TEAM-ADA Archives

Team Ada: Ada Programming Language Advocacy

TEAM-ADA@LISTSERV.ACM.ORG

Options: Use Classic View

Use Monospaced Font
Show HTML Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
"Alexandre E. Kopilovitch" <[log in to unmask]>
Thu, 10 Jun 1999 04:21:28 +0400
text/plain (33 lines)
Roger,

  Probably I'll be unique contributor to this discussion, who agrees that
it is hard to oppose the arguments presented by you. All participants of this
discussion tell right and clever things, but those things seems out of field
reality.
  The essence of situation that you describe is not a language itself and
not a process/methodology, but the people (programmers) involved. From my
(astronomical) observations, the gap between strong programmers and poor
programming workers is much broader and deeper inside Ada community then
inside C/C++ community. Indeed, that gap in Ada case is easily observable,
and in C/C++ case there is no such a gap at all -- there is a smooth spectrum
instead.
  Surely, if you can hire for your projects several really strong programmers
(like most of participants of this discussion -:) then Project A will have
all chances to win against Project C for all imaginable criteria. But in
reality you have a sharp deficit of even moderately-strong Ada programmers
and at the same time sufficiently good C/C++ programmers are generally
available.
  As for cost prediction of a project, there are two points to mention:

1) naturally, there are less chances for big overrun in C/C++ case simply
because an initial estimate is substantially bigger;

2) Ada projects tend to be optimized. And it is a general law (or at least,
general experience) that various estimates for optimized things are often
unstable -- they may jump significantly after small changes.


Alexander Kopilovitch                      [log in to unmask]
Saint-Petersburg
Russia

ATOM RSS1 RSS2