Re: Why don't large companies use Ada?

In article <pgontier-1611941121020001_at_avail.wc.novell.com>, pgontier_at_novell.com (Pete Gontier) writes...
>
>Of course, there's always the possibility that the customer actually has a
>reason for favoring C/C++ over Ada. Off the top of my head, it might be
>the case that the customer expects in-house people to do the maintenance,
>and the in-house people don't know Ada. Pick any of a number of other
>reasons cited already in this thread.

Around here (NASA at Goddard Spaceflight Center) the adversion is in two parts: Risk: mentality is anything 'new' entails risk - and from what they've (upper managment) heard Ada and C++ are risky. 2nd - there is the in-house support aspect. Although programmers might be available much of the algorithms are written by engineers who have trouble understanding the difference between passing a pointer and passing a value. C++ scares them - let alone Ada.

I'm now in the final debuging stage of a large C program (DOS). It uses 14 databases based on linked list - each slightly different. End result is me cutting and pasting 14 sets of linked-list code... Although the program is modular and easily translatable into C++ I was told no because the other engineers would not be able to debug it. To this day, they have yet to look at the code... Due to the overall size and complexity I doubt they ever will.

>I agree that customers are often completely clue-free when it comes to
>determining and/or asking for what they want. However, the safest thing to
>give them is almost always what they ask for. If what they ask for is
>unreasonable, then you can try gently pushing them in another direction.
>But other than that, or if that fails, second-guessing them just gets you
>in trouble later.

What your alluding to is the difference between requirements and specifications   The customer should state what the requirements are. The service provider should specify how it will meet those requirements. We all know this isn't how it works. You must first gain the customers' confidence in your abilities. Then you gently nudge the requirements - and have the customer leave the specifications up to you... Carry the big stick of money savings and you basically convince the customer.

Dirk Received on Thu Nov 17 1994 - 17:54:00 CET