It doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme :)

I agree that this is a great story about how even a government mandate does not mean something may come to pass.

However, I also think that the conditions are different enough that it does not guarantee that this will fall the same fate. There's a few reasons why: the first is that the goals are different. Ada was created by the DoD, because they thought that there were too many languages in use there, and that standardizing on a single, modern language would be far better. So then they set off to create Ada, and in 1980, the first version was done. But it wasn't seen as popular, for various reasons.

In the words of the mandate itself: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304073005/http://archive.ad...

> In March, 1987, the Deputy Secretary of Defense mandated use of Ada in DOD weapons systems and strongly recommended it for other DOD applications. This mandate has stimulated the development of commercially-available Ada compilers and support tools that are fully responsive to almost all DOD requirements. However, there are still too many other languages being used in the DOD, and thus the cost benefits of Ada are being substantially delayed. Therefore, the Committee has included a new general provision, Section 8084, that enforces the DOD policy to make use of Ada mandatory.

It didn't catch on enough naturally, and so therefore needed a push, and the mandate was supposed to accomplish that. But it backfired. First of all, there were a LOT of exceptions. (which I mention could easily happen in this situation as well). The mandate:

> "Notwithstanding any other provisions of law, where cost effective, all Department of Defense software shall be written in the programming language Ada, in the absence of special exemption by an official designated by the Secretary of Defense."

That "where cost effective" was a big loophole.

Second, well, take this article from 1997: https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...

> Chief complaints about Ada since it first became a military-wide standard in 1983 centered on the perception among industry software engineers that DOD officials were "shoving Ada down our throats."

Part of the idea of repealing the mandate was that it would be more palatable to people, and that they'd be more likely to use it if it were repealed.

But there were a lot of other parts to this story that led to the removal of the mandate, like an overall movement towards more off-the-shelf commercial components rather than making everything in-house. But this comment is already too long.

---------------------------------

Okay so why is this different? Well, first of all, because it's not actually a mandate: the language in the bill is

> SEC. 1613. POLICY AND GUIDANCE ON MEMORY-SAFE SOFT- WARE PROGRAMMING.
>
> (a) POLICY AND GUIDANCE.—Not later than 270 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall develop a Department of Defense wide policy and guidance in the form of a directive memorandum to implement the recommendations of the National Security Agency contained in the Software Memory Safety Cybersecurity Information Sheet published by the Agency in November, 2022, regarding memory-safe software programming languages and testing to identify memory-related vulnerabilities in software developed, acquired by, and used by the Department of Defense."

That sheet is this one: https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/10/2003112742/-1/-1/0/CSI...

and the most salient part

> NSA advises organizations to consider making a strategic shift from programming languages that provide little or no inherent memory protection, such as
C/C++, to a memory safe language when possible.

"when possible" feels like that "where cost effective" bit. I guess I've said this twice in this comment now. We'll see.

But moreover, this is not recommending "rewrite everything in Rust." It is not recommending rewriting every single thing in any single language, or move towards a language that is new, designed by them. It goes on to mention

> Some examples of memory safe languages are C#, Go, Java, Ruby™, and Swift®.

I suspect that this policy will not be as controversial as broadly as the Ada mandate was. It's just a different thing.

Time will tell, I guess.