Re: Advice on selling Ada to a C shop

[anon@anon.org]

In <774c25c4-3270-4ffb-ad19-366a0ab16659@i31g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>, Lucretia <Lucretia9000@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>Ask them what they don't like about C and developing in C (via a
>questionnaire if necessary), then show them how to do it in Ada,
>showing the benefits.
>
>This might help get the point across.
>
>Luke.


That might be true until Ada 2012! With C like structure being added 
people will say why switch.  

The C conditional stops the concept of Ada being portable. Because Ada 
strictly follows the Ada RM, the Ada libraries calls to the system 
libraries are the only part that should be different. Which allow all 
user program to be written and transferred to any Ada compiler without 
change. Which enforces the main concept of Ada being truly portable.

A second problem is until Ada 2012, C is the only common used language 
that allows functions to have "in out" type of parameters. If functions 
having the "in out" parameters, was a good idea, you would think then 
other older languages like Fortran, Pascal would have them.  Or even 
the the most modified language called java would have this concept but 
it does not. So, why include that into Ada's function, is a mystery 
unless one is trying to alter Ada into C. Or they the powers that be 
are trying to destroy Ada because they do not want people to leave C 
for Ada.

Now for the main topic selling Ada over C.  Its a hard sell because most 
shops require that all employees of any project to be replaceable. It is 
hard to find a replacement programmer that knows Ada, but you can find 
100s of C programmers due to the fact that schools are turning out 1000s 
of programmers that know C inside and out. Because most schools required 
C and Java, but Ada if they teach it is mostly taught as an elective.