Advice on selling Ada to a C shop
in [ADA]
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From: Phil Clayton on 22 Jun 2010 14:06 On Jun 20, 12:01 am, use...(a)scriptoriumdesigns.com wrote: > I may have the opportunity to pitch Ada for use in some new projects > (industrial equipment) at work. The place has been using C by > default, not by any conscious choice, and of course they've been > paying a typical price for that default. The head of engineering (who > is not a software guy) MAY be open to trying Ada if presented with a > compelling case. The programmers are another question - they may > resist or they may be intrigued by some of Ada's features e.g. > concurrency. They may also be open to improving the very ad-hoc > software culture now in place, and the idea of having fewer bugs, and > those caught sooner and less painfully. > > So, what points would you emphasize to each (manager, programmers) to > make the Ada sale? I've read a lot of the advocacy and I think I have > a fair handle on it, but I'd still like other viewpoints, and perhaps > even examples of such a successful switch. > > In the end, it seems, it all comes down to money. Money saved in > greater productivity and less debugging, money saved in lower > liability and maintenance, money gained from satisfied customers who > get a robust product, and maybe even money saved in having programmers > who have a more powerful and safer tool at their disposal. > > I know that language choice is not the be-all-and-end-all of better > software, but I'm convinced it's a key component, and I'm also > convinced that the sooner we leave C and its baggage behind the better > we can become. Perhaps subsumed under 'maintenance' but it may be worth mentioning separately the portability of Ada across different hardware in comparison to C. Ada is undoubtedly more portable as there is better separation between hardware and software aspects but I don't have any real-world examples to cite. Have there been any issues porting the existing C? Having a lower barrier to re-host on different hardware would offer greater flexibility, but perhaps this is more of a long term advantage associated with hardware obsolescence that would tend to get overlooked. Talking about different hardware also raises the question of compiler availability. Of course, if there's no prospect of changing hardware, then it's probably not worth mentioning. Phil
From: Nasser M. Abbasi on 22 Jun 2010 15:06 On 6/22/2010 11:01 AM, anon(a)anon.org wrote: > In<774c25c4-3270-4ffb-ad19-366a0ab16659(a)i31g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>, Lucretia<Lucretia9000(a)yahoo.co.uk> writes: >> Ask them what they don't like about C and developing in C (via a >> questionnaire if necessary), then show them how to do it in Ada, >> showing the benefits. >> >> This might help get the point across. >> >> Luke. > > > That might be true until Ada 2012! With C like structure being added > people will say why switch. > any link for someone to find what does "C like structure being added" mean and how can that provide something that Ada record does't provide? --Nasser
From: Maciej Sobczak on 23 Jun 2010 03:17 On 22 Cze, 23:00, Gautier write-only <gautier_niou...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > At work, I came across a benchmarking, based on a real production > model, with two languages having "end if"s, and C with its '}'s (or no > '}' sometimes). > Finally, it > was a '}' at the wrong place, and a misleading indentation... Do you think that 'end if' at the wrong place and a misleading indentation would produce much better results? Playing the devil's advocate, but remember: you are selling Ada to a C shop here. Weak arguments are very dangerous, because not only they don't sell anything, but actually discourage further investigation. My experience is that Ada does not sell on brackets. -- Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com YAMI4 - Messaging Solution for Distributed Systems http://www.inspirel.com/yami4
From: Gautier write-only on 23 Jun 2010 03:40 On 23 juin, 09:17, Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homep...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Do you think that 'end if' at the wrong place and a misleading > indentation would produce much better results? Of course not, but the point is that - the "end if" was *not* at the wrong place, probably because it would have (or had) pooped to the eye very quickly - in the C code, two people read and re-read and did not notice anything wrong; the bug was detected only by examining results closely This on only ~15 lines... G.
From: Gautier write-only on 23 Jun 2010 04:08
On 23 juin, 09:17, Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homep...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Playing the devil's advocate, but remember: you are selling Ada to a C > shop here. Weak arguments are very dangerous, because not only they > don't sell anything, but actually discourage further investigation. You're right, a single case is statistically not enough; then it is better to stick comparison of with whole projects, if possible with a parallel development (Jean-Pierre's example), where thousands of similar situations are summed together. G. |