What we need are software engineers who understand how to build complex systems. By the way Java has almost no presence in such systems. At least as of a few months ago, there was not a single line of safety-critical Java flying in commercial or military aircraft.
Such a breadth of options! Surely if we teach students how to create avionics systems for commercial aircraft or military aircraft, they will never want for jobs!
If he were to point out that using any single language as a vehicle for computer science is bad because it ties the knowledge to APIs rather than underlying concepts, that would be one thing. If he were to further point out that a lot of complex systems nowadays aren't written in a single language, and that being able to quickly acquire competence in new technologies is possibly the most valuable skill a university can give to its students, that would lend even more weight to his argument.
But no, he's just whining that no one thinks Ada is relevant anymore. I'm sure he's having trouble finding fresh college grads who share his passion for safety-critical avionics systems, but I really can't muster up that much sympathy.
A long long long time ago (my first out of uni job) I used to do machine control systems (thankfully, not for aircraft) but there were often safety issues (so you didn't burn/crush/soak people with acid etc). We never used a turing complete programming language, as it was seen as too risky, was always something primitive like ladder logic (which seemed intuitively easy to reason over and forced simplicity and fail safe behaviour).
I am not sure what has changed, but I wouldn't want to be doing stuff that different now with a general purpose programming language (be that Ada, Java or for reasons I would never understand, C).
I dunno, you deal with the risk of standing on thin air no matter what you use, unless you've designed your device from the silicon up.
There's not a strong argument to be made for using Java in an industrial setting, but I'm not clear that a finite-state machine that compiled down to JVM bytecodes would be inherently less safe than anything else.
Ada doesn't guarantee the correctness of your program, and C certainly doesn't. This interview reads more like an inarticulate complaint about how things keep changing than a real argument against trends in education.
Minor nit-pick. I work around (but not with) ada code, and a common pattern is that if you can get your ada code to compile; it's pretty likely that it's safe.
If you're just saying Ada doesn't guarantee that the program does what you really need... no language can do that.
C is the 2nd most unsafe language I've worked with, asm being the first.
Such a breadth of options! Surely if we teach students how to create avionics systems for commercial aircraft or military aircraft, they will never want for jobs!
If he were to point out that using any single language as a vehicle for computer science is bad because it ties the knowledge to APIs rather than underlying concepts, that would be one thing. If he were to further point out that a lot of complex systems nowadays aren't written in a single language, and that being able to quickly acquire competence in new technologies is possibly the most valuable skill a university can give to its students, that would lend even more weight to his argument.
But no, he's just whining that no one thinks Ada is relevant anymore. I'm sure he's having trouble finding fresh college grads who share his passion for safety-critical avionics systems, but I really can't muster up that much sympathy.