She worked at the Boeing San Diego office, which is quite beautiful.
As in: "for every line of code a functional programmers writes" he'll write 5 blog posts and 10 HN comments on why functional programming is better, how currying, functional composition, monads, etc, work etc...
Thanks for sharing the anecdote with us. :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_Integ...
[2] http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2011-10-26-Boeing-Huntsville-Sit...
As a side note on terminology, QA means a very different thing in the aerospace industry. The function of QA in this world is to witness the tests and attest that we did indeed run the test as written. Usually in the form of stamping a printed procedure as it is followed. This mirrors the process used to test the mechanical and electrical parts. The testing of the software is called verification and validation testing not QA.
I beg to differ.
I started my career working for a CMM level 5 software services company. One of the first shocks I received after I entered the web industry was total lack of discipline here. There was barely any documentation in the web industry- No way to keep a track of a impact of a particular change, no design notes, not even a change log of whom to call in case something goes wrong, in the CMM level 5 firm we would have think of roll back scenarios even before we worked on the code.
In the web industry I saw, the idea of roll back planning didn't even appear to people. Yet the way I saw, a little documentation would have the whole team sane, and avoided more 50% of fire fighting we did on weekends.
Rules are boring, but when something large is at stake it generally is worth the process.
It's all about finding the right place on the curve, and not being behind it. Add huge amounts of process to most web projects, and yeah, they might turn out a bit better, but they'll cost too much for what the customer wants to pay.
You're right though in that too many web projects have virtually no process or rules, and that's not good either.
We wrote it in MISRA C instead of Ada, purely for personal reasons.
Sadly our industry only regards security as a cost that is often imposed by external processes.
It will only charge at large when companies start to be made accountable for their software, like in other industries.
In this regard the industry is still at its infancy.
Get over it.
Consider every time Word crashes and work is lost. There are billions of Word users out there, mostly being paid to use it. How much does that cost over the course of a year?
And the accumulated frustration from unreliable software, causing loss of productivity, resistance to change, stress... How much does that cost?
There are trade-offs to be made.
Get over it.
Releasing a virus is a tort at best. Cracking a site is a tort at best, and both are probably criminal behavior. Yes, I have this bias.
I've read enough history to know that there have been times when such interlopers ended up as heads on pikes outside city walls. Seems extreme to be sure, but still....
I am a great admirer of C.A.R. Tony Hoare, but virus writers and system crackers give him a "bootleggers and Baptists" common cause with them.
Software should be handled the same way.
However people learned to buy "shoes that explode at random week days" and now we have a quality mess.
If you have the kind of skills to write Open GL in Ada for Boeing, then you're not the kind of person who's depending on having rote-learn some latest tech (J2EE, RoR, Node, Go, whatever) and only can get jobs looking for that.
That's a special sort of hell.
I have a possible explanation on this. A lot of people only know Ada in passing, from classes. For someone fluent in another language typically derived from C, the syntax is very new and frustrating initially. People normally comfortable with coding in their preferred language become newbies again, making a lot of frustrating mistakes. And they hate Ada for it.
I've seen several persons being forced into using Ada for a longer time. Geek types, including two long haired ones. They all hated it initially, but after a while they all come to appreciate and enjoy it. Two of them ended up contributing to GNAT. The cross-over time is roughly around 6 months of full time work with Ada, so more than what you get from a class.
So I guess Ada is different enough to be frustrating at first, and most people don't use it long enough to come over the initial shock and appreciate the good sides of the language. They just hate it, and stay with the "Ada is bondage" meme. Too bad.
For any one interested in large software system design and languages, I recommend looking at the "Rationale for the design of the Ada programming language" book. Even if you don't like the result ;) it's an interesting analysis of the challenge of doing large, safety critical system software IMHO. Just read the latest version, the intial one (though interesting) is now dated and made some wrong bets, like using synchronous tasks as the base for concurrency because there was hope that a formal model enabling proving behavior would develop around it, and that never happened.
Until then Turbo Pascal and Modula-2 served me pretty well.
I don't regret learning 'C'. We had our own safety standards.
C safety is a oxymoron, which is only enforcable with externals tools.
I also don't regret learning C. It provided me a path to jump into C++ and use its features to close its C underpinnings into a dungeon, as much as possible.
'C' safety is anything but an oxymoron. i don't even consider it all that difficult. It's an absolute pain the neck, but nobody said this is easy :)
1: yes, I know this was done on purpose but the lack of adoption of Ada EVEN AFTER there was free compilers available show that (IMHO) it was a mistake.
I got out of that space though. I do mobile application development now.