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Dirk Craeynest <[log in to unmask]>
Thu, 25 Jan 2001 16:59:28 +0100
text/plain (51 lines)
= At 07:28 AM 1/25/01 +0100, Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
= > (BTW: there was a big noise in the press about the breaking of one
= > propeller. Apart from the above article, nobody talked about the
= > big software success. Something that works is not an information...
= > Maybe that's why we don't see Ada more often in the press :-)
=
= This is precisely correct.  For years when one of my academic
= colleagues would say "Nobody is using Ada" I would ask "Why do you say
= that?"  Invariably the answer was "You never hear about it."  I would
= immediately reply something like "That's because software written in
= Ada WORKS, and we only pay attention to things that DON'T work.  [...]

I probably mentioned this before, but anyway...

For the annual Ada-Belgium Seminar a few years ago, I was trying to
get some presentations about operational Ada applications in order to
get reports on the maintenance of such systems.

We had to drop the idea, because for all systems we knew of we couldn't
find any presenters...

The systems worked so well that there was almost no maintenance team
for them, and the few people remaining told me there really wasn't
anything to report.  Usually, the only kind of "maintenance" required
was to make minor modifications to the software when some hardware had
to be changed (for example due to running out of stock to replace
broken pieces and so being forced to use "newer" similar hardware).
These changes typically were very local and straightforward.

As a result, most of the development teams moved on to new projects,
and only a few people did some minor maintenance at irregular times,
almost as an extra task outside their normal work.

Ada seems to be the victim of its own success...

Dirk ([log in to unmask] for Ada-Belgium e-mail)

--
Dirk Craeynest            | Email [log in to unmask] | Ada-Belgium
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*** Intl. Conference on Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe'2001
*** May 14-18, 2001, Leuven, Belgium **** http://www.ada-europe.org/ ***

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