From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,cbb5b0d14f503195 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!news.glorb.com!cycny01.gnilink.net!spamkiller.gnilink.net!gnilink.net!trnddc07.POSTED!20ae255c!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada From: Anonymous Coward Subject: Re: Working with incompetent adaists / unsafe typing war story References: User-Agent: slrn/0.9.7.4 (Linux) Message-ID: Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 04:19:33 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 141.149.87.138 X-Complaints-To: abuse@verizon.net X-Trace: trnddc07 1140149973 141.149.87.138 (Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:19:33 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:19:33 EST Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2923 Date: 2006-02-17T04:19:33+00:00 List-Id: In article , 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.