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This. They had well defined, implemented, and tested technologies to support creating extremely bug free and working software. For some reason they decided to a

This. They had well defined, implemented, and tested technologies to support creating extremely bug free and working software. For some reason they decided to abandon all that previous work. I can not believe they were that inept, they must have done that on purpose.

gaius 12y ago
Indeed. The abandoning of Ada makes no sense, if your goal was to ship extremely reliable software...
- tsotha 12y ago
  They abandoned Ada because they couldn't find people with any experience in the language. That's a big problem with the cyclical nature of military funding - when you don't build new things for a decade you start to lose the capability.
  - gaius 12y ago
    You can find people with COBOL knowledge, if you need them and can pay them - or can train them. If you are planning multi-decade projects like major defence procurements are these days, then training people up-front would be worth it. Incidentally, there are possibly millions of people with daily exposure to a subset of Ada - its the basis of Oracle's PL/SQL. A component of the PL/SQL parser is called DIANA, which true Oracle geeks know is Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada. See http://stackoverflow.com/q/7764656/447514 http://stackoverflow.com/q/7764656/447514
    - tsotha 12y ago
      Of course they considered training a new generation of Ada programmers. In the end they decided other options were better. I think they encountered resistance to the idea from software developers - nobody wants to be the employable-only-on-defense-contracts Ada guy during the next round of budget cuts. There's no guarantee the software would have been any better were it written in Ada. Every generation is more complex than the last.
      - gaius 12y ago
        Airbus use a static analyzer written in OCaml, to verify their C. Which begs the question of why own a dog, if you're going to bark yourself? The irony is, people happily invest their time on becoming gurus in web frameworks with a 2 year shelf life max.
        tsotha 12y ago
        >The irony is, people happily invest their time on becoming gurus in web frameworks with a 2 year shelf life max. The biggest reason I want to find another line of work. Programming is fun. Wiring together flavor-of-the-month frameworks is torture, but that's where the jobs seem to be.
    - julie1 12y ago
      And VHDL.

gaius 12y ago

Indeed. The abandoning of Ada makes no sense, if your goal was to ship extremely reliable software...

tsotha 12y ago
They abandoned Ada because they couldn't find people with any experience in the language. That's a big problem with the cyclical nature of military funding - when you don't build new things for a decade you start to lose the capability.
- gaius 12y ago
  You can find people with COBOL knowledge, if you need them and can pay them - or can train them. If you are planning multi-decade projects like major defence procurements are these days, then training people up-front would be worth it. Incidentally, there are possibly millions of people with daily exposure to a subset of Ada - its the basis of Oracle's PL/SQL. A component of the PL/SQL parser is called DIANA, which true Oracle geeks know is Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada. See http://stackoverflow.com/q/7764656/447514 http://stackoverflow.com/q/7764656/447514
  - tsotha 12y ago
    Of course they considered training a new generation of Ada programmers. In the end they decided other options were better. I think they encountered resistance to the idea from software developers - nobody wants to be the employable-only-on-defense-contracts Ada guy during the next round of budget cuts. There's no guarantee the software would have been any better were it written in Ada. Every generation is more complex than the last.
    - gaius 12y ago
      Airbus use a static analyzer written in OCaml, to verify their C. Which begs the question of why own a dog, if you're going to bark yourself? The irony is, people happily invest their time on becoming gurus in web frameworks with a 2 year shelf life max.
      - tsotha 12y ago
        >The irony is, people happily invest their time on becoming gurus in web frameworks with a 2 year shelf life max. The biggest reason I want to find another line of work. Programming is fun. Wiring together flavor-of-the-month frameworks is torture, but that's where the jobs seem to be.
  - julie1 12y ago
    And VHDL.