16 Jun
2026
16 Jun
'26
8:10 p.m.
On Tue, 2026-06-16 at 21:11 -0500, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote:
For obscure languages APL, LISP, Prolog, ADA, Occam
& Pilot come to
mind. Focal, though widely used on DEC computers seems to have died
with the demise of DEC itself.
When the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn was being planned at JPL,
they were hoping to use NS16032 or NS32032. Sandia kept promising to
deliver a rad-hard version, but never did. Then, out of the blue, DoD
and CIA etc suddenly declassified about a dozen quite good rad-hard
processors. Their reasoning was "everybody knows about these anyway" —
except apparently JPL. The JPL engineers looked at the specs, bought
processors, made computers, and threw them over the wall to the
programmers — who discovered the only programming environment available
was Ada. They were hopping mad because they had their teeth all set to
write all the flight software in C++. Then the Ada compiler started
finding bugs that a C++ compiler would never have caught, and most of
them would be mission-killers. As with most religions, the most
recently converted adherents become the most vocal evangelists.