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It's amazing that this keeps being submitted to HN and keeps being featured. The people pushing this couldn't come up with a way to represent a simple quicksor

by troupo 2y ago

It's amazing that this keeps being submitted to HN and keeps being featured. The people pushing this couldn't come up with a way to represent a simple quicksort in it [1]. Why does this keep appearing? https://forum.drakon.su/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=6124&hilit=quicksort&start=0 https://forum.drakon.su/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=6124&hilit=quic...

echoangle 2y ago
What’s wrong with this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Quicksort_DRAKON.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Quicksor...
- troupo 2y ago
  By Drakon standards it doesn't follow the "one true way": - the main execution path must be the leftmost top-to-bottom "skewer" - there's no recurse (AFAIR) in Drakon, and there were heavy debates on how to express it properly
  - cjohnson318 2y ago
    I use DRAKON, or a loose form of it, when I draw diagrams. I like to use a square action icon saying "GOTO <title>", where title is a rounded title icon that names a process or procedure. It's not perfect.
    - troupo 2y ago
      Yeah, that's what Wikipedia diagram does, too: it uses a lose/extended form
  - echoangle 2y ago
    Interesting point about the recursion, that’s an issue. I think the reason is that it has aerospace heritage, I think explicit iteration control is important there. Having no good way to represent recursion is limiting for general purpose though.
    - troupo 2y ago
      > I think the reason is that it has aerospace heritage It's very doubtful that Drakon has airspace heritage. Any claims to this are made by one single person: the author of the language.
  - nrr 2y ago
    I feel like the degenerate case is the happy path for basically any sorting algorithm: the computer doesn't need to do work. That'd make the leftmost skewer in the Wikipedia version of DRAKON quicksort perfectly fine. As far as recursion is concerned, consider that DRAKON has exactly the expressiveness of assembly language. For environments where modified condition/decision coverage[0] is important (where analysis of branches at the object code level is commonplace), recursion is very likely undesirable, so not having a good way to express it is probably more a feature than a bug. The only seemingly verifiable claim I can find to DRAKON's lineage in aerospace has to do with the Fregat upper stage[1] (though, I don't read Russian beyond an elementary school level, so I don't know what is actually said here), but given what I know of DO-178B and applicable NASA standards for safety-critical systems, it'd make sense to have DRAKON as part of the tooling. 0: https://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/papers/Hayhurst-2001-tm210876-MCDC.pdf https://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/papers/Hayhurst-2001-tm2108... 1: https://www.laspace.ru/upload/iblock/db0/db01beb741f3e811d58abadbb4fae34a.pdf https://www.laspace.ru/upload/iblock/db0/db01beb741f3e811d58...
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > The only seemingly verifiable claim I can find to DRAKON's lineage in aerospace I've been extremely annoyed by DRAKON cultists since 2005 (no, I'm not joking). They were basically claiming: "We have a tooling so powerful that it's used to produce ultra-reliable software for spacecraft, including Buran". When asked to show it, they replied that it's all super-secret. "Buran" is a Russian "Space Shuttle", btw. Back then, my parents were still working in a factory that produced some of the "Buran" components. So I asked them to try to get me in touch with software developers who might have worked on anything related to "Buran". They got me in touch with a couple of developers responsible for parts of software in the ground monitoring system, but nobody heard anything about DRAKON. So it might have been used somewhere, but it certainly was not super-important. Since then, DRAKON cultists have not produced anything significant worth of value. The largest project is, probably, the editor. And if you look at it, it's just a bunch of scripts where Drakon doesn't add much clarity. You can also see that their tooling has zero practicality, it makes any sort of collaboration impossible. Drakon files are binary and can't be diffed sanely.
brudgers 2y ago
“Why is this on HN?” comments are often a mark of an intellectually interesting story…but not always of course. As for quicksort in Drakon, if you need quicksort you might have an impedance mismatch between the application and language…might be knee deep in the Turing Tarpit. For example if you are building a real-time system, sorting to the degree quicksort seems like a good idea might suggest a design error.
- troupo 2y ago
  Drakon cannot handle a trivial algorithm like quicksort, much less a real-time system
  - mistercheph 2y ago
    It is not being shared as a practical tool for people to quicksort their datasets in, it's an experimental tool made by a collapsed empire's defunct space program that seems to attract the interest of hobbyists.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > collapsed empire's defunct space program No, it was not.
  - buescher 2y ago
    I've enjoyed your critique of Drakon and its proponents so far, but it's very typical for real-time safety-critical systems to have coding standards in place that prohibit recursion; one example is MISRA.
    - troupo 2y ago
      1. There's no evidence that Drakon was used in aerospace industry beyond claims made by a single person: Drakon's author 2. Drakon is pushed as a generic programming tool despite: lacking generic programming facilities, lacking any tooling to actually produce working programs on any platform (except a single hobbyist implementation which is a UML editor with code concatenation: https://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/drakon-erlang/silh.html https://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/drakon-erlang/silh.htm...)

by troupo 2y ago

echoangle 2y ago

What’s wrong with this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Quicksort_DRAKON.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Quicksor...

troupo 2y ago
By Drakon standards it doesn't follow the "one true way": - the main execution path must be the leftmost top-to-bottom "skewer" - there's no recurse (AFAIR) in Drakon, and there were heavy debates on how to express it properly
- cjohnson318 2y ago
  I use DRAKON, or a loose form of it, when I draw diagrams. I like to use a square action icon saying "GOTO <title>", where title is a rounded title icon that names a process or procedure. It's not perfect.
  - troupo 2y ago
    Yeah, that's what Wikipedia diagram does, too: it uses a lose/extended form
- echoangle 2y ago
  Interesting point about the recursion, that’s an issue. I think the reason is that it has aerospace heritage, I think explicit iteration control is important there. Having no good way to represent recursion is limiting for general purpose though.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > I think the reason is that it has aerospace heritage It's very doubtful that Drakon has airspace heritage. Any claims to this are made by one single person: the author of the language.
- nrr 2y ago
  I feel like the degenerate case is the happy path for basically any sorting algorithm: the computer doesn't need to do work. That'd make the leftmost skewer in the Wikipedia version of DRAKON quicksort perfectly fine. As far as recursion is concerned, consider that DRAKON has exactly the expressiveness of assembly language. For environments where modified condition/decision coverage[0] is important (where analysis of branches at the object code level is commonplace), recursion is very likely undesirable, so not having a good way to express it is probably more a feature than a bug. The only seemingly verifiable claim I can find to DRAKON's lineage in aerospace has to do with the Fregat upper stage[1] (though, I don't read Russian beyond an elementary school level, so I don't know what is actually said here), but given what I know of DO-178B and applicable NASA standards for safety-critical systems, it'd make sense to have DRAKON as part of the tooling. 0: https://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/papers/Hayhurst-2001-tm210876-MCDC.pdf https://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/papers/Hayhurst-2001-tm2108... 1: https://www.laspace.ru/upload/iblock/db0/db01beb741f3e811d58abadbb4fae34a.pdf https://www.laspace.ru/upload/iblock/db0/db01beb741f3e811d58...
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > The only seemingly verifiable claim I can find to DRAKON's lineage in aerospace I've been extremely annoyed by DRAKON cultists since 2005 (no, I'm not joking). They were basically claiming: "We have a tooling so powerful that it's used to produce ultra-reliable software for spacecraft, including Buran". When asked to show it, they replied that it's all super-secret. "Buran" is a Russian "Space Shuttle", btw. Back then, my parents were still working in a factory that produced some of the "Buran" components. So I asked them to try to get me in touch with software developers who might have worked on anything related to "Buran". They got me in touch with a couple of developers responsible for parts of software in the ground monitoring system, but nobody heard anything about DRAKON. So it might have been used somewhere, but it certainly was not super-important. Since then, DRAKON cultists have not produced anything significant worth of value. The largest project is, probably, the editor. And if you look at it, it's just a bunch of scripts where Drakon doesn't add much clarity. You can also see that their tooling has zero practicality, it makes any sort of collaboration impossible. Drakon files are binary and can't be diffed sanely.

brudgers 2y ago

“Why is this on HN?” comments are often a mark of an intellectually interesting story…but not always of course. As for quicksort in Drakon, if you need quicksort you might have an impedance mismatch between the application and language…might be knee deep in the Turing Tarpit. For example if you are building a real-time system, sorting to the degree quicksort seems like a good idea might suggest a design error.

troupo 2y ago
Drakon cannot handle a trivial algorithm like quicksort, much less a real-time system
- mistercheph 2y ago
  It is not being shared as a practical tool for people to quicksort their datasets in, it's an experimental tool made by a collapsed empire's defunct space program that seems to attract the interest of hobbyists.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > collapsed empire's defunct space program No, it was not.
- buescher 2y ago
  I've enjoyed your critique of Drakon and its proponents so far, but it's very typical for real-time safety-critical systems to have coding standards in place that prohibit recursion; one example is MISRA.
  - troupo 2y ago
    1. There's no evidence that Drakon was used in aerospace industry beyond claims made by a single person: Drakon's author 2. Drakon is pushed as a generic programming tool despite: lacking generic programming facilities, lacking any tooling to actually produce working programs on any platform (except a single hobbyist implementation which is a UML editor with code concatenation: https://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/drakon-erlang/silh.html https://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/drakon-erlang/silh.htm...)