Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
defensenews.com
Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#2OK, everyone here who codes in ADA, raise your hand. Atlas?
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#3Odd story, makes software development in Ada kind of a catch-22. The DoD has used Ada for so long because of the security and correctness constraints built right into the language and compiler. When you're talking about software that's flying a plane (passenger, war time, whatever) it HAS to be right, because if it's wrong, people die. When something HAS to be right, that by itself ensures longer development time and testing.
Now I'm not in this industry, but I know that planes these days are extremely complicated beasts and require a ton of code to run everything properly. I worry that if development is artificially sped up, that code problems that would have been caught in the testing get caught in production.
Of course the above kind of assumes a decent dev team and a good code base. What I said could be moot if what's really happening is the technical debt of some of this code is so massive that simple changes take months to make and ensure correct, which would be a problem for sure.
Either way, blaming the language probably isn't the right way to go about this.
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#4OK, everyone here who codes in ADA, raise your hand. Atlas?
I was taught Ada95 by John McCormick, who wrote several textbooks on Ada.
Though I can't claim any professional experience, lots of my college education was straight from DoD/Navy expats who wrote military software.
There are lots of firms in the midwest that write this kind of software. John Deere, Lockheed, etc.
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#5OK, everyone here who codes in ADA, raise your hand. Atlas?
I hadn't known much about Ada other than that it's very old (as programming languages go) and it has a kind of nonspecific bad reputation, but I looked it up on Wikipedia and it actually doesn't look like an unpleasant language at all from the article. I particularly like its built-in message-passing system for concurrency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)#Conc...
On projects like this I would worry more about accumulated technical debt from decades of modification than the language they're written in. (I suppose the language can complicate the task of hiring programmers who are skilled with its idiosyncrasies, but that's hardly an insurmountable or crippling problem.)
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#6OK, everyone here who codes in ADA, raise your hand. Atlas?
when I went to Uni, the main language we used was Turbo Pascal (followed by loads of assembly and a small amount of C). The year behind us had Turbo Pascal replaced by Ada as that was going to be the Next Big Thing.
The Ada class started in '94 if a timeframe helps
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#7Odd story, makes software development in Ada kind of a catch-22. The DoD has used Ada for so long because of the security and correctness constraints built right into the language and compiler. When you're talking about software that's flying a plane (passenger, war time, whatever) it HAS to be right, because if it's wrong, people die. When something HAS to be right, that by itself ensures longer development time and…
I have no idea about their overall code quality but there was a famous F-22 bug found a few years ago where it lost all navigation systems when crossing the international date line.
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#8But I want the lolly NOW!!!!
But seriously, Ada is well designed and not difficult. Ada is not part of the problem, this would take longer and be less reliable in C++.
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#9But I want the lolly NOW!!!! But seriously, Ada is well designed and not difficult. Ada is not part of the problem, this would take longer and be less reliable in C++.
The article actually nails the real reason: the USAF bought far fewer F22s than it originally planned, so things like this that apply equally to 1 or 1000 have to have their cost spread over far fewer individual units. I'll bet that the F22 software is not actually that much more complicated than that controlling a modern car, yet Ford or whoever can spread the cost over a million units.
Re: Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades
#10OK, everyone here who codes in ADA, raise your hand. Atlas?
Me!
Well not really, but Ada is alive and well in the guise of PL/SQL. You can see it if you look closely, type "desc sys.diana" into any Oracle DB, DIANA is "descriptive intermediate annotated notation for Ada".