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NASA basically uses the approach you patronize so easily. And while I'm not arguing that it's practical to take this approach, defensive coding techniques allow
by duaneb 11y ago
NASA basically uses the approach you patronize so easily. And while I'm not arguing that it's practical to take this approach, defensive coding techniques allow reliable code to be written in environments that wouldn't be considered safe today... like the Apollo Guidance Computer. So yea, I don't consider it useful to finger C++ when there were clearly many poor decisions made at all levels of the engineering stack.
- willtim 11y agoThe Apollo Guidance computer wasn't anywhere near the scale and complexity of the F35 software. I'm also fairly certain the Apollo mission did not pick their technologies based on "programmer availability".
- engi_nerd 11y agoI wish the source for "programmer availability" hadn't evaporated into the ether, because I'd love to see it. I wonder if it meant "The guys who know Ada are all furiously writing F-22 software" -- parenthetical aside, the F-22 was in flight testing and development during the same years that the F-35 project was getting underway, so there would have been high demand for people experienced with developing mission critical flight software -- "and therefore we have to go with the guys we can spare, who mostly know C++ or Java or something". Or did they mean "No one coming out of school knows Ada anymore so let's go with a more widely known language"?
- kps 11y agoAnd yet the Apollo Guidance Computer system famously failed during the Apollo 11 landing. The software met its spec, but the spec was wrong.