I sometimes wonder to myself: what programming challenges would come up in something like the starship Enterprise (any of them) and what new language constructs (if any) would be required to address them?
I was just clarifying the GP comment
> I sometimes wonder to myself: what programming challenges would come up in something like the starship Enterprise (any of them) and what new language constructs (if any) would be required to address them?
The point of the question is to imagine that you are part of the team building this system. What sort of programming techniques would you be using? Is it going to be Python? Modern C++? Probably none of these things as they are incredibly inadequate for such a system.
If done today I think it's more than one technology. The missions critical stuff could maybe be Ada? The AI stuff maybe logical programming based like Prolog? I assume there's a big database in there.
And no doubt some advances will be necessary in terms of AI to handle the calculations. I don’t know what those calculations are, but I’m sure they’re difficult :)
I think about the voice interface to the various computers. Really complex interactions. Always on. Rapidly changing contexts. Historic conversations. Different languages.
I’m sure storage is an issue. Something to do with compression algorithms. And decompression. Probably encryption and security.
Challenges in redundancy might be hardware or materials problems.
Most of them are hard for me to even articulate plainly :)
Thanks for answering!