Re: Another One Bites the Dust!

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Prototyping an application that is eventually to be written in Ada by
using C or C++ is not uncommon, but it is almost always a bad idea. First
of all, C (or even Ada for that matter) is much too low a level language
for prototyping. If you are serious about prototpying you should be using
appropriate prototyping tools.

Secondly, the phenonemon that was just reported in this thread is a danger,
I don't mean a danger to Ada, I mean a danger to the customer. The fact
that something works fine is just NOT GOOD ENOUGH. You would think that
people would realize this by now, but somehow the lesson never seems to
sink in.

The fact that something works gives no indication whatsoever of the quality
of the code, or its maintainability or long term reliability, or of the
life cycle costs that will be incurred in maintaining it.

Now of course Ada does not *guarantee* an improvement in these areas, but
it helps, and one certainly assumes that the reason that Ada is spec'ed (in
an environment where the choice exists) is that a judgment has been made that
these factors are important. It is probably also true in many environments
that with Ada it is easier than C to get a program working in the first place,
but that's not usually the primary justification for the use of Ada.

So it seems quite short sighted to choose Ada, and then be seduced by
"but it's working fine now" observations.

Of course if circumstances have changed to affect the validity of the
original judgment to use Ada, that's fair enough. FOr example, if Ada
was sold on the basis "you'll never have a chance of getting it working
in C", then clearly the observation is significant, but I certainly hope
that Ada is NOT sold on such a transparently bogus basis, it is obviously
*possible* to get anything working in any language, even in assembler for
that matter.