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Comment by sgrove | Hacker News Reader

I feel this is an interesting story to read alongside the OP: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

There will always be someone lamenting that language X (insert Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell or anything else here) is not being used instead of the horribly terribly utterly broken C, C++ or Java (yes, I'm being sarcastic). But in the end, pragmatic concerns win. Nobody works in vacuum, even if they really want to.

I'm a big fan of functional and otherwise dynamic language, but if I had to write my own Mars-landing controller, I would use C. No doubt there.

I wouldn't. I would go with spark ada. No doubt C has better tooling, though.

And more people who can write it or prefer writing in it? Technical problems being people problems 90% of the time or whatever it was the fella said.

The problem with Ada is not only the lack of tooling (although it's a huge problem - relatively to C, the tooling is scarce and horrible), it's also the people that know the language. I prefer C code written by a good programmer than Ada code written by a poor programmer any day, and finding good C programmers is much easier than finding good Ada programmers.

Detailed account of using Spark and PVS theorem prover in such an app

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jck/publications/Xiang.Yin.disse...

> if I had to write my own Mars-landing controller, I would use C. No doubt there.

C is a good choice for code generation, as a replacement for Assembler. But I would never dare write mars landing code in C directly.

I guess the curiosity team used several languages destined for a 100% verified C compiler for a well defined subset of C.

But I would never dare write mars landing code in C directly.

Why not? I used to write code for airborne radars directly in C, so I may have a different perspective.

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