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If you've done VHDL, you'll be familiar with Ada's syntax. When the DoD commissioned the design of VHDL, they required that its syntax be based on Ada. https:/

If you've done VHDL, you'll be familiar with Ada's syntax. When the DoD commissioned the design of VHDL, they required that its syntax be based on Ada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#History

vlovich123 7y ago
It's interesting to see how Verilog & C both took over there in the industry. There's probably a chasm where the extra typedness isn't worth the velocity cost at the beginning of a project and when it's valuable the weight of switching can be too great. I think the middle ground is a language where you can relax some of your rules but then as pieces mature you can start enforcing stricter typing rules. I observe the same effect on other things like unit tests except the effect is the reverse of what people typically think. Lots of unit tests early on help you write correct code initially but as code matures it's just wasted automation time & it can end up ossifying some architectural decisions (ie. a change ripples out & causes a large amount of tests to need updating).
- UncleOxidant 7y ago
  I tend to disagree: strong typing is very valuable in the hardware design space - it's just that you couldn't convince hardware devs of this. If they had exposure to a programming language it was C (and possibly some assembly language) so they wanted something closer to what they were familiar with. When I worked in EDA I was given a project to get rid of linting errors in our generated HDL code. We generated both VHDL and Verilog. Our generated VHDL had very few problems thanks to strong typing. But there were lots of problems to fix in the Verilog code caused by it's weak typing.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    It's very valuable but not worth acquiring for most developers. I write relatively lot of C, I don't enjoy the familiarity, it just gets the job done for me in 90% less time because the tooling is there, the IDE is there, the documentation and support is good, the libraries are there - it matters a lot in what languages I find tolerable I've noticed. I like PLPGSQL, it's also has all that I've listed, I didn't like Ada and it doesn't have what I listed, because I had to "invent the wheel" so much. In the end, why spend 50-90 % more time to get that last x% of some foggy benefit?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  VHDL is quite strong across European companies.
ebaustin 7y ago
Also if you've written any PL/SQL stored procedures in Oracle.
- topspin 7y ago
  PL/SQL has remained faithful to the Ada zeitgeist. I've found spotting flaws in PL/SQL during peer review to be easier than some other languages.
  - OneWingedShark 7y ago
    Interesting. I wonder how nice a PL/SQL & Ada combined environment/IDE could be.
non-entity 7y ago
TIL VHDL was commisioned by the DoD. Also random note, but wouldn't most engineers familiar with HDL's be electronic engineers rather than software developers?
- opencl 7y ago
  A lot of people trained as EEs seem to end up in software dev jobs these days.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Yep. You don't find many EEs left in the US these days, unless they work at a military contractor. All the electronic hardware design work went to Taiwan and China, because that's where all the manufacturing for it is. What's left is government-related (military) stuff that obviously can't be outsourced to Asia, and some commercial stuff that they keep in-house for various reasons. Basically, the US is a really bad place to be an electrical engineer specializing in electronic hardware, but it's a great place to be a software engineer or developer.
    - pkaye 7y ago
      > Basically, the US is a really bad place to be an electrical engineer specializing in electronic hardware, but it's a great place to be a software engineer or developer. Its because software engineers get paid much better in addition to more options. As a firmware engineer I straddled both sides. So many of my EE colleagues lamented they should have done more on the software side. A few of the brilliant ones moved to places like Google, Amazon which need them for specialist roles. I remember a decade back I was visiting a customer in Taiwan to help debug our product and saw a legion of Chinese engineers helping out some project. I knew eventually Taiwan would lose some of their R&D to China.
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  There are a decent chunk of EEs/CpEs doing work that bridges hardware and software. For example, they might be writing VHDL or Verilog for an FPGA and also writing C/C++ for the microcontroller that interfaces with it. Also, there are lots of professional software developers who studied Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering in college. Many schools historically had all their CS classes and faculty within their EE department.
okl 7y ago
They started with Ada's syntax and tacked on strange things that do not fit in, e.g., the ".all" in use clauses.
- amelius 7y ago
  For people wondering what ".all" is about: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/access https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/access
  - inamberclad 7y ago
    I think he's talking about the use of the all keyword in VHDL. Although, the Ada use is odd too.

vlovich123 7y ago

It's interesting to see how Verilog & C both took over there in the industry. There's probably a chasm where the extra typedness isn't worth the velocity cost at the beginning of a project and when it's valuable the weight of switching can be too great. I think the middle ground is a language where you can relax some of your rules but then as pieces mature you can start enforcing stricter typing rules. I observe the same effect on other things like unit tests except the effect is the reverse of what people typically think. Lots of unit tests early on help you write correct code initially but as code matures it's just wasted automation time & it can end up ossifying some architectural decisions (ie. a change ripples out & causes a large amount of tests to need updating).

UncleOxidant 7y ago
I tend to disagree: strong typing is very valuable in the hardware design space - it's just that you couldn't convince hardware devs of this. If they had exposure to a programming language it was C (and possibly some assembly language) so they wanted something closer to what they were familiar with. When I worked in EDA I was given a project to get rid of linting errors in our generated HDL code. We generated both VHDL and Verilog. Our generated VHDL had very few problems thanks to strong typing. But there were lots of problems to fix in the Verilog code caused by it's weak typing.
- Avamander 7y ago
  It's very valuable but not worth acquiring for most developers. I write relatively lot of C, I don't enjoy the familiarity, it just gets the job done for me in 90% less time because the tooling is there, the IDE is there, the documentation and support is good, the libraries are there - it matters a lot in what languages I find tolerable I've noticed. I like PLPGSQL, it's also has all that I've listed, I didn't like Ada and it doesn't have what I listed, because I had to "invent the wheel" so much. In the end, why spend 50-90 % more time to get that last x% of some foggy benefit?
pjmlp 7y ago
VHDL is quite strong across European companies.

ebaustin 7y ago

Also if you've written any PL/SQL stored procedures in Oracle.

topspin 7y ago
PL/SQL has remained faithful to the Ada zeitgeist. I've found spotting flaws in PL/SQL during peer review to be easier than some other languages.
- OneWingedShark 7y ago
  Interesting. I wonder how nice a PL/SQL & Ada combined environment/IDE could be.

non-entity 7y ago

TIL VHDL was commisioned by the DoD. Also random note, but wouldn't most engineers familiar with HDL's be electronic engineers rather than software developers?

opencl 7y ago
A lot of people trained as EEs seem to end up in software dev jobs these days.
- magduf 7y ago
  Yep. You don't find many EEs left in the US these days, unless they work at a military contractor. All the electronic hardware design work went to Taiwan and China, because that's where all the manufacturing for it is. What's left is government-related (military) stuff that obviously can't be outsourced to Asia, and some commercial stuff that they keep in-house for various reasons. Basically, the US is a really bad place to be an electrical engineer specializing in electronic hardware, but it's a great place to be a software engineer or developer.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    > Basically, the US is a really bad place to be an electrical engineer specializing in electronic hardware, but it's a great place to be a software engineer or developer. Its because software engineers get paid much better in addition to more options. As a firmware engineer I straddled both sides. So many of my EE colleagues lamented they should have done more on the software side. A few of the brilliant ones moved to places like Google, Amazon which need them for specialist roles. I remember a decade back I was visiting a customer in Taiwan to help debug our product and saw a legion of Chinese engineers helping out some project. I knew eventually Taiwan would lose some of their R&D to China.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
There are a decent chunk of EEs/CpEs doing work that bridges hardware and software. For example, they might be writing VHDL or Verilog for an FPGA and also writing C/C++ for the microcontroller that interfaces with it. Also, there are lots of professional software developers who studied Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering in college. Many schools historically had all their CS classes and faculty within their EE department.

okl 7y ago

They started with Ada's syntax and tacked on strange things that do not fit in, e.g., the ".all" in use clauses.

amelius 7y ago
For people wondering what ".all" is about: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/access https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/access
- inamberclad 7y ago
  I think he's talking about the use of the all keyword in VHDL. Although, the Ada use is odd too.