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."

Comments

Skill and not language used?

[thedak]

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.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[Digi-John]

Perhaps a language which is slower and a bit more difficult to write prevents programmers from dumping so many lines of semi-working crap, requiring them to put a little more thought into the code?

Re:Skill and not language used?

[larry bagina]

Aside from writing code, you also have to test it. That extra security/straightjacket can mean it works right the first time.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[Detritus]

One of the advantages of a language like Ada is that more problems can be detected at compile time and corrected at low cost, as opposed to languages like C that assume that you know what you're doing and are optimized for speed. Ada also has run-time checks that can catch many problems. It's usually more efficient for the project to do the work up-front, rather than to hack together something and debug it.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[Jason King]

Yes, 10 uber-coders can finish a project ahead of 10 clueless coders every time. What Ada does is it makes it harder for the clueless coder to hose the whole system. Because its persnickety you don't find buffer overruns (for example) in the wild. You always get them in test or sometimes they even generate compiler errors. The earlier in the cycle you get your errors the easier they are to fix.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[wfstanle]

You are forgetting something... Actually writing the original code takes up a small part of the total time spent on a program in its life cycle. There is debugging, testing and updating that have to be considered. I have updated programs written in Ada and in other programming languages. Have you actually had to read code the code written by others? Reading a C or C++ program is not easy. Some say that C (and all of its derivatives) are "Write only languages". At least in Ada, it is easier to make sense of the code that others write.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[aldousd666]

haha in refernce to your java being easy to read by default, you're forgetting about people like this.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[Ephemeriis]

You need to make a distinction: they weren't writing new code, they were updating existing code. This is a very important distinction. We are all aware of "code rot", etc. and how over time documentation gets lost, people have to re-learn a piece of code based purely on the source, etc. However they took an older piece of code and revamped it, right on time and under budget. This is notable, and may be attributable to some of the properties of Ada.

  Maybe, maybe not, but there's a good chance it had something to do with Ada. Ada is almost self-documenting. The syntax is all very verbose and human readable.

If you have to walk in blind and maintain someone else's code, Ada is the language to do it in.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[afidel]

No, I'm saying most of the bottom 90% have no idea what Ada is =)

Re:Skill and not language used?

[hey!]

Not necessarily.

C is a good language if you (a) need a portable language but don't have another portable language to implement it with and (b) you need the language to be well designed enough for a team of competent programmers to tackle nearly any problem.

You can give a language more features that makes it easier to tackle certain problems, but it tends to undermine the portability goal. C is something like a portable assembler, only with the most critical abstractions for day to day programming provided. Once you get into more, you start to run into assumptions. Static or dynamic typing? It depends on your software engineering methodologies, particularly testing.

What C is emphatically not is idiot proof. Even worse, it is spectacularly not clever person proof. I dunno. I've never worked in Ada myself, but I suspect this might be some of its, er, attraction. It looks like a language in which it is not fun to be cleverer than you need to be.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[Darinbob]

"Return of C"? Has it ever gone away? I use it all the time in places where C++ is too bloated and assembler isn't required.

I think C is the languages that killed Ada. Ada was about code safety and correctness, and C was about being able to break the rules. Early Ada also did not give sufficient access to the underlying machine, which made it suitable for applications but not so much for systems work where C excelled. By the time Ada evolved, C was already entrenched as the system language and C++ was starting to dominate applications.

As a language, Ada is great. Maybe a few nits I'd change, but very well grounded and building on the solid base of Pascal and Modula-II.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[bnenning]

That extra security/straightjacket can mean it works right the first time.

Or not. I'm not quite sure why, but my Python code has a significantly higher frequency of working right the first time than my Java code, and that's after developing in Java for 10 years and Python for less than 2. My theory is that it Java's static typing and verbosity consumes a portion of my mental energy that makes it harder to focus on the actual algorithm.

Re:Skill and not language used?

[darkwing_bmf]

As a programmer, *I* find it more readable as well. This doesn't matter when writing your own small program from scratch, but it's damn convenient when you've got to maintain someone else's code. You can do fewer "clever" things in Ada.

Suppose we want to assign b to a, then execute c if b is non-zero:

In C:

if (a=b) c;

It is clever. But can easily be misread as a comparison between a and b instead of an assignment. Obviously (or maybe not) good programmers won't write this way, but C allows it and you don't always get to choose who wrote the code you're currently working with. And this is just a trivial example. It can get far more complex and clever than I'm willing to attempt.

Ada doesn't let you be that clever. You're forced to write it out:

a := b;
IF b /= 0 THEN
  c;
END IF;

Now pretend someone else wrote this and you don't know the original goal of the code segment. You're not even sure if the code is 100% correct or not. Which one would you rather maintain?

Re:Ada

[Maaras]

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?

Re:I used ada....

[TargetBoy]

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.

Re:Language Magic Bullets

[mihalis]

Bug? Phooey - The software in question performed exacly as per spec... the spec for the Ariane 4 rocket, that is.

Re:I used ada....

[Chris Mattern]

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. Ada simply makes you aware of that fact before you put the code into production.

Re:It is not just the language

[Alistair Hutton]

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 :-)

Re:Anything that forces discipline is good.

[Petaris]

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.

Re:I used ada....

[jonadab]

> > 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.