[SystemSafety] A Common Programming Language for the Department of Defense

Steve Tockey Steve.Tockey at construx.com
Mon May 1 19:57:03 CEST 2017


It’s interesting to me that most people even think that the problems outlined in Section A.1. could ever be solved by a programming language (IMHO):

*) Responsiveness—this is rooted in crappy requirements and uninformed, amateur design practices (e.g., lack of application of fundamental design principles)
*) Reliability—this is caused by not paying attention to code semantics (e.g., lack of design-by-contract)
*) Cost—my data shows that about 60% of the cost of a typical software project is reworking mistakes made earlier (caused by crappy requirements and design and inattention to up-front quality)
*) Modifiability—again, lack of application of fundamental design principles
*) Timeliness—again, 60% rework caused by crappy requirements and design drive most of this
*) Transferability—we have to finally admit that code is inherently un-reusable. Nearly 70 years and we still haven’t solved it? It’s time to look for alternate solutions. . .
*) Efficiency—this will always and forever be a problem. Moore’s Law helps on the supply side, but the customers continue to demand more complex applications that they would not have even dreamt of 10 years ago. Demand for high performance will always outstrip supply

These are not problems that were ever caused by one programming language vs. another. With the exception of the last one, these have always been—and will always be—methodological issues (HOW you do requirements work, HOW you do design work, HOW you qualify people to be doing work in these areas in the first place, . . .). Until we fundamentally re-think HOW we should develop software in the first place, none of these problems would ever be solved. Thinking they can be solved by one magic programming language is pretty darned naïve.


— steve



From: systemsafety <systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de<mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>> on behalf of Les Chambers <les at chambers.com.au<mailto:les at chambers.com.au>>
Date: Monday, May 1, 2017 at 4:21 AM
To: Haim Kuper <h3k at 012.net.il<mailto:h3k at 012.net.il>>
Cc: "systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de<mailto:systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>" <systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de<mailto:systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>>
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] A Common Programming Language for the Department of Defense

Interesting that 40 years later we still have the same problems called out in
Section A.1. The DoD software problem
At least we're doing a little better with transferability, with the use of libraries and various frameworks.
Their seems to be no end to the technology churn though.
Les

On 1 May 2017, at 4:48 pm, Haim Kuper <h3k at 012.net.il<mailto:h3k at 012.net.il>> wrote:


IMHO this is exactly what Derek is looking for.

http://www1.adacore.com/~brosgol/Fisher-P-1191.pdf

Kuper

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of Ben Brosgol
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2017 8:44 PM
To: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de<mailto:systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] A Common Programming Language for the Department of Defense

One of my colleagues at IDA sent me a pdf (7.5MB):

http://www1.adacore.com/~brosgol/Fisher-P-1191.pdf

The author, Dave Fisher, was also the principal author of the various requirements documents (Strawman etc) that eventually led to the design of the Ada language.  I was the head of the Red language team during the design competition; those were interesting times :-)

On 4/27/2017 12:47 PM, Derek M Jones wrote:

> All,

>

> Following a suggestion by James Inge I posted a request:

>> Tryhttp://www.dtic.mil/dtic/contactus/askaLibrarian.html

>

> and just received a reply :-)

>

> "It appears that we do not currently have a digital copy of this

> report available. Our current estimate is 4-6 weeks for the document

> to be retrieved from our archives, scanned and posted on the public

> site (http://www.dtic.mil), although it may appear sooner. Please

> check the DTIC Public Collection (http://www.dtic.mil) for your report

> in about 30 days and recheck weekly thereafter."

>

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