Re: Ariane 5 Failure from 1996

[John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk>]

On Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:08:33 -0700 (PDT), Marco
<prenom_nomus@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On Jul 10, 11:17�am, "John B. Matthews" <nos...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
>>
>> > To me the whole section on Ada sounds like a typical spiel from
>> > someone who really doesn't know Ada and has picked up a load of
>> > anti-Ada propaganda from a number of disparate sources.
>
>   It doesn't sound particularly anti-Ada to me. Just anti only-one-
>language I doubt he has much experience in Ada.

Fair enough and you're entitled to your opinion. I feel that, straight
off it goes into supporting the myths about Ada; "Ada was a language
born of committees, the US Department of Defense, and Pascal.". You're
immediately led in to the "Ada was designed by a committee" view (even
though, technically that's not quite what it says!) and, as we all
know, that's not true. Ada was designed by Honeywell Bull in order to
meet a set of requirements that, presumably, were specified by a
committee.

>> The article claims, "had the system been written in C, the disaster
>> would probably never have happened!" That conclusion is unsupported in
>> the article.

>  Mr Henney is a respectable SW writer. I assume he meant that if it
>was written in C that more extensive testing would have occurred but
>he should have said that or otherwise defended his statement.

Of course, by why would he as all he's trying to do is disparage Ada.

The fact is, if this system had been written in any language to meet
the Ariane 5 requirements, the disaster would probably not have
happened. If you build a subsystem that meets the requirements of
system X, and reuse it in system Y (which has different requirements),
it probably won't work!