Implicit actions & program correctness

[deadhacker <gstover@gmail.com>]

Hi all.  I am an old programmer who is new to Ada.  (I do not use Ada on the job.)

In the Ada books I'm reading, there's an emphasis on correctness & early bug detection that I haven't seen in many other books.  It's led me to contrast that with what I see on the job.

On the job, we often use frameworks such as Spring (for Java) to "autowire" components.  It means that a lot of work is done implicitly by that framework.  As one who audits systems, that implicit work makes is _really_ difficult to be sure that I understand how the program works, much less to verify correctness.

It makes me wonder what experienced Ada programmers think of work done implicitly by a program.  Have you run into similar practices?  Have you been able to talk people into ending them?

I guess another way to look at what I'm wondering is: In books about software engineering with Ada, I see lots of talk about correctness especially by moving bug detection to the compile phase.  How often can that actually be done?

(Full disclosure: These are kind of a dumb questions because I think I know what Ada programmers might answer, so I feel a little guilty about asking, but I still hope to learn something & engage in some interesting talk.)