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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

I first encountered Drakon around 2008 or so, it was being pushed by complete ignoramuses, and they were trying to force it on school students. With grandiose claims that it's the most transformative approach to designing safe programs, blahblahblah.

I got mad at them, so I started digging.

I spoke with several people who worked on Buran (at that time, my parents were working at a factory that had designed Buran's instrument panel). Nobody there knew about Drakon. They apparently used a mix of Prolog (its Russian dialect, ПРОЛ), low-level assembly, some Modula-2, Fortran, etc.

It's questionable that the Soviet engieers would have been comfortable working with a graphical language, back when many of them still used punch cards to enter programs.

It could have been used in documentation or in specs, because Drakon indeed is a better graphical notation than the regular flow charts.

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Indeed you're right, I know what you're talking about, and actually briefly worked in contact with the people you're talking about in early 2000s as an intern, until leaving that circus for good. However I also know for a fact that it's been used in at least one organization for a couple live projects as a visual language in a CASE tool (no idea to what extent though). That org had some of the best bullshitters and practitioners of siburda - imitation of intense work - I've ever encountered in a post-soviet world (which had no shortage of those), and the same kind of ignoramuses you allude to.

i found a detailed article on Drakon in Russian [1], they say that development of the Drakon language started in 1986 (that would have been two years before the launch) and that work on the ГРАФИТ-ФЛОКС dev environment was completed in... 1996.

it was used with the Sea Launch program, Fregat - that's a space tug for Soyuz/Zenit, the modernized Proton-M, ДМ-SL-Б - that's a space tug used with the Zenit launcher.

However the article is a bit old, from 2009. It could have been used for later systems.

https://old.computerra.ru/readitorial/418507/

Wikipedia mentions hybrid variants of Drakon - like Drakon-C, here the they would put C code into each of the boxes of the flowchart (each square box would stand for a basic block, and each diamond box a boolean expression?). I think that would make more sense, this way you could actually write some more complex programs and the flowchart would not blow up in complexity.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%A0%D0%90%D0%9A%D0%9E...

i guess that with Drakon-C a function call would be just a line in the basic block, would make more sense.

> However the article is a bit old, from 2009. It could have been used for later systems.

That article is written by the main DRAKON pusher: Владимир Паронджанов (Vladimir Paronjanov), so I'd take it with a grain of sand the size of the Great Salt Lake.

Somehow, all applications of DRAKON happened to be in areas like space and defense, that are heavily protected by the state secrecy laws. So nobody could really confirm it. And that was also an excuse for not having any public tools released.

> Wikipedia mentions hybrid variants of Drakon

The only real programs in DRAKON are written like this. The compiler simply generates the code from the graphical description by joining the sections together.

Keep in mind that the spaceflight is systems-first; most development effort usually goes into the hardware and systems/mission design, the code has less priority and nearly zero decision freedom, so most of the complexity is baked into specs and requirements. In that sense, it's the appropriate area for a thing like this. It's also true for certain niches in industrial automation.

That said, in my experience, the Soviet tech industry workforce was separated into three very distinct categories since the ~70s: enthusiasts (people who came into it to actually build the tech; they delivered most of the result, and were the first to leave after the crash), opportunists (people who used it as a social elevator/welfare program and couldn't care less about the result), and crackpots (underperforming idealists who couldn't be fired, but still won't shut up about their wonderful idea, so they've been filtered into containment projects which were only meant to exist on paper). Drakon is giving off the strong vibes of something created by the last category.

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