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Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

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Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#91

Post by bdavis__ »

wrp wrote: post #72

This article promotes a popular misconception of the programming situation for defense projects in the 1970s. There may have been "hundreds of specialized programming languages" in existence that could be used, but just a handful actually predominated. Most aeronautical projects were done in JOVIAL. I've talked about this history with engineers from the 1960s-70s. They did not regard the introduction of Ada as a good…

Many of the 'programmers' of those days lacked the sophistication and education to appreciate Ada.

Just the mojo required to print an integer (having to instantiate a generic) was considered complicated

Ada was also very slow to compile, on the order of 10 times slower than Jovial. (my experiences)

Avionics systems back then were tiny. Jovial usually ran on a 16 bit processor.

Ada enabled a certain maturity and correctness to the avionics domain.

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#92

Post by bdavis__ »

hwayne wrote: post #88
wrp wrote: post #72

This article promotes a popular misconception of the programming situation for defense projects in the 1970s. There may have been "hundreds of specialized programming languages" in existence that could be used, but just a handful actually predominated. Most aeronautical projects were done in JOVIAL. I've talked about this history with engineers from the 1960s-70s. They did not regard the introduction of Ada as a good…

Welp, there's my rabbit hole for the week. I've never heard of JOVIAL before, and it looks like there's lot of interesting stuff here. Thank you!

fortran with nice syntax and built in bit operations.

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#93

Post by Gibbon1 »

wrp wrote: post #72

This article promotes a popular misconception of the programming situation for defense projects in the 1970s. There may have been "hundreds of specialized programming languages" in existence that could be used, but just a handful actually predominated. Most aeronautical projects were done in JOVIAL. I've talked about this history with engineers from the 1960s-70s. They did not regard the introduction of Ada as a good…

> The impetus that led to Ada came from management and implementation was done by academics.

Impression of mine back then was academics were busy designing their perfect languages to do data transformation while ignoring real world engineering needs and that not everyone had an unlimited account on the schools big iron mainframe.

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#94

Post by Gibbon1 »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #51
jeffdavis wrote: post #40

There is some overlap in the use cases between Ada-in-the-mainstream (which seems to be what the article is suggesting) and Rust. The existence of Rust will make it even harder for Ada to break out of its existing domains. Both seem to have good ecosystems, but quite different. Ada has more high-assurance tooling and practices. Rust has more in terms of packaging and general-purpose high level libraries. With Ada, it…

I understand what you're getting at here I tbink, but one of the ecosystem challenges we run into is that while Rust is abstractly a fantastic choice for the domain of systems development that would often be served by Ada (in fact we think it's a lot better in some respects because we can do more statically ahead of time, that Ada does dynamically at runtime, by abusing the Rust type system and borrow-checker), the R…

> ore attention provided to things like Wasm than there is to things like embedded use cases for example.

Things might be better, but last time I checked rust's compiler was a lot slower than C and the binaries were several times bigger. That last one is a big deal for embedded.

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#95

Post by galangalalgol »

bdavis__ wrote: post #92
hwayne wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp, there's my rabbit hole for the week. I've never heard of JOVIAL before, and it looks like there's lot of interesting stuff here. Thank you!

fortran with nice syntax and built in bit operations.

Nice fixed point types too. A fixed point all to the right of the binary point to represent angles asa semicircle was useful. Table ovelays are evil though. I'd rather have rust than ada for the functional lineage along with the performance, but the thin stdlib combined with the difficulty of getting a crates.io mirror certified clean of malcious code makes it problematic.

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#96

Post by aledalgrande »

wrp wrote: post #72

This article promotes a popular misconception of the programming situation for defense projects in the 1970s. There may have been "hundreds of specialized programming languages" in existence that could be used, but just a handful actually predominated. Most aeronautical projects were done in JOVIAL. I've talked about this history with engineers from the 1960s-70s. They did not regard the introduction of Ada as a good…

Seems like "the next big thing" has existed in the tech world from the start.

I remember using Ada 95 in university, after learning C++, Java and Python in other projects. It worked very well for concurrent processes, but it was so basic as a developer experience.

In C++ (98 I think) I needed to build length dynamic arrays, in Ada 95 I had to build dynamic length strings.

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#97

Post by steveklabnik »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #94
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you're getting at here I tbink, but one of the ecosystem challenges we run into is that while Rust is abstractly a fantastic choice for the domain of systems development that would often be served by Ada (in fact we think it's a lot better in some respects because we can do more statically ahead of time, that Ada does dynamically at runtime, by abusing the Rust type system and borrow-checker), the R…

> ore attention provided to things like Wasm than there is to things like embedded use cases for example. Things might be better, but last time I checked rust's compiler was a lot slower than C and the binaries were several times bigger. That last one is a big deal for embedded.

You can get Rust binaries just as small; the smallest known one was 145 bytes. Some defaults were recently adjusted to make them smaller by default too.

https://github.com/tormol/tiny-rust-executable

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#98

Post by galangalalgol »

fortran77 wrote: post #89
bluejekyll wrote: post #12

First, this is a great introduction article to Ada. It's a great history lesson, and analysis of where it's used and why. That said, it seems to be arguing for something in a vacuum. Where is the mention of other new programming languages that also fit this category? Where is the mention of Rust? Rust fits all the same requirements: - A general, flexible design that adapts to satisfy the needs of embedded computer ap…

Why can't someone write an article about Ada without it having to be about Rust?

Because they overlap almost entiely in use case?

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#99

Post by dpc_pw »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #81

This article was a decent introduction, I suppose. I've been learning Ada for about a year now, and I quite like it. It's larger than the previously largest language I know, Common Lisp, but I like the focus on reliability and whatnot; it's a language that has many facilities programs need, but you don't need to use otherwise; it's also segmented well, unlike Common Lisp, but there's advantages to both methods. There…

> As I like to write, Ada is used in critical systems such as ballistic missiles and trains, whereas Rust is used in Firefox.

You mean to say that Ada is good for much simpler, easier, smaller-scope projects?

Re: Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With

#100

Post by [deleted] »

wrp wrote: post #72

This article promotes a popular misconception of the programming situation for defense projects in the 1970s. There may have been "hundreds of specialized programming languages" in existence that could be used, but just a handful actually predominated. Most aeronautical projects were done in JOVIAL. I've talked about this history with engineers from the 1960s-70s. They did not regard the introduction of Ada as a good…

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