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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Safety-critical development in Ada and Eiffel
Date: 1997/07/17
Message-ID: <dewar.869182213@merv>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 257469491
References: <33C835A5.362A@flash.net> <EDCo7K.Ezr@syd.csa.com.au>
 <33CC0548.4099@flash.net> <5qitoi$fdv$1@news.irisa.fr>
 <33CD6512.2404@flash.net> <869134861snz@transcontech.co.uk>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.eiffel
Date: 1997-07-17T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


<<It is a shame that Les Hatton is not on this ng. He is a very interesting
character who has spent quite some time examining the effect of language,
project size, complexity and domain expertise on the outcome of various
projects. From his results (and supported by numerous other papers) it
appears that the most important factor in understanding a project is the
level of domain expertise in the project. The language used had very little
effect on the projects studied in terms of quality.
>>


Well I certainly disagree strongly with Les' quite bogus conclusions about
language complexity drawn from the number of isses raised with respect to
the standard. I can't comment on his other observations. There is certainly
a body of literature showing that language *does* matter, and particularly
the abstraction level of a language matters. 

Actually I think these studies are all dubious, it is almost impossible
to do controlled studies of any kind, so this kind of work ends up being
very soft, almost as bad as a lot of wooly social science stuff. People
almost always seem to find the data that supports their preheld conceptions,
always an indication that you are treading on flaky areas from a scientific
point of view.