[seabird]

Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent.

I get that there's more tools for C++ but first class formal verification support and a language that's generally designed to save you from yourself seems like something you would stand your ground on. Ada is supremely good at killing people and/or keeping them un-killed, there's a reason you still see it kicking around in defense and aerospace despite the common perception that it's a bygone relic.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent.

Do you think the auto industry will have a easier time finding Ada talent at their pay rates? Or that talent will want to specialize into Ada just to pigeonhole themselves into the Automotive jobs market?

[seabird]

I'm near Detroit which has a huge amount of auto industry, and engineering pay is good across pretty much all disciplines. It'll pay for a happy life and then some as long as relentless title climbing and job hopping isn't your definition of happiness.

Ada is not some exotic thing that requites SF comp. If it's such a major adjustment coming from C/C++ that it's actually causing you trouble, you have other problems.

It's comical bringing up the automotive industry considering that its responsible for AUTOSAR, which is simultaneously widely hated by engineers and completely useless outside the industry.

[FirmwareBurner]

>I'm near Detroit which has a huge amount of auto industry, and engineering pay is good across pretty much all disciplines.

I dunno about Detroit since I don't live there, but in Europe the auto industry is on a major downturn with cost cutting, layoffs and hiring freezes. Good luck getting hired anywhere now if you're laid off from the Auto industry and your specialty is some niche stuff only used in the auto industry. Also, IIRC, the company I worked for recently laid off 35% staff at their Auburn Hills office overnight so I doubt the situation around Detroit is as rosy as you make it seem.

> If it's such a major adjustment coming from C/C++ that it's actually causing you trouble, you have other problems.

Like I said, there should be no problem for a (skilled) programmer to adjust from C++ to Ada or vice versa, the problem is convincing HR to hire you on that premise. Ask me how I know (see my username).

Gone are the days of the SW generalists programmer, who would be hired with the expectation to learn on the job the new language used at that job, companies now are only looking for people with X on-the-job YoE on that programming language or framework, not self taught people coming from other programing languages.

This is not something you can control, it's the hiring market that's broken, so you can only adapt to it by not pigeonholing yourself in things that might be a career dead-end.

>It's comical bringing up the automotive industry considering that its responsible for AUTOSAR

AUTOSAR did what it was supposed to do: be a vendor lock in program for German bureaucratic companies and job security program for workers in that industry. That's what Germany and German companies do best: create massive amounts of bureaucracy requirements as a moat for an industry they have a foothold in, then sell you the solution. Why do you think SAP is also German?

[seabird]

Everywhere is in a downturn. ZIRP is over, this isn't limited to automotive. Just because you're not going to be hired within a few days of looking doesn't mean that everything is doom and gloom. Automotive software engineers aren't working for poverty wages.

You don't outright lose years of experience writing C and C++ just because you learned Ada. You're not going to leave a decade of C experience off your resume just because it wasn't the primary language in your last position. Ada isn't for frontend web development where new "technology" gets chewed up and spat out every year or two. It shines in firmware. There's plenty of vendors that haven't moved past C99.

Chalking up a hypothetical appreciable Ada marketshare in automotive as "niche stuff only used in the auto industry" doesn't make sense in that it sees plenty of use in aerospace, defense, and medical. The point of me bringing up AUTOSAR is that Ada is nowhere close to the pigeonhole scenario that AUTOSAR is.

In the world where you only have Ada experience, and you're not a bad programmer, but HR departments are giving you grief, just lie on your resume. Fuck em. We both know that it's not a major adjustment, so brush up on details before you're interviewed and if they asked what you used C/C++ just say you're not at liberty to speak about it. Nobody is going to hit you with anything along the lines of whether or not it's true that monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Automotive software engineers aren't working for poverty wages.

How does that help when nobody is hiring right now and you're competing with thousand of laid off engineers?

>so brush up on details before you're interviewed

How do you get interviewed in the first place if they're screening your resume out due to not having the experience with the programming languages they're looking for?

Like I said, having niche languages sends your resume in the bin.

>if they asked what you used C/C++ just say you're not at liberty to speak about it

Unless you worked for government intelligence, this type of response gets you rejected immediately here in Europe/Germany, since they have 100 other candidates who can speak about what they did. Why would they bother with you when you're already making their life hard from the interview stage?

I feel like your US centered viewpoint is way off from the reality of where I live.

[cmrdporcupine]

As a Rust + C++ developer (in medical right now, and vehicle before that) I see no reason why I couldn't also pick up Ada as one of many skill sets. I have an Ada95 manual on my bookshelf from years ago that I bought out of curiosity -- frankly for senior level talent the language syntax is the easiest thing to pick up it's the intricacies of an existing code base and business domain that is the hard part of joining a new project and that is generally language independent.

Arguably picking up Rust -- with its frankly exotic value passing and ownership semantics -- is much harder than learning Ada.

[FirmwareBurner]

> I see no reason why I couldn't also pick up Ada as one of many skill sets

Low wages and the negative resume drive development might be reasons.

Believe it or not, pigeon holing yourself in niche/uncool tech for years, can and will negatively impact your future hiring prospects at good jobs, since hiring in tech is broken and HR selects resumes on buzzwords and on your "last X years of experience in Y framework".

[zoom6628]

THIS.

I knew someone a while back who worked on Patriot missile software. It was Ada. And Patriot still a formidable weapon.

[FirmwareBurner]

You mean the Patriot that ended up getting 28 people killed due to a SW bug?[1] That Patriot?

Let me repeat myself again, Ada won't save you from human bugs. If you hire bad programmers or have bad dev and test practices, there's no magic programming language that will save you from your calculation and logic mistakes. You can code in raw machine code like you're 1960's NASA, and still have less bugs than a clueless vibe coder in Ada/Rust/etc. if you know what you're doing and have the right test and verification processes.

[1] https://www.cs.unc.edu/~smp/COMP205/LECTURES/ERROR/lec23/nod...

[seabird]

The Patriot failures were the result of floating point error. Ada provides facilities specifically to deal with this, while you're left rolling your own in C/C++. Of course Ada won't save you from human bugs, but it's silly to say that you're no better off with a language giving you everything it can to avoid them than one that is a notorious fuckup dispenser.

[FirmwareBurner]

1. How is Ada better at floating point than C++?

2. In mission critical systems we always used fixed point fractional numbers in C as a representation of floats, to avoid floating point issues, so any issues of the language are moot.

[seabird]

In respect to both points, Ada provides decimal and binary fixed point representations as a first class feature of the language, and in the event you must use floating point, SPARK provides the capability to prove that you're not running into rough edges. It's actually one of the most immediately noticeable features of the language for a firmware developer coming from C, and I'm a bit surprised you don't know about it.

Of course I know that you can do all of this stuff in C. I did it for years. I just don't think there's any sort of honor or expression of skill in getting your balls busted by this stuff being an afterthought, it's just annoying. I know your response will be "get better", and I did, countless people have, and we all still appreciate that these nuisances can be taken care of by the language.

[anthk]

It will help a lot still. But as I said, Forth it's better than raw ASM.

On integers casted into floats, a Forth programmer would use a fixed point in a much saner way, they had experience for decades on it.

[FirmwareBurner]

C programmers have been using fixed point integer math instead of floats for decades. It's a solved engineering problem in safety critical systems. It's only a problem for clueless devs who look for reason to shit on C and think the magic lies in the right programming language, not in having the right knowledge.

[anthk]

Chuck Moore disagrees. On C, I use OpenBSD and I even adapted some ports (mednafen, c++, but my point remains), one of them (not officially, as a home user) being cpulimit from Free to Open. Still, Forth on small devices it's far more predictable and introspectable than C.