CONTR47@NOSC-TECR.ARPA (05/18/87)
I always enjoy reading Ed Berard's articles because they are very thought provoking. I usually agree with his observations and usually disagree with his conclusions and recommendations. The recent 4 part discourse is not unusual in that respect. While reading I mentally composed pages of response and wondered which responses, if any would be worthy of net resources. Then I received a paper from the SEI by Watts S. Humphrey titled "Software Process Management" which contains a concluding thought that seems to sum up my possible responses to Ed's articles. "There is a definition of insanity that applies to software development. It is said that insane persons believe they can continue doing the same thing over and over and get different results". Upon reading that I realized that I have been insane most of my career. I was insane when I expected engineers and managers to immediately see the advantage of transistors over vacumn tubes. I was insane when I expected them to see the advantage of computers over analog control. I was insane when I expected them to see the advantage of Ada over Fortran until I said to myself "Self- That's enough- Only deal with people who have already accepted that there is an advantage and want help realizing the advantage." This happened about the same time I started my own company and became interested in profit. i.e.: There isn't much profit in missionary work. I have a placard that says "Never try to teach a pig to sing: It will waste your time and it annoys the pig." I believe that Ed is attempting to teach pigs to sing as I have often done. It is a form of insanity according to Humphrey. It takes 14 or so years for a new technology to be widely used in practice according to SEI (from my memory) and I think it will be so for modern software engineering/Ada and there isn't much Ed or I can do about it. Hopefully the SEI can do something about it through the software engineering curriculum design. So Ed, my reaction to your discourse is to not criticize anyone for not immedialtely seeing the advantages of Ada, work with the ones who ask for help. The 14 years will pas quickly and you'll be working on the next tnew technology by then. regards, sam harbaugh ---------------------
gore@nucsrl.UUCP (05/20/87)
/ nucsrl:comp.lang.ada / CONTR47@NOSC-TECR.ARPA / 11:33 am May 18, 1987 / > [...] I have a placard that says "Never try to teach a pig to sing: It will > waste your time and it annoys the pig." I believe that Ed is attempting > to teach pigs to sing as I have often done. [...] It takes 14 or so years > for a new technology to be widely used in practice [...] and I think it will > be so for modern software engineering/Ada and there isn't much Ed or I can > do about it. > [...] > So Ed, my reaction to your discourse is to not criticize anyone for not > immedialtely seeing the advantages of Ada, work with the ones who ask for > help. The 14 years will pas quickly and you'll be working on the next tnew > technology by then. > regards, sam harbaugh Oh, how wise that sounds... I wish I could follow that advice. I'm afraid I can't, though. What advice do you have for us poor folks in the education arena, whose job is to teach the new technology to students, but who end up spending a lot of time and energy just trying to convince our colleagues that there even IS a problem with the old technology? Jacob Gore Northwestern University, Computer Science Research Lab {gargoyle,ihnp4,chinet}!nucsrl!gore gore@EECS.NWU.Edu (for now, only from ARPA)