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Comment by mercurial | Hacker News Reader

It's guaranteed subsidies to the military-industrial complex for decades, not to mention employment. Why would you stop that?

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This. They had well defined, implemented, and tested technologies to support creating extremely bug free and working software. For some reason they decided to abandon all that previous work. I can not believe they were that inept, they must have done that on purpose.

Indeed. The abandoning of Ada makes no sense, if your goal was to ship extremely reliable software...

They abandoned Ada because they couldn't find people with any experience in the language. That's a big problem with the cyclical nature of military funding - when you don't build new things for a decade you start to lose the capability.

You can find people with COBOL knowledge, if you need them and can pay them - or can train them. If you are planning multi-decade projects like major defence procurements are these days, then training people up-front would be worth it.

Incidentally, there are possibly millions of people with daily exposure to a subset of Ada - its the basis of Oracle's PL/SQL. A component of the PL/SQL parser is called DIANA, which true Oracle geeks know is Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada. See http://stackoverflow.com/q/7764656/447514

Of course they considered training a new generation of Ada programmers. In the end they decided other options were better. I think they encountered resistance to the idea from software developers - nobody wants to be the employable-only-on-defense-contracts Ada guy during the next round of budget cuts.

There's no guarantee the software would have been any better were it written in Ada. Every generation is more complex than the last.

Airbus use a static analyzer written in OCaml, to verify their C. Which begs the question of why own a dog, if you're going to bark yourself?

The irony is, people happily invest their time on becoming gurus in web frameworks with a 2 year shelf life max.

>The irony is, people happily invest their time on becoming gurus in web frameworks with a 2 year shelf life max.

The biggest reason I want to find another line of work. Programming is fun. Wiring together flavor-of-the-month frameworks is torture, but that's where the jobs seem to be.

And VHDL.

We could spend the money employing people to do useful things like repairing our failing infrastructure.

Not the same people.

So?

They won't vote for you if you take their jobs, especially if they are in a niche industry.

So give them different jobs.

I am one of those people. I've worked in the aircraft industry for about 5 years total of my career, and with rockets for another 2 years or so. I have two engineering degrees, neither one of which are directly related to the kind of engineering I actually get paid to do. And I'm not really exceptional in regards to being flexible. The lead electrical designer for my department has a background in mechanical engineering. Our technical lead was a test engineer on the Delta IV program for years. It's common for maintenance leads to also have business degrees, or for an engineer to have a side job doing app development. Program goes away? We'll find other engineering work somehow.

Can't we just go back to building pyramids? There must be some scheme that siphons off as much excess capital as possible so we can happily remain serfs and doesn't provoke arguments. The Egyptians managed to build pyramids for many, many, many decades. They are tried and tested unlike these new fangled war planes things.

Could be even worse if the thing worked. They might get the idea to go start a war somewhere.

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