Re: Is the Ada World Embarrassed by the Defense Industry?

["DuckE" <nospam_steved94@home.com>]

> So just out of curiosity, has anyone out there ever been involved with
> or have first-hand knowledge of a project where an actual business case
> analysis was undertaken with respect to language choice?  Where it was
> really decided to try to quantify the expected cost/benefits for the
> various alternatives and make the decision on that basis?  I'd be very
> interested to hear about it...

In our group we don't tend to select language and development environments
by individual projects.  We select an environment that will meet our needs
for many projects for years to come.

A few years ago the development envrionment VAX VMS and target RTOS: VAXELN
started to approach their end of life.  Our applications were written in
VAXELN Pascal.

We were faced with many choices.  We had to choose a new target
architecture, new development environment, and new programming language.  We
could have stayed with Pascal, but would have had to change the dialect.

I had little difficulty finding resources on the Internet to argue the
advantages of moving to Ada 95.  No such resources were available (that I
could find) supporting moving to other environments.

Still the decision to move to Ada was a hard sell.  We had a meeting in our
department to make the decison on how to proceed.  I was able to present
numerous case studies in favor of moving to Ada.  The only arguement against
was "Nobody uses it".

We made that decision to use Ada, and have been thankful ever since.

SteveD

>
> Mark Lundquist
> Rational Software