And people don't have to all agree on the same things. People can get together to work towards cause X and then individually believe in mutually exclusive causes alpha, beta, gamma.
Queer people aren't causes, they're people. Imagine I worked on the Brave browser, and in my personal time maintained a website aimed at discouraging personal relationships with him. This would probably make me difficult to work with, despite my personal views not impacting the quality of my work. You might say these examples aren't one-to-one, and you're right. My example doesn't actually push any legislation forbidding him from having a relationship with a consenting person, and it costs a hell of a lot less than $1000.
I dunno. Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty reprehensible people sometimes.
I used to live in Bahrain while my wife worked in oil and gas, and a lot of her colleagues had some... pretty different... views from us but we still got along. Hell, the country itself has a pretty significant Sunni / Shia divide, with employees being one or the other and they managed to work with each other just fine.
I think in general people should be able to work with others that they have significant differences in opinion with. Now, in tech, we've been privileged to be in a seller's (of labor) market, where we can exercise some selectivity in where we work, so it's certainly a headwind in hiring if the CEO is undesirable (for whatever reason), but plenty of people still will for the cause or the pay or whatever. You just have to balance whether the hiring problems the CEO may or may not cause are worth whatever else they bring to the table.
That's exactly my point. They are able to do their job despite not believing in their clients, which for public defenders even means trying to let their clients go free, which is a fair bit further than is asked of a tech employee who disagrees with their CEO.
If you were on a hiring committee, and your otherwise-qualified-candidate had a political opinion you objected to in this way, perhaps with a similar donation, would you refuse to hire them?
If it’s about government fiscal policy, probably not. If it’s more along the lines of discriminating against or undermining people’s rights, then yeah I would refuse to hire them.
If you were about to hire a candidate and then found out that they donate regularly to the “Arrest kbelder and deport them to El Salvador” fund, would you hire them?
Ive worked with Catholics and my views on sola scriptura and the authority of the Pope never came up once. Ive worked with Muslims, and it was never an issue. Ive worked with Hindus. Ive worked with Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Nigerians, Brazilians, Kenyans, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Ghanans, Mexicans, and many other nationalities. I have been on many teams and in my companies with a combinatorial explosion of fundamentally incompatible beliefs.
So yes I do expect staff to work under a ceo that is opposed to gay marriage, an idea that I would bet globally has a less than 50% popular support.
Have you donated to anti-Muslim, anti-Christian etc. platforms in a public fashion while working with them? Because you would've found quite quickly how that changes the interactions.
I don't mind working with someone who has incompatible views with me, but I'd be quite unhappy working with someone who was actively working on undermining my rights.
That depends. I have donated to Religious missionary work publicly, that could be seen by an extremist of any other religion who sees this as a zero sum game as anti their religion. But I don't bring this up in work because that is uncouth and not what my job is about, and would expect the same from co-workers. Eich also didn't donate publicly, this was dug up and then foisted upon him. If someone were to dig through records they could find my donations and party affiliations, which is what they did to him. He was being professional, they were the ones that were taking his private views and forcing them into the public sphere.
> taking his private views and forcing them into the public sphere
Donations in an effort to change the law are fundamentally a public action, whether or not the government requires the fact of your donation to be publicly disclosed. Seeking to use the law to hurt people is not a private view.
I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with people that disagree. Why has everything to be black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's not a productive way to think about others.
If there's nothing fundamental about marriage and it's just some weird coliving arrangement, then why ban it for only some groups in the first place? Nothing productive or even rational about it.
Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?
> Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?
The analogous (but with an opposite direction) action would be campaigning to make gay marriage legal. Nobody has a problem with people doing that. The reason people object to Eich's firing is because it is a very clear escalation in the culture war, not because they have strong opinions about gay marriage.
It has to be us vs against us because that's what law is all about -- outlawing certain actions.
It's one thing to believe as you do, it's quite another to push for legislation that would (in your example) deny childless couples societal advantages, whatever that actually means.
If you're not in favor of a-or-b arguments the answer is to allow a and b, eh?
For one, being childless is a choice (mostly, especially since adoption is a possibility). It's indeed OK to have different opinions for what how laws apply differently to people based on their choices. Being gay is not a choice, it is rather similar to race/ethnic background, and it's generally not OK to have laws that treat people differently based on something like that. I'm sure there are more nuances to add, but it seems to me that makes it quite a different situation.
I don't think everyone agrees that being gay is not a choice. There are no outward physical indicators of a person's sexual orientation. It's entirely behavorial and therefore plausibly under the conscious control of the person. Now, I would agree that a person doesn't choose which gender he is attracted to, but it not something than anyone else can see and immediately understand as an inborn characteristic.
Clearly being black, or hispanic, or asian, or white are physical characteristics. Far fewer people would argue that there is any element of choice in that.
In a liberal context, marriage means nothing except for being a symbol of a union between two people. But all rules, obligations and rights that make marriage a meaningful institution are rooted in religion, and are hence not always respected outside of religion.
You could argue that there are laws that only apply to married couples, and that THAT brings meaning to marriage. But:
Firstly, generally speaking, even the most important features of a marriage are not protected by law, most notably: fidelity. So the law is disjoint from what's traditionally considered to be obligations within marriage. That leaves the legal definition at the whims of contemporary polititians. Therefore, law cannot assign the word "marriage" any consistent meaning throughout time.
Secondly, to my limited knowledge, the line between a married couple and two people living together is increasingly getting blurred by laws that apply marriage legal obligations even to non-married couples if they have lived together for long enough. It suggests that law-makers do not consider a ceremony and a "marriage" announcement to be what should really activate these laws, but rather other factors. Although, they seem to acknowledge that an announcement of a marriage implies the factors needed to activate these laws. If that makes sense...
So marriage is inherently a religious institution that in a religious context comes with rules, obligations and rights. Hence why people who take religion seriously will find it offensive that somebody that completely disregards these rules calls themselves married.
The main benefits are tax free gifts between partners and filing jointly, both of which seem very reasonable and wouldn't be of value to single people.
The actual tax breaks most people think about are tied to dependents in your household, not marriage.
And how many Mozilla were fired while the CEO increased her pay to more than $7M per year?
How can staff members feel trust and been seen as equals when they get fired to make place for someone that is already earning 70x their wage. All while tanking the company to new lows.
That's right. To get a bit philosophical, it's interesting to see some people's justifications about how they are right to be intolerant in the ways they want to be, while still believing that they are free-thinking and tolerant. A lot of convoluted arguments are really about keeping one's self-image intact, justifying beliefs that are contradictory but which the person really wants to believe. I think that is a trap that is more dangerous for intelligent people.
For what it's worth, I support and supported gay marriage at the time, but don't think people should be forced out of their job for believing otherwise. Thoughts and words you disagree with should be met with alternative thoughts and words.
If you think adults marrying other adults and adults marrying children are in any way equivalent, as you imply, then yes your thinking is deeply disordered.
That's not what he said or implied, he's merely responding to your argument 'Donating any amount of money to prevent people you don't know from marrying each other'. I think you might have a justifiable argument here, but it's not clear at all to me what it is.
I cannot imagine the mental model you're working with if my observation is not crystal clear despite omitting the word "adults" in my initial post. Both your and Y_Y's responses read as bad faith to me, but it could be extraordinary ignorance.
In either case I have no idea how to make it clearer for you. Good luck.
Yes people can and should have differences of opinion but a line is crossed when you openly campaign to eliminate the differences of opinion by curtailing the freedoms of the people you disagree with.
So pretty much any law that is opposed by someone. Shop lifting shouldn't be legal because there are people who like free stuff. Curltailing the freedom of people who want free stuff improves society by protecting people's property.
Just because people can get together to work towards a cause while believing in mutually exclusive ideals, that doesn't mean it's the most effective way for people to work together. The ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing well is a big difference.
The point was not "whatever the majority wants is therefore good". The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs. That is a pretty unreasonable standard to apply, imo.
Also, come on man. It's in really bad taste to compare stuff to the Holocaust. Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
> The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs.
Standards should be higher for folks with more power. The cashier at the grocery store expressing bigoted beliefs won't harm me much; my boss doing it is more serious.
> Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
I assure you, homophobia has its murder victims. (Including a good number of Holocaust ones.)
Obama opposed gay marriage as well. As did many prominent politicians, left and right.
The swing from opposing it to supporting it was a huge cultural shift, and I'm not sure I've seen anything like that happen so quickly, except maybe during a time of war. It went from being opposed by a strong majority to supported by a strong majority in... maybe 5-8 years? It was pretty impressive, and I think it's a sign that the marketplace of ideas can still function.
It helps a lot that it's really a harmless thing. It's giving people more freedom, not taking any away from anyone, and so as soon as it became clear that it wasn't causing a problem, everybody shrugged and went 'ok'.
I wonder if in hindsight he's embarrassed to have been on the wrong side of history. Imagine spending your time and money fighting inevitable social change. Fighting gay marriage is just a time-shifted fight against women voting or interracial marriage.
Wikipedia also says he's Catholic. From what I understand, the Church's positions on such things have evolved at least somewhat since then. His views could have totally changed or evolved since then (can't find anything publicly myself).
No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly. (I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with his right and decision to keep it a private matter.)
I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.
What I meant is he is a guy who have evolved in the center of the tech revolution in the 90s and 2000s. If he is not horribly bad with money he probably made a lot at least in various investments.
So I would guess $1000 was almost nothing to him. He is not really supporting anything by donating $1000.
I listened to him in a interview once, he really feel like a nice guy.
But then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium, like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?
They originally started with Gecko and switched to Chromium.
"There were a ton of issues using Gecko, starting with (at the time) no CDM (HTML5 DRM module) so no HD video content from the major studios, Netflix, Amazon, etc. -- Firefox had an Adobe deal but it was not transferable or transferred to any other browser that used Gecko -- and running the gamut of paper-cuts to major web incompatibilities especially on mobile, vs. WebKit-lineage engines such as Chromium/Blink."
And he went in on integrating trendy things like Ads that pay crypto and AI integrated into the browser, so it's not like there wouldn't be AI if he were in charge.
Is there a name for the fallacy where you assume the path not taken is much better? Because I agree, this is that. Mozilla’s challenges are foundational, Eich as CEO wouldn’t have made a dramatic difference in outcomes.
It isn't really Yet Another Chromium Fork, they're the company that does most anti-ad research / development. Stuff like Project Sugarcoat[0]. Their adblocking engine is also native and does not depend on Manifest V2, making it work better than any blocker that has to switch to MV3 when Google removes MV2.
And they're the only browser that has a functional alternative for webpage-based ads. Active right now. And you can instead fund pages / creators by buying BAT directly instead of watching private ads.
On top of that, Brave's defaults are much more privacy-protecting than Firefox's, you only get good protection on Firefox if you harden the config by mucking about in about:config.
People love to hate on Brave because they made some weird grey area missteps in the past (injecting affiliate links on crypto sites and pre-installing a deactivated VPN) and they're involved in crypto. But its not like Firefox hasn't made some serious missteps in the past, but somehow Firefox stans have decided to forget about the surreptitiously installed extension for Mr. Robot injected ads (yes really).
If people could be objective for a second they'd see that Brave took over the torch from Firefox and has been carrying it for a long time now.
Not to have him cancelled in the first place. No need to pretend that doing something under the mob pressure is the same as doing something entirely willingly
Far, far more people have protested the positions of power held by (for example) Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. They ignored the cancellation attempts, and they're richer and more influential today than they were a few years ago.
"Cancellation" is a state of being famous enough that your controversial beliefs upset a large, loud number of people. In Eich's case, it threatened to have no effect on his career. He chose to change his career because of it.
Eich expressed his First Amendment rights, and other people expressed theirs in return. Why should either of them give up those rights for fear of offending the other?
This site in general has a massive hate boner for any part of a corporate structure that isn't the engineering department. Sales, admin, marketing, legal, HR, etc... all get flak from the HN community for being irredeemably idiotic wastes of space.
"Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192577
One of my favorite examples of this is when HNers insist that if only an auto-manufacturer would make a simple car with tactile buttons and no screen or creature comforts it would sell like hotcakes.
I very much doubt that the track record of companies fronted by an hands-on engineer is much better. If anything they probably fail faster on average so we never hear about them.
I'm afraid they're delegated to coding nowadays and even open source projects are run like corporations with attached "foundations" parasites where funneling out money on unrelated stuff occurs.
This piece linked is a dry marketing and nothing else, and I don't believe in a single bit this guy is saying or will ever say.
The line about AI being always a choice that user can simply turn it off: I need to go to about:config registry to turn every occurrence of it in Firefox. So there's that.
Yes and he is writing like an MBA/Product Manager (or is it the AI?)
Actually he is most likely a drone. Meaning he is speaking like he believes he is the CEO of a public company talking to the shareholders, so of course he talks about how AI is changing software.
But guess what Mozilla is not a public company, there is no stock to pump and the thing it really miss is its users. Going from 30% to less than 5% market share in 15 years with a good product.
Actually I am pretty sure the users who left just do not want to much AI.
But he is an MBA drone so he is just gonna play the same music as every other MBA drone.
Ford announced the Maverick, it got so much excitement that it sold out and dealerships sold for over MSRP. So in their infinite wisdom they... didn't make more mid range trucks. Ill never understand these guys.
I was interested in this truck when it came out. My in laws purchased one and queued a second one up to have two reliable (new is reliable to them) in their retirement years. The price was good, its a smaller compact truck and very good on utility. The second generation of them - the price went up, and some of the value in what the truck was vanished. Its also years behind on production. Ford doesn't seem to want to sell these.
If Chevy came out with a competitive S10 Electric style truck, I'd consider it as well.
The Mavs have been caught up on orders for a while now. I got one in the spring and pretty much any trim/colour/option package was in stock locally at mildly below msrp.
The idea is that you make more profit selling 50,000 cheap trucks and 50,000 expensive trucks than just 100,000 cheap trucks. When you can fool a largely innumerate populace into 84-month loans with "cheap" monthly payments, overpriced vehicles are the way to go.
All US automakers are doing the same thing. There's gentle up-marketing collusion.
The issue at root is that auto demand is a finite, population-based amount. Automakers are all pretty good at margin and manufacturing cost control.
So that leaves the only independent variable that can influence revenue and profits as {average sold vehicle price}.
New entrants face a scale issue: it's difficult to compete with the larger manufacturers' production costs with orders of magnitude less sales volume.
Which is why you historically only saw state-sponsored new manufacturers break into the market (read: Japan, Korea, China).
Electrification turned some of this on its head, but not completely. GM, Ford, et al. can still build just enough mid-market electrics to spoil others volumes, without attempting to build something really good and cannibalizing their own luxury vehicles.
Price conscious consumers have been out of the "New" car market for a very long time. New cars have a massive premium that never makes sense.
Instead of buying a brand new Geo Metro like you would in the 90s, you just buy a used Corolla or Civic. You end up with a better car and it lasts longer anyway.
That means the majority of the "New" car market has already decided price isn't that important.
Which is why the "average" new car price is $50k and people are signing up for 80 month loans on trucks.
There is this consistent myth by the most radical faction of people in the country. They are only the most radical 5 or 10%, but they seem to believe their anti-nationalist, anti-government, anti-American views are much more widely share than they are. The vast majority of American's view working in the defense industry, espionage, etc as a good thing.
There are ways in which it clearly is a good thing. I don't have my head around how people could oppose CNE operations aimed at counterproliferation, for example. But obviously, it's morally fraught work (fraught, meaning complicated, a minefield, not meaning "damnable") and I don't have the stomach (or, really, the talent) for it.
Theres a spectrum too it. Helping design fighter jets and missiles? Yes that has to be done with the idea that the weapons you are designing for national security can and most likely will be used in such a way that will cause harm. However in espionage or cyber security, those are almost all pure good. You are protecting information or attaining information.
The main myth though is that somehow there is this idea that someone working as a booze allen contractor for the NSA or CIA is going to now be blackballed by everyone out of disgust. Most people will see it as good, and most companies just want talent and dont actually care about what areas people are in.
I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.
If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.
So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.
The fact of the matter is that you read through a lot of these start up blogs on how they scaled X technology to some amazing number like 1000 users a day or whatever. But your average Java Spring app on Postgres is doing some far heavier workloads.
It’s something I recently learned and has informed the way I think about him and his family. Seems others have appreciated the knowledge too.
As a Jew myself, I think the actions of Israel over the past 2 years are clearly ethnic cleansing and I believe anyone who supports that effort should be exposed for doing so.
What's the largest company you've worked for? A lot of big, older companies, are just so messed up that its just not worth it. How do you do this? Well you have to find the specific form, or specific person who does the thing, who is that? no one knows. So that provisioning of a vpn and getting in jira might literally be like a month of work.
I've worked for S&P Global, so pretty large. If you don't have an account that you need, then you need to be tenacious, which of course is super annoying. If you don't have an account on a system you should, it's 100% on you after a while.
I've always strongly disliked this argument of not enough X programmers. If the DoD enforces the requirement for Ada, Universities, job training centers, and companies will follow. People can learn new languages. And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.
I agree. First of all I don't think Ada is a difficult language to learn. Hire C++ programmers and let them learn Ada.
Secondly, when companies say "we can't hire enough X" what they really mean is "X are too expensive". They probably have some strict salary bands and nobody had the power to change them.
In other words there are plenty of expensive good Ada and C++ programmers, but there are only cheap crap C++ programmers.
They need to have very strict security clearance requirements and maintain them throughout the life of the project or their tenure. People don’t realize this isn’t some little embedded app you throw on an ESP32.
You’ll be interviewed, your family, your neighbors, your school teachers, your past bosses, your cousin once removed, your sheriff, your past lovers, and even your old childhood friends. Your life goes under a microscope.
I went through the TS positive vetting process (for signals intelligence, not writing software for fighter jets, but the process is presumably the same).
If I were back on the job market, I’d be demanding a big premium to go through it again. It’s very intrusive, puts significant limitations on where you can go, and adds significant job uncertainty (since your job is now tied to your clearance).
Not to mention embedded software is often half the pay of a startup and defense software often isn't work from home. Forget asking what languages they can hire for. They are relying on the work being interesting to compensate for dramatically less pay and substantially less pleasant working conditions. Factor in some portion of the workforce has ethical concerns working in the sector and you can see they will get three sorts of employees. Those who couldn't get a job elsewhere, those who want something cool on their resume, and those who love the domain. And they will lose the middle category right around the time they become productive members of the team because it was always just a stepping stone.
Yes but like a certification, that clearance is yours, not the companies. You take it with you. It lasts a good while. There are plenty of government companies that would love you if you had one. Northrop, Lockheed, Boeing, etc.
An Engineering degree and a TS is basically a guaranteed job. They might not be the flashiest FAANG jobs, but it is job security. In this downturn where people talk about being unable to find jobs for years in big cities, I look around my local area and Lockheed, BAE, Booze Allen, etc they have openings.
My issue is you end up dealing with dopes who don't want to learn, just want to milk the money and the job security, and actively fight you when you try to make things better. Institutionalized.
While getting lunch at an Amazon tech day a couple of years ago, I overheard somebody talking about how easy it was to place somebody with a clearance and AWS certifications. Now, this was Washington, DC, but I doubt it's the only area where that's true.
And yet my experience looking at the deluge of clearance-required dev jobs from defense startups in the past couple of years is that there is absolutely no premium at all for clearance-required positions.
I was once interviewed by the FBI due to a buddy applying for security clearance. One thing they asked was, "have you every known XXX to drink excessively", to which I replied "we were fraternity brothers together, so while we did often drink a lot, it needs to be viewed in context",
Why require that companies use a specific programming language instead of requiring that the end product is good?
> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.
What is the evidence for this? Companies selling Ada products would almost certainly agree, since they have a horse in the race. Ada does not automatically lead to better, more robust, safer or fully correct software.
Your line of argument is dangerous and dishonest, as real life regrettably shows.[0]
> The failure has become known as one of the most infamous and expensive software bugs in history.[2] The failure resulted in a loss of more than US$370 million.[3]
> The launch failure brought the high risks associated with complex computing systems to the attention of the general public, politicians, and executives, resulting in increased support for research on ensuring the reliability of safety-critical systems. The subsequent automated analysis of the Ariane code (written in Ada) was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation.[9]
Ada and especially Spark makes it a whole lot easier to produce correct software.
That doesn't mean it automatically leads to better software.
The programming language is just a small piece of the puzzle. But an important one.
> Ada and especially Spark makes it a whole lot easier to produce correct software.
Relative to what? There are formal verification tools for other languages. I have heard Ada/SPARK is good, but I do not know the veracity of that. And Ada companies promoting Ada have horses in the race.
And Ada didn't prevent the Ada code in Ariane 5 from being a disaster.
> The programming language is just a small piece of the puzzle. But an important one.
100% true, but the parent of the original post that he agreed with said:
> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.
What is the proof for that, especially considering events like Ariane 5?
And Ada arguably has technical and non-technical drawbacks relative to many other languages.
When I tried Ada some weeks ago for a tiny example, I found it cumbersome in some ways. Is the syntax worse and more verbose than even C++? Maybe that is just a learning thing, though. Even with a mandate, Ada did not catch on.
>What is the proof for that, especially considering events like Ariane 5?
Ariane 5 is a nice anti-ada catchphrase, but ada is probably the most used language for war machines in the United States.
now the argument can be whether or not the US military is superior to X; but the fact that the largest military in the world is filled to the brim with warmachines running ada code is testament itself to the effectiveness of the language/dod/grant structure around the language.
would it be better off in c++? I don't know about that one way or the other , but it's silly pretend ada isn't successful.
But Ada had for a number of years a mandate to require its usage [0]. That should have been an extreme competitive advantage. And even then, C++ is still used these days for some US military projects, like F-35. Though I don't know whether the F-35 is successful or not, if it is not, that could be an argument against C++.
Ada is almost non-existent outside its niche.
The main companies arguing for Ada appear to be the ones selling Ada services, meaning they have a horse in the race.
I barely have any experience at all with Ada. My main impression is that it, like C++, is very old.
> The Defense Department`s chief of computers, Emmett Paige Jr., is recommending a rescission of the DOD`s mandate to use the Ada programming language for real-time, mission-critical weapons and information systems.
Poking around it looks like ada is actually the minority now. Everything current is either transitioning to c++ or started that way. The really old but still used stuff is often written in weird languages like jovial or in assembly.
> Ada didn't prevent the Ada code in Ariane 5 from being a disaster
That's a weak argument to say that Ada could not lead to a better place in term of software.
It's like saying that it's not safer to cross at a crosswalk because you know someone who died while crossing on one.
(But I guess that's fair for you to say that, as the argument should probably be made by the people that say that Ada would be better, and because they made a claim without evidences, you can counterclaim without any evidence :-) )
There are no programming language that can prevent a software for working correctly outside of the domain for which the software is written, which was the case for Ariane 501. Any language that would have been used to write the same software for Ariane 4 may have led to the same exact error. Ariane 501 failure is a system engineering problem here, not a software problem (even if in the end, the almost last piece in the chain of event is a software problem)
> There are formal verification tools for other languages.
None that are actually used.
I have no horse in this race and I have never actually written any Ada, but it seems pretty clear to me that it would produce more correct code on average.
Also asking for evidence is a red herring. Where's the evidence that Rust code is more likely to be correct than Perl? There isn't any. It's too difficult to collect that evidence. Yet it's obviously true.
Plenty of things are pretty obviously true but collecting scientific evidence of them is completely infeasible. Are code comments helpful at all? No evidence. Are regexes error-prone and hard to read? No evidence. Are autoformatters helpful? No evidence.
I agree that the "there aren't enough programmers for language X" argument is generally flawed. Acceptable cases would be niches like maintenance of seriously legacy or dying platforms. COBOL anyone?
But, not because I think schools and colleges would jump at the opportunity and start training the next batch of students in said language just because some government department or a bunch of large corporations supported and/or mandated it. Mostly because that hasn't actually panned out in reality for as long as I can remember. Trust me, I _wish_ schools and colleges were that proactive or even in touch with with the industry needs, but... (shrug!)
Like I said, I still think the original argument is flawed, at least in the general case, because any good organization shouldn't be hiring "language X" programmers, they should be hiring good programmers who show the ability to transfer their problem solving skills across the panopticon of languages out there. Investing in getting a _good_ programmer upskilled on a new language is not as expensive as most organizations make it out to be.
Now, if you go and pick some _really obscure_ (read "screwed up") programming language, there's not much out there that can help you either way, so... (shrug!)
Since when was expense a problem for defense spending?
In the video, the narrator also claims that Ada compilers were expensive and thus students were dissuaded from trying it out. However, in researching this comment I founds that the Gnat project has been around since the early 90s. Maybe it wasn't complete enough until much later and maybe potential students of the time weren't using GNU?
The GNAT project started in 1992 when the United States Air Force awarded New
York University (NYU) a contract to build a free compiler for Ada to help
with the Ada 9X standardization process. The 3-million-dollar contract
required the use of the GNU GPL for all development, and assigned the
copyright to the Free Software Foundation.
Take a look at job adds for major defense contractors in jurisdictions that require salary disclosure. Wherever all that defense money is going, it's not engineering salaries. I'm a non-DoD government contractor and even I scoff at the salary ranges that Boeing/Lockheed/Northrup post, which often feature an upper bound substantially lower than my current salary while the job requires an invasive security clearance (my current job doesn't). And my compensation pales in comparison to what the top tech companies pay.
The DOD could easily have organized Ada hackathons with a lot of prize money to "make Ada cool" if they had chosen to in order to get the language out of the limelight. They could also have funded developing a free, open source toolchain.
Ironically I remember one of the complaints was it took a long time for the compilers to stabilize. They were such complex beasts with a small userbase so you had smallish companies trying to develop a tremendously complex compiler for a small crowd of government contractors, a perfect recipe for expensive software.
I think maybe they were just a little ahead of their time on getting a good open source compiler. The Rust project shows that it is possible now, but back in the 80s and 90s with only the very early forms of the Internet I don't think the world was ready.
Given how much memory and CPU time is burned compiling Rust projects I'm guessing it is pretty complex.
I'm not deep enough into the Rust ecosystem to have solid opinions on the rest of that, but I know from the specification alone that it has a lot of work to do every time you execute rustc. I would hope that the strict implementation would reduce the number of edge cases the compiler has to deal with, but the sheer volume of the specification works against efforts to simplify.
> They could also have funded developing a free, open source toolchain.
If the actual purpose of the Ada mandate was cartel-making for companies selling Ada products, that would have been counter-productive to their goals.
Not that compiler vendors making money is a bad thing, compiler development needs to be funded somehow. Funding for language development is also a topic. There was a presentation by the maker of Elm about how programming language development is funded [0].
Since on paper government cares about cost efficiency and you have to consider that in your lobbying materials.
Also it enables getting cheaper programmers who where possible might be isolated from the actual TS materiel to develop on the cheap so that the profit margin is bigger.
It gets worse outside of the flight side JSF software - or so it looks like from GAO reports. You don't turn around a culture of shittiness that fast, and I've seen earlier code in the same area (but not for JSF) by L-M... and well, it was among the worst code I've seen. Including failing even basic requirement of running on a specific version of a browser at minimum.
No they won't. DoD is small compared to the rest of the software market. You get better quality and lower cost with COTS than with custom solutions, unless you spend a crapton. The labor market for software's no different.
Everyone likes to crap on C++ because it's (a) popular and (b) tries to make everyone happy with a ton of different paradigms built-in. But you can program nearly any system with it more scalably than anything else.
In my experience people criticize C++ for its safety problems. Safety is more important in certain areas than in others. I’m not convinced that you get better quality with C++ than with Ada
Go was built because C++ does not scale. Anybody that's ever used a source based distro knows that if you're installing/building a large C++ codebase, better forget your PC for the day because you will not be using it. Rust also applies here, but at least multiplatform support is easier, so I don't fault it for slow build times
Go was created because Rob Pike hates C++, notice Plan 9 and Inferno don't have C++ compilers, even though C++ was born on UNIX at Bell Labs.
As for compilation times, yes that is an issue, they could have switched to Java as other Google departments were doing, with some JNI if needed.
As sidenote, Kubernetes was started in Java and only switching to Go after some Go folks joined the team and advocated for the rewrite, see related FOSDEM talk.
A lot of people hate C++, that doesn't grant you the ability to make a language, however very few have the opportunity to create a new language out of free time provided by said language taking too long to compile.
I do not know why they did not go with java, I imagine building a java competitor (limbo) and then being forced to use it is kind of demeaning. but again, this would all be conjecture.
C/C++ basically demand that codebases be large. And we hear all the time about software troubles written in these languages. Finding reports of this are almost endless.
I think people who write complex applications in more sane languages end up not having to write millions of lines of code that no one actually understands. The sane languages are more concise and don't require massive hurdles to try and bake in saftey into the codebase. Safety is baked into the language itself.
The exact opposite of what you suggest already happened: Ada was mandated and then the mandate was revoked.
It’s generally a bad idea to be the only customer of a specific product, because it increases costs.
> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++
What’s the problem with the F35 and combat readiness? Many EU countries are falling over each-other to buy it.
Maybe the EU shouldn’t have transformed themselves into US vassals then.
Nobody respects weakness, not even an ally. Ironically showing a spine and decoupling from the US on some topics would have hurt more short term, but would have been healthier in the long term.
>Maybe the EU shouldn’t have transformed themselves into US vassals then.
I share the same opinion. If you're (on paper) the biggest economic block in the world, but you can be so easily bullied, then you've already failed >20 years ago.
But I don't think it was bullying, but the other way around. EU countries were just buying favoritism for US military protection, because it was still way cheaper than ripping the bandaid and building its own domestic military industry of similar power and scale.
Most defense spending uses the same motivation. You're not seeking to buying the best or cheapest hardware, you seek to buy powerful friends.
Much of existing European F-35 fleet predates Trump's first term. In fact now quite the opposite happens: other options being eyed from reliable partners, even if technically inferior.
The pilots might have reassessed after Pakistan seemed to have shot three of them down from over 200km range. Intel failure blamed but likely many factors of which some presumably may be attributed to the planes.
I poorly worded it. Rafales allegedly shot down. After that happened, perhaps the pilots wanting them over F35s might have a different opinion. F35s might be harder to get a lock on at that distance and might have better situational awareness capabilities.
> What’s the problem with the F35 and combat readiness?
For example, the UK would like to use its own air-to-ground missile (the spear missile) with its own F-35 jets, but it's held back by Lockheed Martin's Block 4 software update delays.
Why require that companies use a specific programming language instead of requiring that the end product is good?
> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.
What is the evidence for this? Companies selling Ada products would almost certainly agree, since they have a horse in the race. Ada does not automatically lead to better, more robust, safer or fully correct software.
Your line of argument is dangerous and dishonest, as real life regrettably shows.[0]
> The failure has become known as one of the most infamous and expensive software bugs in history.[2] The failure resulted in a loss of more than US$370 million.[3]
> The launch failure brought the high risks associated with complex computing systems to the attention of the general public, politicians, and executives, resulting in increased support for research on ensuring the reliability of safety-critical systems. The subsequent automated analysis of the Ariane code (written in Ada) was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation.[9]
> Why require that companies use a specific programming language instead of requiring that the end product is good?
I can think of two reasons. First, achieving the same level of correctness could be cheaper using a better language. And second, you have to assume that your testing is not 100% correct and complete either. I think starting from a better baseline can only be helpful.
That said, I have never used formal verification tools for C or C++. Maybe they make up for the deficiencies of the language.
How do you define a better programming language, how do you judge whether one programming language is better than another, and how do you prevent corruption and cartels from taking over?
If Ada was "better" than C++, why did Ada not perform much better than C++, both in regards to safety and correctness (Ariane 5), and commercially regarding its niche and also generally? Lots of companies out there could have gotten a great competitive edge with a "better" programming language. Why did the free market not pick Ada?
You could then argue that C++ had free compilers, but that should have been counter-weighed somewhat by the Ada mandate. Why did businesses not pick up Ada?
Rust is much more popular than Ada, at least outside Ada's niche. Some of that is organic, for instance arguably due to Rust's nice pattern matching and modules and crates. And some of that is inorganic, like how Rust evangelists through force, threats[0], harassment[1] and organized and paid media spam force Rust.
I also tried Ada some time ago, trying to write a tiny example, and it seemed worse than C++ in some regards. Though I only spent a few hours or so on it.
A language that makes avoiding certain important classes of defects easier and more productive.
>how do you judge whether one programming language is better than another
Analytically, i.e. by explaining and proving how these classes of bugs can be avoided.
I don't find empirical studies on this subject particularly useful. There are too many moving parts in software projects. The quality of the team and its working environment probably dominates everything else. And these studies rarely take productivity and cost into consideration.
> IMO I think we are going to see Paramount, STARZ and AMC bought up soon.
You do know that David Ellison (Larry Ellison's son), through his Skydance Media, acquired Paramount Global (including its parent, National Amusements) in a merger completed in August 2025.
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