Re: Isn't this in favour of Ada??

[Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com>]

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Erlo Haugen wrote:
>>
> But isn't engineering (at its best) supposed to be independent of the 
> language chosen?

Hardly. A bridge is designed to work when constructed of materials with 
certain characteristics; the design is not independent of the materials.

In the SW field, we've been correcting buffer-overflow vulnerabilities 
in networking code for decades. They're the single most commonly 
exploited class of error in the code. Yet the people writing networking 
code in C today are creating new buffer-overflow errors, despite their 
knowledge of the problem and their desire not to contribute to it. It 
seems no amount of engineering can overcome the weakness of the material.

A SW engineer using C will create better SW than a coder using C, but a 
SW engineer using Ada will create better SW than a SW engineer using C. 
There was a posting here just the other day to the effect that no matter 
how carefully the poster designs his C++ code, he makes errors that he 
would not have made in Ada.

> You have a point, but most software is not like bridges, it's more like 
> garden houses: if something goes wrong, it is inconvenient, but not 
> fatal. I do hope that adequate engineering processes are used for 
> critical software.

Unfortunately, I've seen critical SW that is very badly designed, 
basically taking design techniques that work OK on a student's 300-line 
program applied to 100s of KLOC of critical code.

If there's a ditch, 2 m deep and 2 m wide, on my property between my 
house and the road, and I want to be able to get my car across it, I can 
put a couple of beams across and add a roadbed and have a bridge that 
will serve my purposes.

If I need to carry heavy trucks or span the Golden Gate of San Francisco 
Bay, this design technique is not optimum. You can build such a bridge 
across the Golden Gate. It involves a lot of piers. It will be much more 
expensive to build than a better suited design, not meet all desirable 
objectives (we'll have to give up having large ships moving in and out 
of the bay), but it will carry traffic across the gap. It will be very 
difficult and expensive to maintain.

What we have in SW are a lot of Golden Gate bridges built using design 
techniques only suitable for much smaller projects.

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