Minear@HI-MULTICS.ARPA (04/07/86)
In a recent entry David made the following remark:
If they just make the contractors use the few people who are
productive, instead of the thousands of mostly brain dead bodies
as is typically done, then a very large savings would be
realized. Force people to use a poor technology for standards
sake, ...
I find it rather difficult but I have to admit that there is a fair
amount of turth to what he says. But he is overlooking an awful lot of
reality in not being able to recognize that the state of the practice at
present is not ready to support his ideal. The long term goal of
software engineering research has got to be to put an end to the current
"solve it with an army of ants" approach that we use to day, and get to
the point were the application area specialist has at hand the
facilities to build the solutions with out the aid of an army of
software engineers.
The short term reality however is that we have to make the people we
have more effective. This means getting them to use the best tools
available for the tasks at hand. In this context I can not accept the
conclusion that Ada, and it's associated developments in software
engineering are bad. The expressive power of Ada is fare better than
what most software practitioners have to use today. And though
mandating change is not generally a good thing to do, my view of the
"real world" says that that is about the most effective way to get us
off of dead center on this issue. The momentum is clearly towards no
change in the general populace. And unfortunatly we don't have enough
of "the few that are productive" with the knowledge of the application
area problems and the sophisticated tools required to turn the whole
array of problems to be solved over to them alone.
Spence Minear