Re: Working with incompetent adaists / unsafe typing war story

[Jean-Pierre Rosen <rosen@adalog.fr>]

Anonymous Coward a �crit :
> [War story snipped]
> Do you folks encounter this frequently?  And what's the solution?
> Management can never appreciate the benefits of concepts like type
> safety.  Strong typing is incorrectly viewed as "academic" and counter
> to progress.

Ada was designed to induce a change in mentalities. A change in 
mentality is much harder to introduce than a change of programming language.

Moreover, training is felt by management as a waste of time and money. 
Why should we pay to get our engineers not working for a week or two?
This newly hired guy does not know Ada? Just give him some code to read 
(Ada is so readable after all); he's a talented guy, he will learn 
quickly. In only rare cases, the guy is given Barnes' book (not to be 
read during work hours).

Currently, we see many projects in Ada, and at the same time the 
attendance to my training sessions has never been so low. I'm worried, 
not for my business (the said projects provide me with enough 
occupation), but for this growing idea that proper training is not 
necessary.

I just added a new rule to AdaControl (available in the next release) to 
check "while true loop .. end loop;". I did so because I found it in 
actual programs. It is a great indicator of modules written by people 
without any Ada education, and which certainly deserve peer review!
-- 
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            J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr