Kateryna Yushchenko | Hacker News Reader

Kateryna Yushchenko

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Another Soviet technology in software development, sounds very interesting but hard to find information about it: It is named R-Technology a visual programming system said to be still used for critical software in the Russian Space Program:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045926X0...

"The essence of R-technology is the use of weighted, oriented graphs to express control logic and to enforce good programming style. Unlike other developments in visual programming, R-technology can accommodate many programming languages and has been used for numerous development projects. Despite the fact that it has been extensively documented in the Soviet literature, it is practically unknown in the United States."

PDF link: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/S1045-926X(05)800....

Re: Soviet visual programming environments, I usually hear DRAKON brought up in that context (as far as what's usually cited in real world use for Buran etc.)

I wonder if "R-technology" is either another term for DRAKON or a distinctly different system. Given how underdocumented Soviet high technology (esp around computing and related fields) is in English sources, either can be considered a real possibility.

Its is complitly different. I know DRAKON and it is very different what I see in the article. Also DRAKON is very different from other visual diagraming systems. DRAKON is open but system that is actually used in space programming (if i remember correctly is called Grafit-Floks, https://books.google.com/books?id=0g9kDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA198&lpg=...) is not open and as far as I know is not in market. If you are interested in DRAKON there is a forum.drakon.su which has english section and on that forum is made by inventor of DRAKON and he participated in discussion. DRAKON has also wikipedia page.

HN discussion from 2016 about DRAKON:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12638032

Interesting. That page, and the page on the address programming language, both could use a lot more detail and significant editing. Hopefully more people who speak Russian can contribute to these articles.

Hear hear. I've explored the old USSR via youtubers like bald and bankrupt and various urban explorer channels (and of course, the amazing HBO/Sky show, chernobyl) but I would love something as digestible based on older computing systems from Russia and beyond. Just yesterday, an urban exploration channel found a bunch of abandoned computers in a bunker that I could not find a single reference to on the internet (and that looked fairly intact).

It's not about programming languages, but it contains a lot of information about the birth of cybernetics in the USSR: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.

Highly recommended!

Hey there, those channels you like sound awfully interesting to me as well. Would you mind sharing where you saw this bunker exploration video exactly? Thank you :)

For Soviet-era bunkers and similar urbex I suggest you have a look at Shiey (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpXwMqnXfJzazKS5fJ8nrVw/vid...) as well as Urbex Polska's videos on "Sobieskiego 100" (https://www.youtube.com/user/NaszaRzeczywistosc/videos).

I think this the channel that I was last watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Gux1jDm8Q

There is a good book covering the development of computing in Kyiv in those days:

intro: http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/DIFFERENT/StoreEternally.ht... pdf: http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/TXT/MalinovskiyBN_StoreEter...

Some more about Kateryna Yushchenko on the Museum's website: http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/Ushchenko-memoirs.html

It seems that this APL (Address Programming Language) notation is kind of a high-level microcode, similar to one used in Intel x86 CPUs, assuming that not only RAM words, but every register and I/O port are also directly addressable.

Of-course microcode is executable, but Address notation was manually translated into each specific CPU architecture.

Since every operation defined as a set, it seems it supported expressing SIMD-style vectorized computations.

Can anyone find any snippet of the above mentioned language?

There are a couple of articles in Russian on Habr[1][2]. At a glance, it seems like the language was closer to a form of mathematical notation than it was to what we now consider a programming language.

[1] https://habr.com/ru/company/ua-hosting/blog/387837/

[2] https://habr.com/ru/company/ua-hosting/blog/274019/

https://habrastorage.org/r/w780/files/154/629/59f/15462959ff...

Photo of programmers from 1956. Twelve women, zero men.

That was not uncommon. I went to school both in the United States and the USSR. Back there, almost always the student at the top of their class was a girl.

I remember that American female students struck me like a bunch of divas at first. That's when I realized these things are purely cultural.

My father worked in one of these Central Calculation Centers in the 80s. Almost all programmers were women. Man tended to work more with the hardware which was considered more "dirty" work since you had to be stuck for hours in those huge machines trying to find the piece that broke. Too bad we lost all our Ada lang, linear programming books...

If I'm not mistaken this was the case across the board

Back then the actual process of programming was considered as a clerk job, wasn't it?

Not back then, even by late eighties USSR, technical occupations were women dominated. By 1990, 68% of union's engineers were women.

Men were supposed to do either dunce jobs, or jobs for "big men" like bossing people around in the party or state enterprises.

https://medium.com/a-computer-of-ones-own/kateryna-l-yushche...

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/flztwo/til_t...

-> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

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