Re: [wmii] Inferno/Styx

On 5/15/06, Bill Puschmann <puschy_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> iv_AT_c-66-229-172-60.hsd1.ca.comcast.net wrote:
>
>
> > > The subscribe to a "german engineering" software philosophy which is
> clean,
> > > efficient, […]
> > > By the way most mission critical code in medical and military
> > > applications is still writeen in C.... I wonder why..???
> >
>
> It's called legacy code. I can point to a lot of mission critical and
> military apps written in Ada and COBOL... and I doubt that makes them good
> things :).
>
> That and people know more about it and aren't making "beginner" mistakes.
> Remember how horrendous JAVA was (and "is")... yet there are two rovers
> running around on Mars programmed in Java. They were only supposed to last
> a couple months...

Bullshit, the Java code is only on the client side on Earth, IIRC the
code in the rovers is C and maybe some ASM. And for the record, the
rovers have suffered various embarrassing software problems that were
close to making the mission a total failure, and that after years of
testing and debugging such a mission critical system that has cost
millions of $, it still crashes completely randomly. For details
bother to read the weekly updates at the NASA MER website.

Also well worth reading about programming at NASA:
http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

uriel
Received on Tue May 16 2006 - 14:28:37 UTC