On Thursday 31st of January 2002 at 19:20:41 +1100
Alan Brain emailed:
"[..]

BTW today was my last day working as leader of the On-Board Software Development on
FedSat (Australia's First R&D Satellite in 25 years)."

What an atrocious treatment of valuable human resources.

"That's the trouble with Ada - the software works reliably first time, and the developers
are out of a job till the next project comes along : there's almost no maintenance effort
compared with the initial development."

Having come from an onboard software maintenance department, I can say that though Ada is
excellent the user perception of developers wanting to hop onto a brand new project would
be changed if they provided a reliable; elegant; and safe way of modifying the software in
flight without having to resort to assembly and manual task rescheduling.