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.

A better argument would have been based on statistics. But that might both be difficult to do, and statistics can also be very easy to manipulate and difficult to handle correctly.

I think companies should be free to choose any viable option, and then have requirements that the process and end product is good. Mandating Ada or other programming languages, doesn't seem like it would have prevented Ariane 5, and probably wouldn't improve safety, security or correctness, instead just open the door for limiting competition and cartels and false sense of security. I believe that one should never delegate responsibility to the programming language, more that programmers, organizations and companies are responsible for which languages they choose and how they use them (for instance using a formally verified subset). On the other hand, having standards and qualifications like ISO 26262 and ASIL-D, like what Ferrocene is trying to do with their products for Rust, is fine, I believe. Even though, specifically, some things about the Ferrocene-derived specification seem very off.

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.

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.

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.

[0]: https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...

> 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.

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)

With C++ it's just too easy to make mistakes.

Relative to C++.

> 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.

Looking at the Ariane 5 error it looks like the specifically disabled the compile-time error: https://www.sarahandrobin.com/ingo/swr/ariane5.html

That's nothing to do with Ada.

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.

Are you sure? I cannot even find Ada in [0].

I tried modifying some Hello World example in Ada some weeks ago, and I cannot say that I liked the syntax. Some features were neat. I had some trouble with figuring out building and organizing files. Like C++, and unlike Rust I think, there are multiple source file types, like how C++ has header files. I also had trouble with some flags, but I was trying to use some experimental features, so I think that part was on me.

[0]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...