Re: F-22 ADA Programming

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> You are a master at living with and promoting failure as a lifestyle.

I did not promote failure in any of my previous posts, so your statement is misplaced. Still, I find it telling and that you have switched to ad-hominem arguments, as it shows that you are running out of technical ones.

> The OpenBSD project got sick enough to throw out OpenSSL and
> replace it and with their new 5.6 release have shipped their own modifications.
> The work will be ongoing until all the problems in OpenSSL have been gutted and reworked.

Excellent. This is exactly what should happen and I applaud it (which falsifies your imagination of my lifestyle).

So what is the language that they have used for implementing their "modifications"?

> Engineering ethics have to be made part of an
> education. 

Great idea, I'm all for it. On this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering

the word "economy" is found in 9 places, every time as a component that is as important as "science". One example is this:

"Engineers use their knowledge of science, mathematics, logic, economics, and appropriate experience or tacit knowledge to find suitable solutions to a problem."

You cannot build any "engineering ethic" construction with any one of these components removed. Economy is part of the equation whether you like it or not. I have already given an example of buying a car. There is a lot of ethics implied in it, but it cannot be done without economy in mind. The same applies to programming, too.

> But you do need to get rid of C and C++ because their culture is
> broken.

The C++ culture is now exploring Mars. I find this "culture" pretty convincing.

> They value ease of implementation over correctness.

The correctness is heavily impaired if the ease of implementation is not encouraged. All safety standards that I'm aware of encourage solutions that are easy to implement (see also the "logic" part of the engineering description above).

> They value
> running on everything

Portability seems to be a valid engineering goal.

> with a battery

No. This is Python's domain. C and C++ are relatively naked.

> more important than doing whatever it
> is they're supposed to do well.

I'm not sure if difficult to implement and not working on existing hardware could be counted as "doing well".

> That culture has to go.

It's not going anywhere.

> Java is not pretty but it's still a lot safer than C or C++.

Java introduces more problems than it solves - that's why C++ is now on Mars while Java had to stay on Earth. And that's also why you can find C++ in safety-related deployments (to the highest levels of criticality), whereas you are not likely to find Java there anytime soon.
Unless you want failure to be part of your lifestyle...

Actually, as I have already written in a similar discussion here some time ago, it is not C++ which is a biggest enemy of Ada (believe it or not, C++ programmers are the only ones who are likely to become Ada recruits) - the biggest and most dangerous enemy of Ada is Java, which makes Ada and C++ look like close friends. And the only way for Ada to survive is to stop blindly fighting with C++, as the reasons to fight are no longer valid today. This is the part that you seem to be missing.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com