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Comment by 1gor | Hacker News Reader

   Any _robust_ C program contains an ad-hoc, 
   informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow 
   implementation of half of Erlang...

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GreenspunsTenthRuleOfProgramming

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But in this case that's almost completely wrong. For example, "bug-ridden"? Outfits like NASA use classical techniques (code inspection etc.) to ensure that their software has exceedingly low error rates. This has been well studied. Such an approach works, it's just too expensive for most commercial projects. As for "slow", how likely is that?

On another note, it's pretty cool that the first three names credited in the JPL coding standard document (which is linked to at the bottom of the OP and is surprisingly well written) are Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Doug McIlroy.

>But in this case that's almost completely wrong.

On the second line of linked article:

"This is a humorous observation"

(emphasis mine :) )

Humor doesn't make it applicable. Greenspun's line had a specific meaning. It doesn't stick to this surface.

> As for "slow", how likely is that?

Have you seen the rover move? :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=484R2TQGLAQ

Jokes aside, there isn't much of a speed requirement here, really. It all runs fine on a radiation-hardened 200mhz processor. Nothing on mars is running away.

> On another note, it's pretty cool that the first three names credited in the JPL coding standard document are Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Doug McIlroy.

It's not surprising at all. It's the work of Gerard Holzmann[1], who worked at Bell Labs at the Computing Sciences Research Center with all the other Unix folks where he developed the Spin[2] model checker. (As a sidenote, Spin was used to check the sanity of the Plan 9 kernel).

[1] http://spinroot.com/gerard/

[2] http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html

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