alt Hacker NewsSince 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.
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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.
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.
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.