6 ms·

Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent. I get that there's more tools

Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent. I get that there's more tools for C++ but first class formal verification support and a language that's generally designed to save you from yourself seems like something you would stand your ground on. Ada is supremely good at killing people and/or keeping them un-killed, there's a reason you still see it kicking around in defense and aerospace despite the common perception that it's a bygone relic.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent. Do you think the auto industry will have a easier time finding Ada talent at their pay rates? Or that talent will want to specialize into Ada just to pigeonhole themselves into the Automotive jobs market?
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  As a Rust + C++ developer (in medical right now, and vehicle before that) I see no reason why I couldn't also pick up Ada as one of many skill sets. I have an Ada95 manual on my bookshelf from years ago that I bought out of curiosity -- frankly for senior level talent the language syntax is the easiest thing to pick up it's the intricacies of an existing code base and business domain that is the hard part of joining a new project and that is generally language independent. Arguably picking up Rust -- with its frankly exotic value passing and ownership semantics -- is much harder than learning Ada.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    > I see no reason why I couldn't also pick up Ada as one of many skill sets Low wages and the negative resume drive development might be reasons. Believe it or not, pigeon holing yourself in niche/uncool tech for years, can and will negatively impact your future hiring prospects at good jobs, since hiring in tech is broken and HR selects resumes on buzzwords and on your "last X years of experience in Y framework".
- seabird 1y ago
  I'm near Detroit which has a huge amount of auto industry, and engineering pay is good across pretty much all disciplines. It'll pay for a happy life and then some as long as relentless title climbing and job hopping isn't your definition of happiness. Ada is not some exotic thing that requites SF comp. If it's such a major adjustment coming from C/C++ that it's actually causing you trouble, you have other problems. It's comical bringing up the automotive industry considering that its responsible for AUTOSAR, which is simultaneously widely hated by engineers and completely useless outside the industry.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >I'm near Detroit which has a huge amount of auto industry, and engineering pay is good across pretty much all disciplines. I dunno about Detroit since I don't live there, but in Europe the auto industry is on a major downturn with cost cutting, layoffs and hiring freezes. Good luck getting hired anywhere now if you're laid off from the Auto industry and your specialty is some niche stuff only used in the auto industry. Also, IIRC, the company I worked for recently laid off 35% staff at their Auburn Hills office overnight so I doubt the situation around Detroit is as rosy as you make it seem. > If it's such a major adjustment coming from C/C++ that it's actually causing you trouble, you have other problems. Like I said, there should be no problem for a (skilled) programmer to adjust from C++ to Ada or vice versa, the problem is convincing HR to hire you on that premise. Ask me how I know (see my username). Gone are the days of the SW generalists programmer, who would be hired with the expectation to learn on the job the new language used at that job, companies now are only looking for people with X on-the-job YoE on that programming language or framework, not self taught people coming from other programing languages. This is not something you can control, it's the hiring market that's broken, so you can only adapt to it by not pigeonholing yourself in things that might be a career dead-end. >It's comical bringing up the automotive industry considering that its responsible for AUTOSAR AUTOSAR did what it was supposed to do: be a vendor lock in program for German bureaucratic companies and job security program for workers in that industry. That's what Germany and German companies do best: create massive amounts of bureaucracy requirements as a moat for an industry they have a foothold in, then sell you the solution. Why do you think SAP is also German?
zoom6628 1y ago
THIS. I knew someone a while back who worked on Patriot missile software. It was Ada. And Patriot still a formidable weapon.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  You mean the Patriot that ended up getting 28 people killed due to a SW bug?[1] That Patriot? Let me repeat myself again, Ada won't save you from human bugs. If you hire bad programmers or have bad dev and test practices, there's no magic programming language that will save you from your calculation and logic mistakes. You can code in raw machine code like you're 1960's NASA, and still have less bugs than a clueless vibe coder in Ada/Rust/etc. if you know what you're doing and have the right test and verification processes. [1] https://www.cs.unc.edu/~smp/COMP205/LECTURES/ERROR/lec23/node4.html https://www.cs.unc.edu/~smp/COMP205/LECTURES/ERROR/lec23/nod...
  - anthk 1y ago
    It will help a lot still. But as I said, Forth it's better than raw ASM. On integers casted into floats, a Forth programmer would use a fixed point in a much saner way, they had experience for decades on it.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      C programmers have been using fixed point integer math instead of floats for decades. It's a solved engineering problem in safety critical systems. It's only a problem for clueless devs who look for reason to shit on C and think the magic lies in the right programming language, not in having the right knowledge.
      - anthk 1y ago
        Chuck Moore disagrees. On C, I use OpenBSD and I even adapted some ports (mednafen, c++, but my point remains), one of them (not officially, as a home user) being cpulimit from Free to Open. Still, Forth on small devices it's far more predictable and introspectable than C.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

>Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent. Do you think the auto industry will have a easier time finding Ada talent at their pay rates? Or that talent will want to specialize into Ada just to pigeonhole themselves into the Automotive jobs market?

cmrdporcupine 1y ago
As a Rust + C++ developer (in medical right now, and vehicle before that) I see no reason why I couldn't also pick up Ada as one of many skill sets. I have an Ada95 manual on my bookshelf from years ago that I bought out of curiosity -- frankly for senior level talent the language syntax is the easiest thing to pick up it's the intricacies of an existing code base and business domain that is the hard part of joining a new project and that is generally language independent. Arguably picking up Rust -- with its frankly exotic value passing and ownership semantics -- is much harder than learning Ada.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  > I see no reason why I couldn't also pick up Ada as one of many skill sets Low wages and the negative resume drive development might be reasons. Believe it or not, pigeon holing yourself in niche/uncool tech for years, can and will negatively impact your future hiring prospects at good jobs, since hiring in tech is broken and HR selects resumes on buzzwords and on your "last X years of experience in Y framework".
seabird 1y ago
I'm near Detroit which has a huge amount of auto industry, and engineering pay is good across pretty much all disciplines. It'll pay for a happy life and then some as long as relentless title climbing and job hopping isn't your definition of happiness. Ada is not some exotic thing that requites SF comp. If it's such a major adjustment coming from C/C++ that it's actually causing you trouble, you have other problems. It's comical bringing up the automotive industry considering that its responsible for AUTOSAR, which is simultaneously widely hated by engineers and completely useless outside the industry.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >I'm near Detroit which has a huge amount of auto industry, and engineering pay is good across pretty much all disciplines. I dunno about Detroit since I don't live there, but in Europe the auto industry is on a major downturn with cost cutting, layoffs and hiring freezes. Good luck getting hired anywhere now if you're laid off from the Auto industry and your specialty is some niche stuff only used in the auto industry. Also, IIRC, the company I worked for recently laid off 35% staff at their Auburn Hills office overnight so I doubt the situation around Detroit is as rosy as you make it seem. > If it's such a major adjustment coming from C/C++ that it's actually causing you trouble, you have other problems. Like I said, there should be no problem for a (skilled) programmer to adjust from C++ to Ada or vice versa, the problem is convincing HR to hire you on that premise. Ask me how I know (see my username). Gone are the days of the SW generalists programmer, who would be hired with the expectation to learn on the job the new language used at that job, companies now are only looking for people with X on-the-job YoE on that programming language or framework, not self taught people coming from other programing languages. This is not something you can control, it's the hiring market that's broken, so you can only adapt to it by not pigeonholing yourself in things that might be a career dead-end. >It's comical bringing up the automotive industry considering that its responsible for AUTOSAR AUTOSAR did what it was supposed to do: be a vendor lock in program for German bureaucratic companies and job security program for workers in that industry. That's what Germany and German companies do best: create massive amounts of bureaucracy requirements as a moat for an industry they have a foothold in, then sell you the solution. Why do you think SAP is also German?

zoom6628 1y ago

THIS. I knew someone a while back who worked on Patriot missile software. It was Ada. And Patriot still a formidable weapon.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
You mean the Patriot that ended up getting 28 people killed due to a SW bug?[1] That Patriot? Let me repeat myself again, Ada won't save you from human bugs. If you hire bad programmers or have bad dev and test practices, there's no magic programming language that will save you from your calculation and logic mistakes. You can code in raw machine code like you're 1960's NASA, and still have less bugs than a clueless vibe coder in Ada/Rust/etc. if you know what you're doing and have the right test and verification processes. [1] https://www.cs.unc.edu/~smp/COMP205/LECTURES/ERROR/lec23/node4.html https://www.cs.unc.edu/~smp/COMP205/LECTURES/ERROR/lec23/nod...
- anthk 1y ago
  It will help a lot still. But as I said, Forth it's better than raw ASM. On integers casted into floats, a Forth programmer would use a fixed point in a much saner way, they had experience for decades on it.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    C programmers have been using fixed point integer math instead of floats for decades. It's a solved engineering problem in safety critical systems. It's only a problem for clueless devs who look for reason to shit on C and think the magic lies in the right programming language, not in having the right knowledge.
    - anthk 1y ago
      Chuck Moore disagrees. On C, I use OpenBSD and I even adapted some ports (mednafen, c++, but my point remains), one of them (not officially, as a home user) being cpulimit from Free to Open. Still, Forth on small devices it's far more predictable and introspectable than C.