Post #1650308

2026-04-17 12:01 UTC

@bsdphk Well that's thoroughly depressing. All this time, we could have had nice things, but because modern language designers ignored Ada, our industry is still full of cowboys stuck in the wild west.

Replies (2)

@6d03@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-17 14:51

@whyrl @bsdphk Maybe some people like being cowboys 🤷

Open ##1650310
@pfriedma@pfedi.pfriedma.org 2026-04-17 17:06

@whyrl Except, of course, the probably most famous example in the Arien 5 (flight v88). Although the root cause was re-use of an inappropriate subroutine and improper exception handling (the 5 had more thrust than the 4 resulting in an overflow), ADAs behavior in debug output contributed. The specific module exception was not handled, allowing the exception to propagate up to the default handler, which outputted debugging data, which was interpreted as control data to the engine gimbles causing it to veer highly off course. That being said, the use of ADA facilitated the post-mortum analysis allowing us to know with pretty high certainty that this is what happened. @bsdphk

Open ##1650311