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Subject: Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum
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Date: 2014-07-08T11:25:00-06:00
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On 06-Jul-14 13:41, sbelmont700@gmail.com wrote:

> So, unfortunately, Ada will only ever "work right" when you can build
> everything yourself, from scratch, and can justify the cost of doing
> so (basically, safety critical systems).

So then, why aren't we-as-a-community doing that?
Consider the Heartbleed bug, TLS (SSL's successor) really ought to be 
written in a formally-verified manner; and we have a superior tool just 
for this job: SPARK.

Granted, this means that we have to implement the underlying 
technologies as well: X.509 security certificates, which themselves 
depend on ASN.1... so, the real question is this: are we going to 
address this problem or not?

I've started, but finding that I need X.509 and therefore ASN.1 (and 
have *zero* experience with either these or SPARK) has revealed it to be 
a little daunting. -- I realize I'm stubborn, opinionated, 
tough-to-teach, and generally don't ask for help; but I *do* want to see 
Ada put to use, to see its popularity rise, and I think that /this/ is 
one area that we-as-a-community generally agree: Ada/SPARK is ideally 
suited to security-critical applications.

I'd be more than happy to populate a gethub repo with a set of 
skeleton-projects so we can do this; Peter Chapen also pointed me to 
some ASN.1 related stuff, so if he gives the go-ahead we can spin off of 
that.