Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

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> The only seemingly verifiable claim I can find to DRAKON's lineage in aerospace has to do with the Fregat upper stage

It's not verifiable. It's once again co-authored by Drakon's author, and there is no other independent confirmation that any of his claims are true.

On the contrary, the main Drakon discussion forum has multiple threads and discussions trying and failing to even produce the simplest algorithms in Drakon. Much less anything as complex as aerospace requirements.

Drakon's author himself repeatedly fails to answer any questions about how to implement stuff in Drakon, and only answers with pseudo philosophical demagoguery.

The only notable software produced for Drakon is Drakon Editor https://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/ which is essentially a UML editor with code concatenation

"The only notable software produced ... is ... essentially a UML editor ..." Yes, correct. It's a CASE tool, at least when you have a computer to assist with using it. For harder-hitting software applications, I never took much stock in using it as much more than a better way to diagram out the basic blocks when analyzing the disassembly of something, and I'm usually doing that by hand, without computer assistance.

More broadly, I never expected much from my CASE tools actually generating code for me: the scaffolding was possible, but any sophistication beyond that just never materialized. That ship sailed right around the turn of the millennium, and none of what DRAKON does innovates on that.

"It's not verifiable." Thanks. I always figured that a lot of this chaff was just marketing.

That's why I can't believe it keeps appearing on HN's front page :D

I'm pretty sure 60% of the reason is that it has a cool name :-P. The rest 40% is that at least the part you can easily see, like the comparison between arbitrary spaghetti flowcharts and much more tidy looking DRAKON flowcharts, do look convincing enough. Since 2-3 years now there is even a web-based editor you can play around with, which adds to its shareability.

Of course its mystique association with the USSR space program also helps despite supposedly all being classified (which, if anything, adds to the mystique), but IMO even without those, the cool name would do enough to be shared :-P.

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