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It feels like we've gone full circle back to 1980 when the US Defense comissioned a 'safe' embedded language. Jean Ichbiah's team won this contract with the la

It feels like we've gone full circle back to 1980 when the US Defense comissioned a 'safe' embedded language. Jean Ichbiah's team won this contract with the language 'Green' in 1979. They subsequently went on to further develop this and standardize it in what was then the Ada 83 language standard. The more I think about the more it feels that Ada just came about to solve the right problem but at the wrong time.

pjmlp 5y ago
Unisys still sells Burroughs to customers that care about top level security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems ESPOL/NEWP were the very first system programming languages to have UNSAFE code blocks, 10 years before C was even an idea. Before that there was JOVIAL as well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVIAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVIAL
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Hasn't that morphed into some sort of emulation nowadays? Like almost COTS(common of the shelf) Xeon, running some hypervisor and the 'legacy' within? Similar to what Symbolics did with Genera for Alpha? edit: [1] https://microsites.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward https://microsites.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/mainframe/unisys-clearpath-forward-mainframe-rehost https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-... Azure?! Err...sure...
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    First of all it depends on the customer deployment scenario. Secondly, having an issue with number 2 cloud provider at world scale? Or would you rather have AWS?
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      That's not what I meant to say. It doesn't matter which cloud provider at all, if the product running on it is an emulation. All the assurances you spoke of regarding early Burroughs Large Systems resulted from hardware/software co-design. The hardware does not exist anymore. They ported some abstraction layer by whichever means to contemporary platforms, and now top that by making it available to the cloud, saying: 'Diz iz good! We king of the mainframe hill, Ugga Ugga!' I wouldn't trust that. The same way I wouldn't trust that from another, very established competing vendor, saying the same things, having the same nimbus of security and reliability. Because sometimes there are blips on my radar, wherein some conference talk pops up, and people looked under the rugs of these systems, not even hard, just casually, and discovered some oopsies. So it seems like that nimbus of security and reliability is more a result of very careful isolation from public networks on one hand, and inacessability for the bored and curious pranksters of the world on the other. But it is no absolute. Especially if it's running in emulation on contemporary COTS hardware. (In the EFFING cloud!) Just my not so humble opinion, though.

pjmlp 5y ago

Unisys still sells Burroughs to customers that care about top level security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems ESPOL/NEWP were the very first system programming languages to have UNSAFE code blocks, 10 years before C was even an idea. Before that there was JOVIAL as well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVIAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVIAL

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Hasn't that morphed into some sort of emulation nowadays? Like almost COTS(common of the shelf) Xeon, running some hypervisor and the 'legacy' within? Similar to what Symbolics did with Genera for Alpha? edit: [1] https://microsites.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward https://microsites.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/mainframe/unisys-clearpath-forward-mainframe-rehost https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-... Azure?! Err...sure...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  First of all it depends on the customer deployment scenario. Secondly, having an issue with number 2 cloud provider at world scale? Or would you rather have AWS?
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    That's not what I meant to say. It doesn't matter which cloud provider at all, if the product running on it is an emulation. All the assurances you spoke of regarding early Burroughs Large Systems resulted from hardware/software co-design. The hardware does not exist anymore. They ported some abstraction layer by whichever means to contemporary platforms, and now top that by making it available to the cloud, saying: 'Diz iz good! We king of the mainframe hill, Ugga Ugga!' I wouldn't trust that. The same way I wouldn't trust that from another, very established competing vendor, saying the same things, having the same nimbus of security and reliability. Because sometimes there are blips on my radar, wherein some conference talk pops up, and people looked under the rugs of these systems, not even hard, just casually, and discovered some oopsies. So it seems like that nimbus of security and reliability is more a result of very careful isolation from public networks on one hand, and inacessability for the bored and curious pranksters of the world on the other. But it is no absolute. Especially if it's running in emulation on contemporary COTS hardware. (In the EFFING cloud!) Just my not so humble opinion, though.