Ada
Some general thoughts about Ada.
Introduction
This language is not known enough yet, at least not to the majority of us, much to the detriment of many potential users for that matter. Compared to the fashionable languages, Ada is more portable, more readable, allows for higher abstraction levels and has features and functionalities unseen in other languages. Ada also allows a more comfortable experience in system programming and proves itself light enough to be usable on low class 8 bit processors.
Ada is the name of the first programmer to ever exist in humanity. And this first programmer was a woman: Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, born in 1815, daughter of Byron, the great poet, Charles Babbage’s assistant, she wrote programs destined to run on his famous machine.
Ada is an American military norm (MIL-STD-1815) as well as an international civil norm (ISO/IEC 8652), it is the first object oriented language to be standardized at an international level. All Ada compilers must strictly adhere to the standard. There are hundreds of compilers destined to run on that many platforms but all of them will produce a code that runs identically.
Ada is used everywhere security is critical: Airbus (A3xx civil series and A400 military), Alsthom (High speed train), Boeing (777 and 787), EADS (Eurofighter, Ariane, ATV, many spaces probes), STS (line 14 Meteor), NASA (Electric power supply of the International Space Station). The list goes on and on. Everywhere reliability and security must come first, Ada is the language of choice.
Why use Ada
Ada was created because software engineering is a human activity. Humans make mistakes, the Ada compiler is friend to developers. Ada is also friend to project managers for large scale development. An Ada application is written, expanded and maintained very naturally. For these reasons, Ada is also friend to executives. Ada is the language of happy programmers, managers and users.
Because Ada is a comfortable language by it’s expressiveness and a restful language by it’s reliability, humans involved with Ada also reflect the image of their language. The Ada community is a very comfortable community to visit and most meetings are very enlighting. Free libraries are numerous and are usually of a very high quality. Finally, the Ada community is very highly active and by now growing again.
The ending word
When Boeing decided, two decades ago, that all software for the 777 would be exclusively written in Ada, the corporate associates of the constructor made the remark that they were using, for a long time, languages such as C, C++ and assembly language and that they were fully satisfied with them. Boeing simply answered that only firms that could provide Ada software would be considered in contracts offerings. Therefore, the firms converted themselves to Ada.
Today, the development of software for the Boeing 777 nicknamed « The Ada Plane », has been performed and it is essentially thanks to the very big commercial success of this plane that Boeing was able to maintain the revenues created by its civil activities (this text was written well before the tragic engineering failure of the 737 Max, whose design has nothing in common with the 777).
And what do the Boeing partner firms do from now on ? They continue to develop their new software in none other than… Ada, and here’s why:
- They noticed that the length of time to convert developers to Ada is usually rather short. In a week, the developer is comfortable enough to write software in Ada and in less than a month, he feels totally comfortable with the language;
- These firms did their accounting: written in Ada, software costs less, present less anomalies, are ready sooner and are easier to maintain.