Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

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> The only seemingly verifiable claim I can find to DRAKON's lineage in aerospace

I've been extremely annoyed by DRAKON cultists since 2005 (no, I'm not joking). They were basically claiming: "We have a tooling so powerful that it's used to produce ultra-reliable software for spacecraft, including Buran". When asked to show it, they replied that it's all super-secret. "Buran" is a Russian "Space Shuttle", btw.

Back then, my parents were still working in a factory that produced some of the "Buran" components. So I asked them to try to get me in touch with software developers who might have worked on anything related to "Buran". They got me in touch with a couple of developers responsible for parts of software in the ground monitoring system, but nobody heard anything about DRAKON. So it might have been used somewhere, but it certainly was not super-important.

Since then, DRAKON cultists have not produced anything significant worth of value. The largest project is, probably, the editor. And if you look at it, it's just a bunch of scripts where Drakon doesn't add much clarity.

You can also see that their tooling has zero practicality, it makes any sort of collaboration impossible. Drakon files are binary and can't be diffed sanely.

Forgive me, but I'm left scratching my head. I can't find where I mentioned any of this.

Buran's cancellation predates (given my limited command of Russian, what I think is) the first evidence of DRAKON's production use in the engineering process for avionics systems by almost a decade. Nowhere did I bring up that particular orbiter.

I'm also unsure where I wrote that DRAKON by itself is machine consumable. I'm only familiar with it as a pattern language for drawing diagrams, and that's the extent of my experience with it.

Russian Wikipedia details the claims: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%A0%D0%90%D0%9A%D0%9E...

You can do machine translation for the article, it's not bad.

It also details claims that it's an actual programming language (what we call now "no code"): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%A0%D0%90%D0%9A%D0%9E....

> I'm also unsure where I wrote that DRAKON by itself is machine consumable. I'm only familiar with it as a pattern language for drawing diagrams, and that's the extent of my experience with it.

The cultists claim that it IS a machine language. I don't mind it as a documentation language for simple algorithms, but it's not what they claim.

"The cultists claim that it IS a machine language." Cultists? I'm still left scratching my head as to how this is relevant to my comment.

I wrote about the Fregat upper stage, DRAKON's expressiveness as it relates to recursion with an example of an environment where it might be undesirable, and how the implementation of quicksort shown on Wikipedia is "perfectly fine."

Where are the cultists there?

In general, that's an apt description for DRAKON proponents. I interacted with them more than once.

And at this point, it's not even clear if DRAKON charts make sense even for their intended purpose: visual illustrations of simple algorithms. They are better than classic flow charts, but that's mostly because flow charts themselves are hopelessly bad.

Sequence diagrams are better to show interactions between agents, and good old state diagrams are far better structured to visualize state transitions.

I'll try being more direct.

I have a tightly-defined universe of discourse here, and you are operating almost completely outside it. Why is your engagement with my comment relevant beyond the connection to DRAKON?

So far, I've seen you write about cultists and Buran and, now, how sequence diagrams and state diagrams are superior. That final bit could admittedly make for interesting conversation, but I've heretofore not seen significant substantiation from you or, hell, any interrogation from you why I even use DRAKON.

Dare I say it, but I feel like I've been the target of your trauma response here, and I don't exactly appreciate it.

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