Newsgroups: sci.aeronautics.airliners Path: news From: ditka!sgiblab!acd4.acd.com!HDFS1.acd.com!jbii ( John O. Bell II ) Subject: Re: Flight envelope protections, and mistrust of CS people X-Submission-Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1992 16:30:15 GMT References: Message-ID: Approved: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM Summary: Don't walk out in the rain w/o an umbrella AEs... you might drown Organization: Applied Computing Devices, Inc., Terre Haute IN Sender: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM X-Submission-Message-Id: <1992Dec4.163015.1333@acd4.acd.com> Date: 04 Dec 92 22:30:34 PST >Especially in software, of particular relevance to the net. A lot (if not >most) of the people writing this code--4M on the A320, 10M+ on the >A330 and A340--are *not* aero engineers: just programmers, ostensibly with ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I used to think that way as an AE grad, until I got my CS degree. Let's face it, guys, most AEs don't even know where to _begin_ coding this stuff. They don't have the experience or the background to make clean, fast, fault- tolerant code for these kind of applications. However, it is true that the CS types better have a good math/engineering background if they are going to understand exactly what is required for the code. You can't be a specialist in everything (much to the company's chagrin >:-)... "Darn, we gotta pay money to those CS people too? I thought our AEs could handle this!"). Side Note: Every time I see some aerospace article talk about how engineers are becoming accomplished computer scientists, I laugh my head off. I've been on both sides of the tracks, and I know better. Doing scientific programming in FORTRAN does not make you a CS god. >CS backgrounds (a more frightening thought I can't imagine! :-)), performing >under strictly governed, structured, controlled environments: to specif- >ication. Unlike the AEs, who are allowed to be creative, free-wheeling, loose cannons. Shyeah, and I'm the Easter Bunny... unless you are a conceptual designer, you are a glorified paper shuffler just like anyone else. Why do you think they call Boeing "The Lazy B", anyway (just an example). >Airbus even mentioned the "CS" types it brought in from "outside" to >buttress a comment on its quality-control practices, in an article, as if >to make the point that mere engineers weren't writing this stuff: the >"pros" are doing it. :-) Yeah, we know what we're doing, SURE... :-) Yeah, they do. Evidently the AEs on the project couldn't handle the task or they wouldn't have hired CS types. Either that, or the code they were putting together was such a spaghetti-mess of calls and gotos that they had to get CS people just so they could trace and fix the bugs. >Robert Dorsett >rdd@cactus.org >...cs.utexas.edu!cactus.org!rdd John Bell jbii@hdfs1.acd.com Applied Computing Devices, Inc.