Author Topic: "Make With Ada" Competition  (Read 31153 times)

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Online nctnico

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #125 on: September 15, 2019, 07:44:03 pm »
Call me when you accept boarding on a plane that runs critical systems with Python or Lua. :-DD
Well choose between a shoddy written program in Ada or a well written program in Python. I like the ideas behind Ada but if see how poorly VHDL code is written in general then I don't have much hope of people getting Ada right. OTOH nowadays everybody knows Python and Lua isn't unknown either. Both languages don't have the typicall problems you encounter if you want to program anything mission critical in C: bad pointers, buffer overflows and a large number of different types.
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline legacy

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #126 on: September 15, 2019, 08:27:42 pm »
Call me when you accept boarding on a plane that runs critical systems with Python or Lua.

ATL guys in the QA team have just bought their new pocket calculators from CASIO and found ucPython installed.

You can imagine some funny pills of humor when, getting off a red-ic helicopter,  one of them pulled out of the bag her new pocket calculator claiming to her colleagues to look at collected data and calculous.

- oh, I didn't know that Python could flight - said my colleague, and the guy next replied  - CASIO must have done a great job at certifying it - so he replied - No, it's not certified to flight, there is no certified calculator for any QA guy, it's just a girl with a uCpython calculator getting off a helicopter -

LOL :-DD
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #127 on: September 15, 2019, 08:55:43 pm »
so he replied - No, it's not certified to flight, there is no certified calculator for any QA guy, it's just a girl with a uCpython calculator getting off a helicopter -

 :-DD
 

Offline FreddieChopin

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #128 on: September 16, 2019, 05:27:55 pm »
Ada was a decent idea ruined by government funding and let's be honest, most of us aren't working on life-critical avionics. It's better to get stuff done with C instead of cocking about with hello-worlds with niche language for niche applications. C code can be pretty safe if you work with a right mindset, check out test driven development for embedded C book.

Also, I like python's "We are consenting adults" approach. Sure, I'll make my code pretty safe, tested, with clear interface but if you decide to misuse it - well it's your fault. Embedded software shouldn't be done by newbies, at least not without guidance and supervision from more experienced programmers. If you hire interns as lead developers and get burned by product that failed - blame yourself for bad business decisions (been there, done that, felt the consequences).
 

Offline legacy

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #129 on: September 16, 2019, 06:38:27 pm »
Ada was a decent idea ruined by government funding and let's be honest, most of us aren't working on life-critical avionics.

ru-in-ed-?!
 

Online tggzzz

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #130 on: September 16, 2019, 06:46:52 pm »
Ada was a decent idea ruined by government funding and let's be honest,

Ah, politics. And inaccurate at that.

Quote
most of us aren't working on life-critical avionics.

True, but unenlightening.

Quote
It's better to get stuff done with C instead of cocking about with hello-worlds with niche language for niche applications. C code can be pretty safe if you work with a right mindset, check out test driven development for embedded C book.

Oh dear God. Another person that thinks tests (in the form of TDD) are sufficient. Yes, TDD is helpful in many cases, but as the old saying goes "you can't inspect/test quality into a product".

Anybody that doubts that should first answer the question "how do prove you have developed sufficiently good tests?".
Then they should answer the question "if you have insufficiently good staff, what leads you to believe they will develop sufficiently good tests?".
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 

Offline FreddieChopin

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #131 on: September 16, 2019, 07:24:52 pm »
. Another person that thinks tests (in the form of TDD) are sufficient

Only I don't . For me it's just a helpful tool to get the job done right and somewhat ensure it stays right as the years pass.
If electronic design was just about as anal as Ada programmers are about their code we'd use 0.1% resistors and other grossly overspec'd parts for something as simple as fleshlight or TV remote.
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #132 on: September 16, 2019, 07:39:26 pm »
Ada was a decent idea ruined by government funding and let's be honest, most of us aren't working on life-critical avionics.

ru-in-ed-?!

 :-DD
 

Offline chickenHeadKnob

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #133 on: September 16, 2019, 10:01:41 pm »
Ada was a decent idea ruined by government funding and let's be honest, most of us aren't working on life-critical avionics.

Legacy and tggzzz were being polite by not directly stating that it was US dept of Defence that funded and created the  competing development groups Ironman, tinman ect (or whatever they were called at the time). Those competing groups were in turn mostly or entirely composed of Comp. Sci academics. The result was a predictable design by committee melange. 

I had the experience of being relayed interim reports on ADA development by one of my Professors as he was either directly on one of the committees or closely connected to one. Reports which bored me to tears. The Ironic thing is that this happened while he was teaching me  Algol 68. Now I don't particularly like any imperative language but Algol 68 with its garbage collection and clean declaration syntax always struck me me as being the best of the bunch.
 

Online tggzzz

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #134 on: September 16, 2019, 10:53:55 pm »
. Another person that thinks tests (in the form of TDD) are sufficient

Only I don't . For me it's just a helpful tool to get the job done right and somewhat ensure it stays right as the years pass.

Completely false, thereby demonstrating you really don't understand, and confirming my point.

TDD helps ensure it stays unchanged, correct or incorrect.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 

Online tggzzz

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #135 on: September 16, 2019, 10:55:49 pm »
Ada was a decent idea ruined by government funding and let's be honest, most of us aren't working on life-critical avionics.

Legacy and tggzzz were being polite by not directly stating that it was US dept of Defence that funded and created the  competing development groups Ironman, tinman ect (or whatever they were called at the time). Those competing groups were in turn mostly or entirely composed of Comp. Sci academics. The result was a predictable design by committee melange. 

I had the experience of being relayed interim reports on ADA development by one of my Professors as he was either directly on one of the committees or closely connected to one. Reports which bored me to tears. The Ironic thing is that this happened while he was teaching me  Algol 68. Now I don't particularly like any imperative language but Algol 68 with its garbage collection and clean declaration syntax always struck me me as being the best of the bunch.

Famously Algol is regarded as an improvement on most of its successors :)
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #136 on: September 16, 2019, 11:45:31 pm »
Summing it up:
"Every language after Algol 68 has been a failure, so I'm using Python."
 ;D

Edit: an that's yet another thread on the verge of getting ruined by off-topicism. ::)
It's a thread about an Ada competition, its organization and news about it, for heaven's sake! Not a thread to discuss the merits of Ada or anything else.
Hijacking threads in this way IS the very definition of trolling.
If people want to discuss Ada and the merits of Python or whatever language that tickles their fancy (if nothing else), they can open their own thread, preferably in the Programming section, so that threads don't get hijacked and discussions MAY actually have a chance of being interesting.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2019, 11:59:00 pm by SiliconWizard »
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #137 on: September 17, 2019, 03:55:25 am »
Summing it up:
"Every language after Algol 68 has been a failure, so I'm using Python."
 ;D

Edit: an that's yet another thread on the verge of getting ruined by off-topicism. ::)
It's a thread about an Ada competition, its organization and news about it, for heaven's sake! Not a thread to discuss the merits of Ada or anything else.
Hijacking threads in this way IS the very definition of trolling.
If people want to discuss Ada and the merits of Python or whatever language that tickles their fancy (if nothing else), they can open their own thread, preferably in the Programming section, so that threads don't get hijacked and discussions MAY actually have a chance of being interesting.

A perfect demonstration of the Ada mindset.  Define everything perfectly(by your own ruleset).  If it wasn't in the definition it has no value and doesn't exist.  I apologize for any problems my posts have caused and will sully this thread no more.
 

Offline westfw

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #138 on: September 23, 2019, 09:26:10 am »
Hmm.  A thought WRT Ada:
The development of Ada Compilers ended up being badly timed, with the compilers showing up at about the same time as personal computers.   But Ada was a BIG language, with big compilers, big runtime environments, and big resource requirements.  You couldn't run an Ada compiler on your floppy-base PC, and if you could somehow cross-compile your application on the $$mainframe$$, it wouldn't run very well on the 640k PC, either.
Smaller, simpler languages (BASIC, Forth, C, Pascal) won the day, as well as the hearts and souls of a generation or two of programmers.

A decade or two later, Moore's law had had its way with PCs, and Big Compilers and RTEs were no longer considered much of a problem.  Big Languages (C++, Jave, Python) have re-surfaced with a vengeance, and no one thinks twice about throwing (former) super-computer class processing at compilation, even for "small" final environments.  (C++ for $1 8kB microcontrollers, MicroPython for somewhat bigger $5 chips.)

If Ada had come along later - say at the same time as Java, it might have been more accepted.
If it had been a few years earlier, it might have picked up more popularity prior to the PC revolution, and done better (vendors wrote Fortran for PCs...)
 

Offline DimitriP

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #139 on: September 23, 2019, 09:57:38 am »
Quote
, it wouldn't run very well on the 640k PC, either.
Smaller, simpler languages (BASIC, Forth, C, Pascal) won the day, as well as the hearts and souls of a generation or two of programmers.

A long while back took Pascal, C, Assembly and ADA one after the other.

Using Borland  Pascal and C was really nice.
Using the Microsoft assembler was kinda clunky by comparison but doable.
Then came ADA .. WTF was that? Dropped the class!
   If three 100  Ohm resistors are connected in parallel, and in series with a 200 Ohm resistor, how many resistors do you have? 
 

Online Sal Ammoniac

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #140 on: September 23, 2019, 06:05:43 pm »
I've never used Ada, but I have used VHDL, which is very Ada-like, and am always happy when I can go back to Verilog. Ada/VHDL are just too verbose and pedantic to be pleasant to use on a regular basis.
Complexity is the number-one enemy of high-quality code.
 

Online ebastler

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #141 on: September 23, 2019, 07:24:31 pm »
I always grind my teeth at VHDL‘s verbosity too. But on the other hand, VHDL has caught many errors for me which would probably have slipped through in Verilog, and has hence saved me hours (probably days) of debugging time.

No experience with Ada, and despite the rational argument I just typed, I am not all that tempted to try it...
 

Offline Bassman59

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #142 on: September 25, 2019, 06:15:34 pm »
I've never used Ada, but I have used VHDL, which is very Ada-like, and am always happy when I can go back to Verilog. Ada/VHDL are just too verbose and pedantic to be pleasant to use on a regular basis.

One could say the opposite -- VHDL's verbosity (such as it is) helps the analyzer find your mistakes, rather than with Verilog where the customer finds them.
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: "Make With Ada" Competition
« Reply #143 on: September 25, 2019, 06:29:04 pm »
Discussing the verbosity of a language is usually hopeless. Don't do it. ;D
It's like "I find this car way too red. I would never drive it." What can you say to that?
 


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