Re: Customer balks at Ada -- any hope?

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

<mjsilva@my-deja.com> wrote in message news:8l01s4$gnr$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> We're bidding on a custom industrial controller, and I've proposed to
> write the firmware in Ada.  The powers-that-be here are satisfied with
> that, but the customer is afraid nobody will be around to maintain it.
> They're happier with C or C++, alas.  Anybody have any good answers to
> their concern?

Well, I would say that you need to do at least two things:

(1) Define the advantages of Ada in tangible terms that have meaning to the
customer. For example:

(a) Are you going to charge the customer more to do it in C or C++?
(b) Is it going to take longer to do it in C or C++?
(c) How many more failures will there be in the C/C++ version -- from the
customer's point of view -- than in the Ada version? Alternately, will you
guarantee to fix any defects for free in the Ada version, but not in the
C/C++ version?

You can say "more reliable" until the cows come home, but if you can't
quantify that number somehow in relevant terms, who cares?

(2) Identify *all* of the potential risks, and their mitigation, for using
Ada. For example:

Is programmer training the only risk? What about the possibility that the
industrial controller hardware may go obsolete, and the replacement may not
have an Ada compiler? What about the host computer being used for software
development? Is it more likely that the selected Ada vendor may stop
supporting the product, or charge so much in the future that it becomes
economically infeasible to stay with Ada?

You'd better have answers to all of their questions (both current and
future), or you might as well do what they ask.