Re: Advice on selling Ada to a C shop

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.acm.org>]

usenet@scriptoriumdesigns.com wrote:
> 
> In the end, it seems, it all comes down to money.  Money saved in
> greater productivity and less debugging, money saved in lower
> liability and maintenance, money gained from satisfied customers who
> get a robust product, and maybe even money saved in having programmers
> who have a more powerful and safer tool at their disposal.

Where we have hard data, they show that Ada reaches deployment at half the cost 
of C, with a quarter as many post-deployment errors which cost a tenth as much 
to fix (factor of 40 reduction in post-deployment error fix cost).

The hard data include the Rational assessment for compiler development:

http://adaic.org/whyada/ada-vs-c/cada_art.html

and a study by Pratt and Whitney reported here on jet-engine control SW (I'm not 
aware of any link to this).

There's also McCormick's academic results, in which no students familiar with C 
were able to complete a real-time project in C controlling a model railway, even 
when given 60% of the solution, while 75% of students familiar with C but not 
Ada were able to complete the same project in Ada when given < 20%:

http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2000/08/mccormick.html

http://adaic.org/whyada/ada-vs-c.html is a good overall reference.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Perfidious English mouse-dropping hoarders."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
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