Richard Stuckey said:
>
> Is the problem really that there are too few programmers on the market
> who are software engineers  (regardless of whether or not they claim
to
> be such, or what language they use) rather than hackers - and that
this
> shows up more clearly when using Ada rather than C or C++ ?  It seems
to
> me, from what I have seen, that C++ very much appeals to the mindset
of
> quick & dirty programming, clever tricks and complexity simply for its
> own sake which came from the C community.  I find it perfectly
possible
> to produce good code in C - because I write it as though I were
writing
> Ada!
>
Yes. Although I started interviewing for Ada skills, I soon realised
that what I was looking for was a good sense of software engineering. If
the candidate is clearly an engineer, then I don't care if they haven't
done much Ada yet. That's easy to fix. However, if the candidate has
done loads of Ada but is still an engineering novice, there must be
something wrong.

--Michael--