Boeing Flies on 99% Ada (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Boeing Flies on 99% Ada (2010)

archive.adaic.com

38 pointszerr10 comments

Previous discussion in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8250646

I once spoke to a real oldtimer it consultant and he claimed(this was 20 years ago almost) all code related to aviation, including airports' systems are written in ada because of its resilience (he actually said it's impossible to write bugs in it)

The first professional Easter egg I saw was 0xadabad sitting in unused memory in a Boeing device. So not everyone there is a fan.

Ada was the language our University decided to teach for BSc Computer Science.

Once you learn to code in Ada - every other language looks like a death trap. To say it is unforgiving is and understatement. The huge benefit of this is that you learn to do things "The Right Way TM" (because that is literally the only way Ada would allow you to do something - by the book GoF style)

Anyway fast forward to graduation at a time when PHP was ruling the web - imagine going into a job and saying "Well I can do that with a CGI-Bin I will write in Ada", I literally got laughed out of the room.

TLDR - Great language for airplanes / real time systems - but maybe uni should have taught us something to help us get a real world job (not at Boeing) as our main language!

> because that is literally the only way Ada would allow you to do something - by the book GoF style

Ada is a very flexible language and the first versions didn't even support OOP so I will hasard that there was more than one way to do what you wanted. It's actually often used like C but with a proper type system.

Going from Ada to early PHP seems like an easy step to me. Going from PHP to Ada on the other hand would require learning quite lot of new concepts so it doesn't sound like a terrible choice for a first language to me.

I think the last version we used was Ada95. I definitely wasn't saying it was a terrible first language to learn with - job prospects however - not so good!

And yes the transition from Ada to PHP was easy - agree that the other way around would be painful - it's very difficult to un-learn something!

Is Ada also used for self-driving cars? If not, why not, given the security implications?

NVIDIA is starting to use Ada and SPARK for their autonomous vehicle products: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/02/05/adacore-secure-auto...

Curious thought, does it still?

Definitely not in everything they build that flies, nor do all of their current subsystem vendors. Very sadly, one of the comments from the 2014 thread cited above is right - C is in heavy use with such usage growing.

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