[J3] [EXTERNAL] [BULK] Re: Niklaus Wirth

[Van Snyder]

On Mon, 2024-01-08 at 13:54 +0000, Holcomb, Katherine A (kah3f) via J3
wrote:
I think pressure from the national labs (in the US) has also been a significant factor, since they hire CS graduates to do the programming “correctly.”  Those programmers just want to use C++ because reasons. 

When the Cassini Saturn-orbiter mission was being planned at JPL, they
had planned to use a rad-hard version of the National Semiconductor
16032. Sandia kept promising and not delivering. They despaired that
they might need to use dozens of the same ATMAC chips that had been
used in Voyager -- 12 bit CPU, 4k memory.... Then the CIA (or somebody)
decided "everybody knows about all of our rad-hard processors" (except
JPL apparently) so they published a list. The JPL engineers looked
through the specs and selected one. They bought some chips and made
some prototype flight computers. They threw them over the wall to the
software teams, who discovered that the only available programming
environment was Ada. The software developers were hopping mad because
they had had their teeth all set to write all the flight software in
C++. Then they noticed that the compiler was exposing errors that no
C++ compiler could have noticed, and would have been quite difficult to
find at run time -- in orbit around Saturn. Some of them would have
resulted in mission failures.

As in most religions, the most recently converted become the most
evangelical adherents.

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