Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by billfruit on Saturday March 21, 2020 @05:42AM
(#22645513)
Another Soviet technology in software development, sounds very interesting but hard to find information about it: It is named R-Technology a visual programming system said to be still used for critical software in the Russian Space Program:
"The essence of R-technology is the use of weighted, oriented graphs to express control logic and to enforce good programming style. Unlike other developments in visual programming, R-technology can accommodate many programming languages and has been used for numerous development projects. Despite the fact that it has been extensively documented in the Soviet literature, it is practically unknown in the United States."
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by ACE_Recliner on Saturday March 21, 2020 @02:11PM
(#22648472)
Re: Soviet visual programming environments, I usually hear DRAKON brought up in that context (as far as what's usually cited in real world use for Buran etc.)
I wonder if "R-technology" is either another term for DRAKON or a distinctly different system. Given how underdocumented Soviet high technology (esp around computing and related fields) is in English sources, either can be considered a real possibility.
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by vasili111 on Saturday March 21, 2020 @05:15PM
(#22650186)
Its is complitly different. I know DRAKON and it is very different what I see in the article. Also DRAKON is very different from other visual diagraming systems. DRAKON is open but system that is actually used in space programming (if i remember correctly is called Grafit-Floks, https://books.google.com/books?id=0g9kDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA198&lpg=...) is not open and as far as I know is not in market. If you are interested in DRAKON there is a forum.drakon.su which has english section and on that forum is made by inventor of DRAKON and he participated in discussion. DRAKON has also wikipedia page.
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by mxcrossb on Saturday March 21, 2020 @04:19AM
(#22645284)
Interesting. That page, and the page on the address programming language, both could use a lot more detail and significant editing. Hopefully more people who speak Russian can contribute to these articles.
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by mrlambchop on Saturday March 21, 2020 @06:10AM
(#22645604)
Hear hear. I've explored the old USSR via youtubers like bald and bankrupt and various urban explorer channels (and of course, the amazing HBO/Sky show, chernobyl) but I would love something as digestible based on older computing systems from Russia and beyond. Just yesterday, an urban exploration channel found a bunch of abandoned computers in a bunker that I could not find a single reference to on the internet (and that looked fairly intact).
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by musha68k on Saturday March 21, 2020 @08:14AM
(#22646022)
Hey there, those channels you like sound awfully interesting to me as well. Would you mind sharing where you saw this bunker exploration video exactly?
Thank you :)
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by nivertech on Saturday March 21, 2020 @07:50AM
(#22645903)
It seems that this APL (Address Programming Language) notation is kind of a high-level microcode, similar to one used in Intel x86 CPUs, assuming that not only RAM words, but every register and I/O port are also directly addressable.
Of-course microcode is executable, but Address notation was manually translated into each specific CPU architecture.
Since every operation defined as a set, it seems it supported expressing SIMD-style vectorized computations.
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by ainar-g on Saturday March 21, 2020 @05:35AM
(#22645498)
There are a couple of articles in Russian on Habr[1][2]. At a glance,
it seems like the language was closer to a form of mathematical notation
than it was to what we now consider a programming language.
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by papito on Saturday March 21, 2020 @10:14AM
(#22646609)
That was not uncommon. I went to school both in the United States and the USSR. Back there, almost always the student at the top of their class was a girl.
I remember that American female students struck me like a bunch of divas at first. That's when I realized these things are purely cultural.
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by myth_drannon on Saturday March 21, 2020 @08:16AM
(#22646027)
My father worked in one of these Central Calculation Centers in the 80s. Almost all programmers were women. Man tended to work more with the hardware which was considered more "dirty" work since you had to be stuck for hours in those huge machines trying to find the piece that broke. Too bad we lost all our Ada lang, linear programming books...
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by dang on Saturday March 21, 2020 @02:23PM
(#22648578)
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments to HN. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by dang on Saturday March 21, 2020 @02:21PM
(#22648556)
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments to HN. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Re:Kateryna Yushchenko
by dang on Saturday March 21, 2020 @02:22PM
(#22648560)
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments to HN. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045926X0...
"The essence of R-technology is the use of weighted, oriented graphs to express control logic and to enforce good programming style. Unlike other developments in visual programming, R-technology can accommodate many programming languages and has been used for numerous development projects. Despite the fact that it has been extensively documented in the Soviet literature, it is practically unknown in the United States."
I wonder if "R-technology" is either another term for DRAKON or a distinctly different system. Given how underdocumented Soviet high technology (esp around computing and related fields) is in English sources, either can be considered a real possibility.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12638032
Highly recommended!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Gux1jDm8Q
intro: http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/DIFFERENT/StoreEternally.ht... pdf: http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/TXT/MalinovskiyBN_StoreEter...
Some more about Kateryna Yushchenko on the Museum's website: http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/Ushchenko-memoirs.html
See also: http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/museum-map.html
Of-course microcode is executable, but Address notation was manually translated into each specific CPU architecture.
Since every operation defined as a set, it seems it supported expressing SIMD-style vectorized computations.
[1] https://habr.com/ru/company/ua-hosting/blog/387837/
[2] https://habr.com/ru/company/ua-hosting/blog/274019/
Photo of programmers from 1956. Twelve women, zero men.
I remember that American female students struck me like a bunch of divas at first. That's when I realized these things are purely cultural.
Men were supposed to do either dunce jobs, or jobs for "big men" like bossing people around in the party or state enterprises.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/flztwo/til_t...
-> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html