[exDM69]

> If the DoD enforces the requirement for Ada, Universities, job training centers, and companies will follow

DoD did enforce a requirement for Ada but universities and others did not follow.

The JSF C++ guidelines were created for circumventing the DoD Ada mandate (as discussed in the video).

[p_l]

TL;DR Ada programmers were more expensive

[adolph]

Since when was expense a problem for defense spending?

In the video, the narrator also claims that Ada compilers were expensive and thus students were dissuaded from trying it out. However, in researching this comment I founds that the Gnat project has been around since the early 90s. Maybe it wasn't complete enough until much later and maybe potential students of the time weren't using GNU?

  The GNAT project started in 1992 when the United States Air Force awarded New 
  York University (NYU) a contract to build a free compiler for Ada to help 
  with the Ada 9X standardization process. The 3-million-dollar contract 
  required the use of the GNU GPL for all development, and assigned the 
  copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNAT

[0xffff2]

Take a look at job adds for major defense contractors in jurisdictions that require salary disclosure. Wherever all that defense money is going, it's not engineering salaries. I'm a non-DoD government contractor and even I scoff at the salary ranges that Boeing/Lockheed/Northrup post, which often feature an upper bound substantially lower than my current salary while the job requires an invasive security clearance (my current job doesn't). And my compensation pales in comparison to what the top tech companies pay.

[jll29]

The DOD could easily have organized Ada hackathons with a lot of prize money to "make Ada cool" if they had chosen to in order to get the language out of the limelight. They could also have funded developing a free, open source toolchain.

[jandrese]

Ada would never have been cool.

Ironically I remember one of the complaints was it took a long time for the compilers to stabilize. They were such complex beasts with a small userbase so you had smallish companies trying to develop a tremendously complex compiler for a small crowd of government contractors, a perfect recipe for expensive software.

I think maybe they were just a little ahead of their time on getting a good open source compiler. The Rust project shows that it is possible now, but back in the 80s and 90s with only the very early forms of the Internet I don't think the world was ready.

[skepti3]

Out of curiosity:

1: If you had to guess, how high is the level of complexity of rustc?

2: How do you think gccrs will fare?

3: Do you like or dislike the Rust specification that originated from Ferrocene?

4: Is it important for a systems language to have more than one full compiler for it?

[jandrese]

Given how much memory and CPU time is burned compiling Rust projects I'm guessing it is pretty complex.

I'm not deep enough into the Rust ecosystem to have solid opinions on the rest of that, but I know from the specification alone that it has a lot of work to do every time you execute rustc. I would hope that the strict implementation would reduce the number of edge cases the compiler has to deal with, but the sheer volume of the specification works against efforts to simplify.

[skepti3]

> They could also have funded developing a free, open source toolchain.

If the actual purpose of the Ada mandate was cartel-making for companies selling Ada products, that would have been counter-productive to their goals.

Not that compiler vendors making money is a bad thing, compiler development needs to be funded somehow. Funding for language development is also a topic. There was a presentation by the maker of Elm about how programming language development is funded [0].

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8

[adolph]

Is the Gnat compiler not sufficiently free and open source? It does not fulfill the comment calling for "toolchain" however.

Edit: Thanks for that video. It is an interesting synthesis ad great context.

[p_l]

GNAT exists because DoD funded a free, open source toolchain.

[p_l]

Since on paper government cares about cost efficiency and you have to consider that in your lobbying materials.

Also it enables getting cheaper programmers who where possible might be isolated from the actual TS materiel to develop on the cheap so that the profit margin is bigger.

It gets worse outside of the flight side JSF software - or so it looks like from GAO reports. You don't turn around a culture of shittiness that fast, and I've seen earlier code in the same area (but not for JSF) by L-M... and well, it was among the worst code I've seen. Including failing even basic requirement of running on a specific version of a browser at minimum.