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The Return of Ada
Pickens writes "Today when most people refer to Ada it's usually as a cautionary tale. The Defense Department commissioned the programming language in the late 1970s but few programmers used Ada, claiming it was difficult to use. Nonetheless many observers believe the basics of Ada are in place for wider use. Ada's stringency causes more work for programmers, but it will also make the code more secure, Ada enthusiasts say. Last fall, contractor Lockheed Martin delivered an update to ERAM, the Federal Aviation Administration's next-generation flight data air traffic control system — ahead of schedule and under budget, which is something you don't often hear about in government circles. Jeff O'Leary, an FAA software development and acquisition manager who oversaw ERAM, attributed at least part of it to the use of the Ada, used for about half the code in the system."
I may just be a whippersnapper, get off my lawn and whatnot; as a Java, C, C++ coder, but the project being completed under-budget and pre-deadline and having that attributed to Ada itself seems rather misguided to me.
As far as I'm concerned, if a competent team is hired; skilled programmers and developers, then anyone could get it done under-budget and pre-deadline. (yes, yes, military intelligence, oxymoron, but it seems to have worked out with this project)
I think the headline could later read, "the return of C", or any other language in the future if a team manages to finish a project efficiently due to the use of skilled developers.
Not necessarily a praise of language used is necessary, and a congratulatory beer for the team may be advised.
I had to use Ada in my Data Structures class with John McCormick at UNI http://www.cs.uni.edu/~mccormic/ This guy teaches a tough class but you end up learning a lot, and he is very big on Ada. While I haven't used it much since I did like a lot of features in the language.
I don't know everything.
Most projects do not meet their goals and/or timeframes from bad project management. Whilst the choice of language is obviously important, I have never heard of choice of language being a major factor when reporting on contracts that are over due/over budget or plain just dont work.
I'm just worried that some PHB will read this and go, "Hmm, Ada, we must use that!"
Btw Ada is n't that bad a language, but does n't guarentee success. I remember being told that an Ariene rocket that exploded mid flight was written in Ada, the cause was a overflowing integer.
You hit the nail on the head. I wrote Ada on a defense project for about 4 years. From a purely technical standpoint, it is the best programming language that I have ever used. However, in the real world, other concerns tend to dominate. Concerns such as IDE's (AdaCore's IDE was exceptionally slow and hard to use, on Solaris, at least.) and finding developers who know Ada (or are willing to REALLY learn it) counter-balance a lot of Ada's strengths. What good is the best language on Earth if you can't get developers to use it?
Likewise, I also used Ada in college.
I found it very easy to work with and is only slightly more verbose than VB or PowerBuilder.
Frankly a language that forces programmers to do the right thing up front might just be the thing to do. It's always faster to re-type something than to try to find the bug in your code after it is running.
It's not possible anywhere, unless you have access to an arbitrary size memory. Ada simply makes you aware of that fact before you put the code into production.
I think that any strongly typed language with lots of compile time and link time checks would be about as good (e.g., Java). Java, all the verbosity of Ada without any of the benefits. I can't work out how Java managed to make programmers type so many characters without achieving anything. Java's compile time checking is decent but seriously weak when compared to Ada. I've always liked the Ada compiler pointing out my spelling mistakes :-)
Puzzle Daze is now my job
My first three foundation CS courses (back in 2001) were all taught in ADA. This provides the benefit of qualifying me to talk on the subject, with the drawback of providing a heavily biased opinion...
Because of the nature of the language, you HAVE to know what you are doing to write a program in Ada. Getting something to compile in Ada pretty much guarantees you get something that will run reliably.
Schools that train programmers starting with Java or C++ provide the benefit of making their graduates highly employable, but with a greater risk of turning out highly incompetent programmers.
Ada never went anywhere, there has just been a large increase in the number of developers trained on other languages. The reason its 'Returning' is because almost any Project that uses Ada does provide for a success story (As long as you use developers who have been trained on Ada (Googling for source examples is not training)). Its a professional language for applications that just have to run. (Examples of great software written in ada: (Air Traffic Control, Flight Software, Hello World, etc...)
As I said, my opinion is biased.
"I can do it in C" was the line we always used when our Ada teacher said anything "could be done in Ada but nothing else".
"Rendezvous" was built into Ada explicitly but other standards have given it directly or through libraries to everything else. It's just thread synchronization that you can emulate/simulate/do in many other languages with similar code... semaphores, mutexes, events/conditionals, etc. but perhaps with a little more explicitness by the programmer.
The first thing to remember is that no (higher level) language gives magical properties to a computer. If one language can do it, I can guarantee that at least one other can tap into it as well... Machine Language being the easiest example because even magical Ada gets compiled into ML or interpreted by ML at one point or another... if it can be done, it can be done in ML. C is just a step up from Assembly/ML (we used to joke that C was portable Assembly).
You *might* can say that Ada was the first to actually have it as a construct defined in the language specification (I dunno the history of it, there may have been a language before Ada with it designed in) but even by Ada's heyday (mid- to late 80s), we could do it in C.
Getting into Ada is rather complicated and time-consuming, though, so it's not surprising that it never took off in a big way.
Look, can we get beyond the "government is always inefficient" meme? It's just not true. Many government projects come in on schedule and on budget. Some project are late and over budget. Guess what? It happens in the private sector too.
Government is actually more accountable to the people than private corporations are. Numerous cost controls are in place. Public officials are elected. I have not seen the same level of scrutiny in the private sector.
So let's move beyond the ultra conservative and libertarian talking points, ok?
Whats wrong with searching Google?
Its a tool that can lead you to valuable information just as asking a colleague or consulting a book or other publication can. No one knows everything or has come across every issue, but there is usually a good chance someone has. Just because you have seen someone use it to find information who then did a half-assed job of fixing the issue doesn't mean the tool they used is no good or always lends itself to half-assed fixes.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
Unix syscalls in Ada: like ripping your cock off to give yourself head. -- anonymous
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
> > Ever try reading in and storing an arbitrary length string? I'm fairly convinced it's not possible in Ada.
> It's not possible anywhere, unless you have access to an arbitrary size memory.
And yet, a language without the capability to attempt that (and only fail if the string actually gets too long for memory, which in practice doesn't happen very often) is pretty much useless for writing real-world programs like, say, an XML parser, or an email proxy, or, you know, anything much beyond classroom-example programs.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.