It’s difficult to recruit programmers for Ada projects: myth or reality? (Part 2)

2013-08-08

The second of the special three-part series on recruiting programmers to use Ada focuses on new Rapita recruit Chris Bryan. Here Chris talks about his experience of using Ada and how he thinks learning Ada will make him a better software engineer.

Part 2: Chris Bryan

Chris joined Rapita in 2013 with a Masters degree in Electronic Music Technology from the University of York, where he specialised in the development of real-time electronic music software. With his programming language experience restricted to C++, Java and Python, Chris was definitely new to Ada. Typically, he managed to turn this lack of experience into a positive: “I had no knowledge of Ada before joining Rapita, and as a result was able to start learning the language without any prejudices”. Chris says he is finding “the Ada learning curve to be comparable to other languages, and the intuitive syntax makes it easy to decipher example code”. The best part of programming in Ada is “it encourages you to think through the algorithm as you go, rather than having to debug problems that occurred as a result of sloppy thinking”. There are some challenges, but Chris can already see that Ada “is not a 'hack and give it a go' language, but a language for structured, methodical engineering. Even with my limited experience so far, I can see that the code I am writing is cleaner and more maintainable than it might have been in another language”. “I look forward to improving my Ada skills, as I believe it will make me a better software engineer in any other language I use in the future”.