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?

[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: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?

shhh! don't go blabbing this all over the place

[museumpeace]

I make a nice living rewriting Ada systems into C++. When DoD suspended the "only quote us system development costs based on Ada" requirement, most bidders dropped Ada like a burning bag of poop. Its best advances such as exception handling have been picked up by modern system programming languages and even Java. The doctrinaire variable type enforcements have yet to be equaled but OO it really aint. Bottom line, plenty of old defense software systems have few living authors who will admit to knowing the code and upkeep is expensive, talent hard to find. This is ironic since DoD spec'd Ada in the first place because it had a maintenance nightmare of hundreds of deployed languages. So of course the managers think a more popular language with "all the features" of Ada should be a porting target. Eventually even customers demanded modernization and compatibility ports.

I know a few die hard Ada programmers who just love it...but very few. The brilliance of the language can be debated but its moot: no talent pool to speak of.

And besides, Ada is really French. [why did GNU make an ada compiler??????????????]

technology market: you can't separate technical merits from market forces
open source: your market has a small leak and is slowly collapsing.

Re:Language Magic Bullets

[Detritus]

It was the first Ariane V launch. They had reused software from an earlier model of the Ariane without properly testing it in its new environment. Think of it this way, you take the speedometer module from your Trabant and install it in a Ferrari. The first time that you exceed 100 km/h, the speedometer module fails with an overflow error because the type for speed was defined as 0..100. The problem was that Ariane's management was cutting corners on requirements analysis and testing. The software performed as designed, it just wasn't designed for the Ariane V.

Re:It is not just the language

[dprovine]

I think that any strongly typed language with lots of compile time and link time checks would be about as good (e.g., Java).

In Ada, you can declare a variable to be an integer in the range 1..100, and if it goes outside that range at any point during its lifetime, an exception is immediately thrown. In most languages, you'd have to check it every time you assign it.

Also, you can declare subtypes which not only define ranges but wall themselves off from each other. If you declare "MonthType" and "DateType" as types, and then ThisMonth and ThisDate as variables, you can't say assign ThisMonth to ThisDate (or vice-versa) without an explicit cast, even if the value stored is within range.

I programmed in Ada more-or-less exclusively for a year, with all the warnings possible turned on, and it did change a bit how I think about programming. I always know, instantly, what type any object is and what its limits are, because I got so used to thinking about those things when using Ada.

Not that it's perfect, or the ultimate, or anything. I had a job where I wrote C only for about 2 years, and that definitely changed how I thought about programming too. When writing C++ I have sense of what the computer is going to have to do to actually run the code.

There's a quote that any language which doesn't change how you think about programming isn't worth knowing. Ada built up my mental macros for making sure my types and values were in order, and for that alone it was worth learning and using for a year.