxes. If you determined in advance that you wanted to
use Ada, you might have a rather limited selection of processors. So you
want to use some processor that will save you cost in box X but there is no
Ada compiler and what are you going to do? Choose a more expensive part? Pay
someone to retarget their compiler? Program that box in some other language
that is now different from everything else you are doing? Any direction you
go has potential cost increases.

One might argue "Ada saves you costs in long term maintenance..." I agree,
but how big a number is that. Is it big enough to overcome the startup costs
involved in buying or building all of the surrounding tools you need that
might be more readily available and cheaper if you selected C? Is it a big
enough number that it overcomes the time value of money factors? What are
the costs involved in supporting a multiple language environment if I find I
can't do the whole thing in Ada? There are a lot of factors that go into the
economic decisions about the tools selected for a job like this. The answers
aren't always obvious.

The thing to remember is that the JSF buyer is being very price sensitive so
the engineers have to try to optimize "Cheap" in the development of this
plane. I'd be inclined to give them the benefit of a doubt on this one since
they certainly had to back up their case with some variety of cost studies.

I believe Ada *can* be a cost saving technology, but it is not the *only*
cost saving technology. Sometimes C has far more development leverage to
bring to market and Ada doesn't seem to be focused on meeting that
challenge.

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

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

    "Going cold turkey isn't as delicious as it sounds."
        -- H. Simpson
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