alt Hacker NewsI've always strongly disliked this argument of not enough X programmers. If the DoD enforces the requirement for Ada, Universities, job training centers, and companies will follow. People can learn new languages. And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.
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I agree that the "there aren't enough programmers for language X" argument is generally flawed. Acceptable cases would be niches like maintenance of seriously legacy or dying platforms. COBOL anyone?
But, not because I think schools and colleges would jump at the opportunity and start training the next batch of students in said language just because some government department or a bunch of large corporations supported and/or mandated it. Mostly because that hasn't actually panned out in reality for as long as I can remember. Trust me, I _wish_ schools and colleges were that proactive or even in touch with with the industry needs, but... (shrug!)
Like I said, I still think the original argument is flawed, at least in the general case, because any good organization shouldn't be hiring "language X" programmers, they should be hiring good programmers who show the ability to transfer their problem solving skills across the panopticon of languages out there. Investing in getting a _good_ programmer upskilled on a new language is not as expensive as most organizations make it out to be.
Now, if you go and pick some _really obscure_ (read "screwed up") programming language, there's not much out there that can help you either way, so... (shrug!)
> 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).
No they won't. DoD is small compared to the rest of the software market. You get better quality and lower cost with COTS than with custom solutions, unless you spend a crap ton. The labor market for software's no different.
Everyone likes to crap on C++ because it's (a) popular and (b) tries to make everyone happy with a ton of different paradigms built-in. But you can program nearly any system with it more scalably than anything else.
The exact opposite of what you suggest already happened: Ada was mandated and then the mandate was revoked. It’s generally a bad idea to be the only customer of a specific product, because it increases costs.
> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++
What’s the problem with the F35 and combat readiness? Many EU countries are falling over each-other to buy it.
I’ve learned most languages on the job: c#, php, golang, JavaScript, …
I know others who learned ADA on the job.
It’s not too terrible.
Why require that companies use a specific programming language instead of requiring that the end product is good?
> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.
What is the evidence for this? Companies selling Ada products would almost certainly agree, since they have a horse in the race. Ada does not automatically lead to better, more robust, safer or fully correct software.
Your line of argument is dangerous and dishonest, as real life regrettably shows.[0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88
> The failure has become known as one of the most infamous and expensive software bugs in history.[2] The failure resulted in a loss of more than US$370 million.[3]
> The launch failure brought the high risks associated with complex computing systems to the attention of the general public, politicians, and executives, resulting in increased support for research on ensuring the reliability of safety-critical systems. The subsequent automated analysis of the Ariane code (written in Ada) was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation.[9]
I agree. First of all I don't think Ada is a difficult language to learn. Hire C++ programmers and let them learn Ada.
Secondly, when companies say "we can't hire enough X" what they really mean is "X are too expensive". They probably have some strict salary bands and nobody had the power to change them.
In other words there are plenty of expensive good Ada and C++ programmers, but there are only cheap crap C++ programmers.