> You can make an appeal to complexity, I suppose, but this can be managed. If Erlang is used to create a 99.999999999% reliable cellphone infrastructure (http:

> You can make an appeal to complexity, I suppose, but this can be managed. If Erlang is used to create a 99.999999999% reliable cellphone infrastructure (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8426897/erlangs-99-999999... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8426897/erlangs-99-999999...), I believe it can handle medical device functions :P Imagine you gave someone cancer every time a call was dropped. Even 0.00001% is a big risk, depending on what you're doing. You also want something that reliable out of the gate, not after years of beta testing. > even if you have a health-critical device with literally just 10 assembly instructions, a cosmic ray could still flip a bit (http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html) and cause a catastrophe! Sure. That's why there are dead-man switches, watchdogs, heartbeats, acks, checksums, etc. in the majority of ('all' is a strong word) safety critical software. If random corrupt data gets written to the wrong location, the consuming subsystem (hardware or software) should do the safest thing possible.