Re: Working with incompetent adaists / unsafe typing war story

[Anonymous Coward <anonymous@coward.org>]

In article <uwtfvwqod.fsf@acm.org>, 
stephe_on_the_web@toadmail.com wrote:
> 
>> And what's the solution? 
> 
> Programmer education and strong project management.

That's how a company would handle the problem, but what about the peon
who's forced to work in a sloppy environment?  I guess I need to know
how to select a project.  It seems I will need to question an ada
developer in my future job interviews to determine whether I'm dealing
with a competent program.  If private types are not at least
encouraged, I'll turn the job down.

>> Management can never appreciate the benefits of concepts like type
>> safety.
> 
> That's not true. Managers need to be educated along with the
> programmers.
> 
> The best way to educate managers is by demonstrating an impact on
> the bottom line. If you can show that good programming actually
> saves time and therefore money, they will listen.

Maybe I'm just dealing with a tough crowd.  A systems fella ordered a
change on one of my private types, forcing me to represent the same
type with a different set of numbers (a change in coordinate systems
to be exact).  Because it was a private type, I only needed to make
that change in ONE package; which took me about 15-20 minutes (the
same change would have taken most of the day if the type were public).
When I explained to him how trivial the change was, and what the
impact would be if the type had been public, it should have served as
an excellent demonstration of strong typing on the bottom line.  Yet
he shrugged it off, seemingly unconvinced.  I imagine he was thinking
that the savings from that requirements change is outweighed by the
cost of all the "extra effort" that pro-weak typing developers claim
they would endure.

What's interesting is this project is well over budget, and management
is begging for ideas to save money.  This is the same project that is
allowing the unskilled developers to create weak-typed versions of
pre-existing polished private types.  And of course rather than
converting the public types to their private versions to use the
library that exists, they are also duplicating the math within each of
their packages.  It's not my money that being pissed away, but I still
hate to be around it.