Advice on selling Ada to a C shop
in [ADA]
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From: Warren on 21 Jun 2010 10:29 Ludovic Brenta expounded in news:87aaqpmve5.fsf(a)ludovic-brenta.org: > Fritz Wuehler writes: ... >> Unless you can come up with a programming platform/language/system >> that costs you less right now, in people, in hardware, in software, >> you have the snowball's chance in Hell of making it happen. Good >> doesn't matter, cheap wins every time. > > I'm not so pessimistic, at least I will not give in without a fight :) > > If you already know Ada, then to the evil bean counters, the training > costs zero; you can offer to give introductory training to a couple of > your colleagues yourself, reducing the immediate cost of training. If > you explain that your use of Ada saves you 20% of the development cost > *this quarter* and 50% the next quarter, you can win. If you have good developers, they should be curious enough to find out more about "this Ada" first hand. The non-curious will just do their jobs, and collect pay cheques. They won't want any change. With GNAT (and now GNAT with AVR support), good developers should be curious enough to try it. The key is to make it a "fun" learning experience. Make sure they have the tool(s) and book(s) to learn from. You want to avoid them hitting roadblocks (or compiler errors) that they don't know how to resolve. So a big part of winning them over will be resources, resources and resources. Warren
From: Warren on 21 Jun 2010 10:33 Ludovic Brenta expounded in news:87631dmdmz.fsf(a)ludovic-brenta.org: > Georg Bauhaus writes on comp.lang.ada: >> On 6/20/10 8:06 PM, Ludovic Brenta wrote: >> >>>> Unless you can come up with a programming platform/language/system >>>> that costs you less right now, in people, in hardware, in software, >>>> you have the snowball's chance in Hell of making it happen. Good >>>> doesn't matter, cheap wins every time. .... > The trap to avoid is to use rational arguments with irrational people. > That does not work; they always find another excuse. If they were > rational, you would not have to convince them; they would already be > using Ada :) > > So, I think the proper approach is to debunk their irrational fears of > Ada and expose the real cost of bugs in the C software, which they have > been ignoring up to now. Show them that no, C is not "good enough". So maybe the proof of concept project should be an AVR controller for some sort of life support machine (a simulation with a real micro-controller). The challenge winners (C or Ada teams), will be the ones who survive a few days on that machine. ;-) Warren
From: Warren on 21 Jun 2010 10:40 George Orwell expounded in news:2bb211f057648e4d892829e5ee79e34c(a)mixmaster.it: >> So, I think the proper approach is to debunk their irrational fears >> of Ada and expose the real cost of bugs in the C software, which they >> have been ignoring up to now. Show them that no, C is not "good >> enough". > > I'm going to continue to play the devil's advocate only because I was > recently involved in a debacle along these lines. > > Whatever they have is good enough. There are very few companies today, > even software companies, that have not decided bugs, even serious > bugs, are just a fact of life. They accept they're going to anger or > even lose some percent of customers, but this is factored in to their > financial plans. Quality no longer matters, what matters is how much > money we can soak you for this quarter and how long we can get away > with it. I think you are generally right, until you get to "Quality no longer matters". I think it usually _does_ matter, but as you say, they've come to accept bugs as "normal". A quality product is still the goal from semi-honest companies. Certainly from a competitive pov. > A lot of this has come from the poor quality of PC software (Windows) > .... All the big companies are moving to offshore Sad but seemingly true. Worse than that, the programmer is no longer "needed". Business is always saying "we can do that ourselves" after they do a few weeks of night school on VB and Access. Eventually, something big goes wrong, and it all gets swept under a carpet (perhaps after a dismissal somewhere). Warren
From: Jeffrey R. Carter on 21 Jun 2010 13:38 Warren wrote: > > I think you are generally right, until you get to "Quality > no longer matters". I think it usually _does_ matter, but as > you say, they've come to accept bugs as "normal". A quality > product is still the goal from semi-honest companies. Certainly > from a competitive pov. Not necessarily. US defense "cost-plus" contracts are more profitable the lower the quality (as long as the quality remains acceptable to the customer, who has been brainwashed to accept fairly low quality). Then there's commercial SW. Once you have the perfect word processor, you won't be able to sell upgrades, so a buggy product is more profitable. In fact, current word processors may be approaching this (for the most common uses), leading major word-processor vendors to transition to a SW-as-a-service model to maintain a revenue stream. -- Jeff Carter "We use a large, vibrating egg." Annie Hall 44
From: starwars on 21 Jun 2010 15:47
> I think you are generally right, until you get to "Quality > no longer matters". I think it usually _does_ matter, but as > you say, they've come to accept bugs as "normal". A quality > product is still the goal from semi-honest companies. Certainly > from a competitive pov. That is simply not the case in several markets I am aware of, to the extent that the management called all the staff together and announced something like "We are no longer interested in being the best or putting out the best code. We studied the market and being the best is too expensive and not a priority for our customers. We are going to realign to do an adequate job and save everybody money since that is what the market is telling us." This is from a very prominent software company, and they are not alone. |