A few months ago, we started developing an app to control an in-house developed

Question

A few months ago, we started developing an app to control an in-house developed test equipment and record a set of measurements. It should have a simple UI, and would likely require threads due to the continuous recording that must take place. This application will be used for a few years, and shall be maintained by a number of computer science students during this period.

Our boss graduated some 30 years ago (not to be taken as an offense; I have more than half that time on my back too) and has mandated that we develop this application in ANSI C. The rationale is that he is the only one that will be around the entire time, and therefore he must be able to understand what we are doing. He also ruled that we should use no abstract data types; he even gave us a list with the name of the global variables (sigh) he wants us to use.

I actually tried that approach for a while, but it was really slowing me down to make sure that all pointer operations were safe and all strings had the correct size. Additionally, the number of lines of code that actually related to the problem in hand was a only small fraction of our code base. After a few days, I scrapped the entire thing and started anew using C#. Our boss has already seen the program running and he likes the way it works, but he doesn't know that it's written in another language.

Next week the two of us will meet to go over the source code, so that he "will know how to maintain it". I am sort of scared, and I would like to hear from you guys what arguments I could use to support my decision.

Cowardly yours

Explanation / Answer

Notice that the "Please do it like this so I am sure I can maintain it" is actually a very good requirement - most programs spend much longer being maintained than being written and keeping a solution in a known technology is usually a good idea.

Just imagine if some new computer kid when asked for writing a C# application wrote it in Haskell in two days and said "Hey, it works and I'm gone, bye" leaving the maintenance on you.

Just imagine if some new computer kid when asked for writing an ANSI C application 15 years ago had written it in Visual Basic 6 in two days and left it. Now you have to maintain it and Windows 7 starts complaining already when the installation media is inserted.

This might be a good opportunity to say - as Heinzi hinted in the comments - that "this is a quick prototype written in C# which happens to look very much like C - shall we make it production ready, or reimplement it in ANSI C like you asked", and then take the discussion now. Having actual source to see, is much better than "Hey, shouldn't we write our next application in Haskell because its faster".

In other words - you now have the opportunity to demonstrate that a new platform could be considered. Bring up that you wrote a prototype before the code review - this will help removing the impression that you are trying to sneak C# in under the radar. I would suggest that you also demonstrate that all existing code written in ANSI C can be used from within C#. Personally I believe you will be told that the target remains ANSI C to stay in a single platform.

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