Re: employment with ada

[DPH <rally2xs@compuserve.com>]

On Sat, 3 May 2003 19:25:53 -0500, "John R. Strohm"
<strohm@airmail.net> wrote:

>"DPH" <rally2xs@compuserve.com> wrote in message
>news:4mo7bvc2n70k6eikm3muu2965nbo3m77ov@4ax.com...
>> I've just returned from the Software Technology Conference, a large
>> conference and trade show for DoD types, held annually in Salt Lake
>> City.  What I saw there leads me to say this:
>>
>> While Ada is truely a superior language, I believe you should rethink
>> getting into it on anything above a hobby basis.
>>
>> At the conference, one of the 40 minute talks was given by Lockheed
>> Martin on the Fate of Ada in the Joint Strike Fighter project.
>>
>> Starting out by saying that they are all personally Ada zealots, and
>> strongly believe the langauge to be superior to anything else around,
>
>I would be very interested in knowing the names of the people involved here.

The speaker listing in the events guide is John H. Robb.  I didn't
write down the names of the 2 fellows that actually showed up.

>If they were from Lockheed-Martin Fort Worth, I probably know (or knew) some
>of them, and it might answer some questions.
>
>> the company was forced, by business realities, to do their safety
>> critical software in the Joint Strike Fighter in a safety critical
>> subset of C.
>>
>> The safety critical subset of C is C with 172 restrictions, augmented
>> by a source code analyzer to look out for problems.
>>
>> Why give up on Ada?  They actually did a study - this isn't just
>> someone's personal preference or prejudice.  They found:
>
>I'm writing this in two passes.  I would have enjoyed being there, to ask
>some pertinent questions.

The Software Technology Conference should not be missed for many
reasons.

>
>> 1) No college in this country is teaching Ada.  There may be some
>> qualifiers on that that I don't remember, such as "as a major portion
>> of their program", or something like that, but in short there isn't a
>> source of new Ada programmers, nor is there likely to be.
>
>Oh, really?  In about 1980, General Dynamics/Fort Worth Division cranked up
>the F-16 Multinational Staged Improvement Program, which, among other
>things, featured new Operational Flight Programs (OFPs) written in JOVIAL
>J73, for MIL-STD-1750A and Zilog Z8002.  At that time, to my recollection,
>there was one existing JOVIAL J73 compiler, targeting the 1750A, and it was
>nowhere near production quality, and there were NO compilers available
>targeting Z8000.  Also, there were no JOVIAL J73 programmers available.  Nor
>were there any universities teaching JOVIAL J73.  By your reasoning, General
>Dynamics should not have been able to build F-16C/D at all, yet clearly they
>did: the airplane has been flying for almost twenty years, and is projected
>to remain in service for another twenty.  How do you reconcile your results
>with their experience?

I don't know the business atmosphere at that time.  Were people
leaving because they were assigned to program a "dead" language?
Teach someone Ada, and they (sometimes) leave because they fear they
will be obsolete and unemployable because they don't have piles of
experience in C++ and / or Java, and then where are you?  You're out
the training money, and still can't hire decently trained Ada
programmers.  In contrast, C++ programmers,  who can basically program
C by default, are as numerous as weeds in the garden.  

>
>> 2) If they hire someone and train them in Ada, and designate them to
>> program in Ada, all too often that person thinks to himself, "I'm
>> learning a dead langauge, with nowhere to go if this project fails or
>> completes" and the next thing you know, that person is in an exit
>> interview, looking for a job that will provide "marketable skills."
>
>How often did that reason show up in exit interviews for F-16A/B firecontrol
>computer OFP programmers, who were using JOVIAL J3B?  How often did it show
>up for F-16C/D programmers, who were using JOVIAL J73?  What happened to all
>those JOVIAL J73 programmers when F-16C/D switched to Ada in the mid-1990s?
>
>> 3) The people fleeing Ada are right - there were, at last survey 2
>> years ago, 5% Ada jobs.  An informal survey of the latest job market
>> puts it at around 1%.
>
>There appears to be an interesting assumption in there.  The assumption
>appears to be that Lockheed-Martin does not believe in retaining people who
>are proven performers, retooling and retraining them as necessary.  In the
>1960s and early 1970s, General Dynamics (and many other companies) did a
>massive internal retraining program to convert engineers in other
>disciplines into embedded software engineers, because they had a critical
>shortage of software engineers when software suddenly became important.
>
>So why, if LM were in fact intent on retaining people, would those people
>choose to flee?  Possibly, they perceive that LM is not their employer of
>choice?  Possibly, there are human relations problems?

Well, I once fled a CMS-2 opportunity for this reason.  Didn't leave
the entire "company" (US Navy), but avoided the project.  Since I am
gov., it is unlikely that I'll be the victim of some "wrong place,
wrong time" kind of firing / layoff / downsizing that you hear so much
about, but I have had the Navy leave me once already, when they closed
the Naval Air Warfare Center, Aircraft Division, Indianapolis.  Being
skilled in current technology now has a prominant place in my
consideration of what I want to do.  I currently program in C++.  I
like Ada better, but am not in any way nervous about getting C++
experience, either.

Do a job search on career builder, using "Ada" and "software
engineer".  I got 62 hits for the _entire country_.  Same search with
C++ and "Software Engineer" gets 344 for the entire country.  About a
5X difference, although I thought it would be a lot bigger difference.
That's not the 5% or 1% described by the LM guys. Using dice.com, 28
hits, nationwide, for "ada" and "software engineer" together, most of
them by Lockheed Martin, BTW, and 451 for "C++" and "software
engineer" together on dice.com.  That's about the 5% the LM guys
quoted, although I thought they said 1% currently.  The dice results
definitely aren't a 100 to 1 ratio.

>> 4) They projected that they would have to go thru several code
>> overhauls to change compilers as Ada compiler providers either went
>> out of business, or dropped Ada compilers from their product line.
>
>When General Dynamics bought the JOVIAL J73 compilers for F-16C/D, they
>faced this very same set of problems, only worse.  THERE WERE NO
>PRODUCTION-QUALITY JOVIAL J73 COMPILERS AVAILABLE.  The ONLY bids to develop
>compilers came from small business.  See Judy Edwards and Barry Mowday's
>paper on how to buy a compiler from a small business.  As a result, GD
>bought the compilers INCLUDING ALL SOURCE CODE AND BUILD MATERIALS, so that
>they would continue to be able to build it, on whatever platform.

Over the life of the aircraft, processor targets are likely to change,
host computers may change too, and maybe a few other architecture
advancements will occur.  If you don't have a current compiler vendor
to modify the compiler to work with the new environment, you have to
switch compiler vendors.

>
>How does the fact that you are using C change this?  Vendors still go out of
>business, they still discontinue products.

C compiler vendors are much less likely to go out of business, or drop
the language from their supported products.  You're likely to be using
the C++ compiler with a C switch set, anyway, and the C++ language is
likely to be around for a really long time - longer than Ada in any
case.
>
>> They emphasized, over and over, that they are personally Ada zealots,
>> but from a business perspective, Ada for much of the JSF code would be
>> a boneheaded business decision.  4% of the operational flight program
>> will be in Ada, the remainder in that subset of C.  Program-wide,
>> including the support software such as trainers, Ada will acount for
>> approx 1%.
>
>Having been at GD/FW during F-16C/D, I am peripherally aware of the risks
>involved in airplane software development.  Part of your analysis had to be
>a risk assessment, of the relative risk of a Class A mishap caused by a
>software defect.  It is well-known from the industry that Ada vs. C by
>itself has significant impact on software defect density (Consult Pratt &
>Whitney for their experience: you buy engines from them).  What did your
>assessment of this factor show, given that the cost of a Class A mishap is
>many millions of dollars for an airplane, and about the same for the pilot?

Would be interesting to hear that info from LM.  I wonder how reliable
they consider this C subset, backed up by the source code analysis
tool, to be in comparison to the Ada langauge.  A C subset with an
analysis tool might just be very effective at preventing bugs, maybe
rivaling Ada.  It is pretty hard to believe, tho.

Dave Head

>
>--John
>