Re: Advice on selling Ada to a C shop

[Brian Drummond <brian_drummond@btconnect.com>]

On Mon, 21 Jun 2010 01:29:50 -0700 (PDT), Maciej Sobczak
<see.my.homepage@gmail.com> wrote:

>On 20 Cze, 01:01, use...@scriptoriumdesigns.com wrote:
>
>> So, what points would you emphasize to each (manager, programmers) to
>> make the Ada sale?
>
>Contrary to what was already said in this thread, I would advice *not*
>to do it via comparisons of little code examples. 

I think you're probably right.
Little code examples have their uses : once the basic message is accepted they
can have communicative powers : here's how this bug occurred - here's how Ada
would have eliminated it.

>I think that the only way to sell Ada in a C shop is to forget about
>source code altogether and instead refer to the costs of whole
>production cycle. If you do not have any data points internally (and
>you don't), refer to others. I find John McCormick's student project
>statistics particularly relevant.

One possible approach : look at the published information for a large real
project, and infer what we can about the implications had it been in Ada.

For example : this just popped up in another window...
http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox36.html#firefox3.6.4

Fixed in Firefox 3.6.4
[mild]		MFSA 2010-33 User tracking across sites using Math.random()
[moderate]	MFSA 2010-32 Content-Disposition: attachment ignored if
		Content-Type: multipart also present
[moderate]	MFSA 2010-31 focus() behavior can be used to inject or steal
		 keystrokes
[critical]		MFSA 2010-30 Integer Overflow in XSLT Node Sorting
[critical]		MFSA 2010-29 Heap buffer overflow in
		 nsGenericDOMDataNode::SetTextInternal
[critical]		MFSA 2010-28 Freed object reuse across plugin instances
[critical]		MFSA 2010-26 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption
		 (rv:1.9.2.4/ 1.9.1.10)

Fixed in Firefox 3.6.3
[critical]		MFSA 2010-25 Re-use of freed object due to scope
		 confusion

Now I think you could make a case that most of those entries labelled "critical"
wouldn't be there in an Ada project and any remaining would appear as exceptions
pointing at the problem occurrence rather than manifesting as mysterious
behaviour somewhere else.

True this is a C++ project; it just happens to be a convenient example. I
suspect a similar case could be made from a published C project (or even an
internal project at the original poster's company ).

Apologies for snipping your other good points.

- Brian