alt Hacker NewsI remember learning ADA at uni in the 90s and not loving it because of the syntax and it being slow to work with. I also remember the Arianne 5 rocket crash in the late 90s being blamed for a software bug, and the software being written in ADA. Now i understand that it was not a pure software issue, but still, all that safety did not prevent the major disaster that it was
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pyjarrett • today at 2:11 PM
Ariane 5 became one of the most reliable rockets ever made and was used to launch the JWST.
The Arianne 5 crash was caused by re-using a module from the Arianne 4 in the new rocket without testing. Management declared the module to be "proven" but it was only designed and proven within the flight envelope of the Arianne 4.
The C people tried to blame the crash on Ada's use of exceptions. At the time, exceptions were controversial. The actual crash came after an exception was fired and the C folks insisted that C would have just ignored the error state and carried on. Except that the exception was actually the software manifestation of a hardware signal that would have crashed a C program as well.
Ada had a lot of haters, mainly because it was imposed top-down in a lot of organizations. But also because there was a lot of money behind C and other technologies. C++ was vaporware at the time and was able to promise to be a better version of everything Ada was (just you wait!).
Personally Ada was the coolest language I've ever learned and I still love playing with it.