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Comment by itisit | Hacker News Reader

Why can’t Boeing do software? What is going on? I feel like these FCS issues simply weren’t happening pre-2010.

All of the strongest SWEs at Boeing got sucked away to FAANG in Seattle for 2-3x TC. Check them out on LinkedIn... there's been a steady brain drain to those companies for many years. Some were even early Amazon employees. It's crazy to realize Boeing had "big data" at the time when Amazon was still a startup.

Why did they shift away from Ada? It seems Boeing’s avionics systems had far fewer incidents before they started adopting other languages.

What are they using now?

Node

As in Node.js or something else? I don’t know what the 787 uses but I do know that it is not node.js

Exactly, we'll already hear 787s crashes all over if they're using node.

I like node, but they'll be stupid to use it for aviation instrument software.

The bigger issue is that a lot of the microcontrollers in the 797 probably can’t even run JavaScript lol

>issue

Sounds like a critical safety feature to me

There’s critical safety, and then there’s not even being able to do something

Like just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, but if you are not able to can then you are also not able to should

They've been using multiple languages for a long time and were, as far as I can find, never exclusively using Ada. At least with the 787 the language choices we (subcontractor) had were Ada, C, and C++.

I’m guessing you picked C++ out of those options?

I didn't, but yes it was the one chosen before I got there.

Probably similar reasons to why IOT companies can’t do security.

Why use best practices from other industries when you can re-invent things?

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