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My thought exactly. Warning! Warning! NullPointerException!

No, that's a contract I do not want.




I remember reading somewhere that these guys get all the time they want to program these systems, and the environment is very relaxed - I suppose for this very reason.



Write one line of code everyday, make sure it's bug free.

I wouldn't be surprised if they used functional programming and avoiding object orientated programming.


I left the defence industry eight years ago now, but back then (and based on that job posting below it looks like it's possibly still going on), it was a weird combination of ADA, C++ (sometimes C instead) and Java. In the late 90s, there was a big push in both the US and the UK defence industries to start using off-the-shelf software more, which meant moving to C++ from ADA.

But you'd sometimes have weird systems of ADA being used for the "safety-critical" stuff, which interfaced via CORBA with C++ code controlling it (as a bigger system), and would then sometimes be exposed to the user again via CORBA in Java UI code! (never saw this (Java) on aircraft thankfully, only ships)

A certain UK system also had code for controlling the HUD in ADA, but the main flight control system in C++, again via CORBA interfaces..

This wasn't always the case - some Solaris stuff on submarines was all C++ (with Sun's compiler), but it was frightening the complexity of it.


Why wouldn't they be using Ada? That's exactly what is was developed for.[1]

Does anybody know if Ada is still in use for writing new applications?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28programming_language%29



You can take it a step further and use SPARK:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_%28programming_language%2...


Excellent. I wasn't aware of SPARK.

It could have been useful for Toyota, rather than the ad-hoc mess they wound up with controlling their cars. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905718


Boeing for one still uses a lot of Ada for critical flight systems. The 787 flight control software for one.




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