Comments on Kickin' the Darkness: Defensive programming: Fortran, Ada, C++, Java, ??...

your creation will be useful for many generation t...

2012-02-21T04:57:08.446-06:00

your creation will be useful for many generation to come. great job

Ada is the best programming language there is, han...

2012-02-05T17:38:06.972-06:00

Ada is the best programming language there is, hands down.

I say we should promote all world governments to u...

2011-07-06T15:21:02.865-05:00

I say we should promote all world governments to use c and c++ for their weapons. Then if they start a world war 3 everything will fail and there will be world peace by default.

I left the defense industry not because of the com...

2010-12-20T12:36:56.913-06:00

I left the defense industry not because of the complaints you express, I just couldn't sell my soul to the devil anymore knowing little children are dying from my work.

@anonymous: I have no argument with anything you&#...

2010-12-20T12:18:49.987-06:00

@anonymous: I have no argument with anything you're saying about Haskell.

My point in the post is simply observational; unless Haskell becomes widely used in the commercial marketplace, it is unlikely to become the language of choice for defense systems.

But keep up the advocacy, it won't hurt :-)

Haskell can be proven correct, has no side-effects...

2010-12-20T09:23:53.464-06:00

Haskell can be proven correct, has no side-effects (such as pointer errors to debug), and allows for very succinct expression. The less code, the fewer opportunities for error.

Galois works for the NSA on cryptographic products using Haskell for this very reason. Look up cryptol.

@nixar, I've looked at Erlang and I think it&#...

2010-12-20T07:53:58.573-06:00

@nixar, I've looked at Erlang and I think it's a really neat language, and I readily agree it has a good solid foundation.

But until is becomes a leading mainstream language, don't expect the DOD to use it on any significant program.

You may be right that the day of "one language fits all" is behind us. The defense industry, though, is *very* conservative when it comes to software technology, my experience indicates that program managers are isolated from current technology practices and trends, and are highly skeptical of bringing "untried technology" (untried by the defense industry--it's a chicken-and-egg problem) into a multi-million dollar project for which they're on the hook.

I think DSLs have a lot of potential, and they may be where the industry is going (heh :-), but adopting that practice is not as easy and clean (and low-risk) as settling on The New Programming Language For All Program Starts.

@anonymous: Oh I know there's programming lang...

2010-12-20T07:45:45.291-06:00

@anonymous: Oh I know there's programming language oriented R&D efforts going on, and more power to them.

My area of concern is with large programs, say upwards of $100 million expenditures, with a significant software component. There's no sign that programs like that are ever going to come anywhere near a non-mainstream programming language again.

Also, I disagree with your contention that the defense industry works "mostly in secret". Developing a classified program rarely means that everything about that program, including what programming language it is being implemented in, is secret. I've worked the gamut from unclassified to black, and while the defense industry is in its own cocoon and has its idiosyncrasies, a decent amount of into is available for most programs via award notices, journals, conferences, seminars, etc.

I think you and I may be on the same page as I rec...

2010-12-20T07:42:11.579-06:00

I think you and I may be on the same page as I recently started work on a new language designed to make creating software safer. It's very conceptual and I'm not really expecting it to take off, however I just find it interesting that what you're describing and what I'm doing as a small side-project are similar.

What about functional languages? They have existed...

2010-12-20T05:34:32.655-06:00

What about functional languages? They have existed for decades in academia, but they are just now gaining widespread acceptance in various industries.

You mention Erlang briefly; the reason why it's getting a tremendous amount of interest is because it answers beautifully two concerns of growing importance: distributed/multithreaded code (which it treats basically as the same thing), and resilience.

Erlang is not statically typed so it's probably missing on interesting capabilities. There are plenty of other languages that do, though; OCaml, Haskell, F#, Scala and so on. In any case Erlang fills an important niche. It makes implementing tools such as CouchDB or RabbitMQ much easier. CouchDB then uses JavaScript as its glue language. What I'm getting at is that the days of "one language fits all" are gone, and it's a good thing. These days DSL are all the rage, for good reason: they allow implementing the business logic clearly and with as little dependency on the technical side of things as possible.

I have work in the defense industry since '94;...

2010-12-19T18:36:55.439-06:00

I have work in the defense industry since '94; so, you have a few years on me. That said, I know for a fact that new languages are currently being investigated and funded by the defense industry. For example, Plaid is a 'safer' language from CMU that gets a portion of its funding from DARPA. My company, who happens to be a large defense corporation, spends a good amount of research funds on static analysis tools so that we may get the most out of the languages already in use. The point, nobody in this industry could know so much as to make blanket statements about an industry that works mostly in secret. The left hand most certainly does not know what the right hand is doing.

Well, it's only anecdotal evidence, but I can ...

2010-12-04T18:01:35.611-06:00

Well, it's only anecdotal evidence, but I can testify that C (not ++) is very much alive and kicking in the industry. As in, a mission-critical system for a large automobile manufacturer I happen to work on. Sure, we use Java for the front-end, but the backbone is still plain old C (with a little help from Perl and PROLOG).
What is mostly talked about is NOT necessarily what is mostly being used, I guess.

Interesting. Is there a place between conventional...

2010-12-04T15:04:32.073-06:00

Interesting. Is there a place between conventional commercial software development and defense ? Utilities sector maybe ? Airline industry ?

There's a difference between internet chatter on languages and what is getting used. TIOBE still has Java, C and C++ at the top with C# and Python as the up and coming.

But maybe there's more room for niche languages or at least not moving away from languages because they are old. If the innovation has shifted to a different focus (internet, scalability etc) then perhaps the current stuff just isn't broken.