clarification

[farrow@stephanie.hc.ti.com (Rob Farrow)]

>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Several people asked about SmallTalk.  It is true that TI has had some
>> interest in this language of late.  However, convincing management to
>> use it was painful.  Doug Johnson wrote and interesting report
>> comparing SmallTalk to Lisp to C++ and finally won the war.  The
>> report entitiled "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace: MMST Lanugage
>> Selection."  The bottom line was that the project would require ten
>> times the developers ten times as long to complete the work.
>> 

I have gotten several requests for this paper.  But before I send it I
should clarify the the report by Doug Johnson does not make the case
for the 100x productivity loss.  That conclusion was the result of
long (months) decision process.  There was a lot of TI internal data
that went into that claim.  The conclusion also had some situation
dependent criteria.  Most notibly that the team was primarily
engineers (ie not software folks).

Doug's paper was an attempt to levelize the playing field for each of
the potential languages.  It tries to go through the justifications,
both bussiness and technical, for each language without bias.

All I was trying to point out, with my statements above, is the kind
of painful process that was required to NOT use C++.  The conclusion,
whether case dependent or not, was the kind of radical justification
required.  The title of the paper shows the kind of prejudice that
enters into these kinds of decisions.  From some of the responses I
have gotten, I can see that this is the prevalent tone in many
companies.

-- Rob.