>The process of developing more reliable software isn't necessarily more expensive than less reliable software. It can even be cheaper. I'm struggling to find the links (maybe somebody else has them handy, or I'll edit them in if I find them), but there have been a few case studies done a few years back by companies that moved to using Ada. In addition to the benefits of more reliable software, they also found development costs were better or at least no worse than C. I know that isn't exactly the language to compare to these days, but as I said these were done some time ago.

I can believe that. Ada catches a lot of errors you would normally only notice by extensive testing at compile time. You're preaching to the strong-static typing choir here. I believe Ada and Rust could solve a lot of problems of companies working with C/C++ and make development cheaper. You can properly model your domain and abstract without sacrificing safety.

I'm also a strong believer that TDD makes you much faster and safer in the long run.

My experience tells me that most tools, languages or methods that catches errors earlier will save money.

Ada also has the best tested compiler I can think of.

However my larger point was about the engineering processes not the language itself. I think with languages and tools you can make it easier to make good software. The 100x time and cost is more in the sense of process changes when you're working on safety critical systems. How everything has to be traceable from requirement to test, how there are mandatory reviews before any code change that need to be documented, how there are qualification criteria for the toolchain, etc. All these things cost a lot of time and manpower, with arguably very bad cost-benefit analysis, which is only really worth it when human lives are at stake.