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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

What language do you propose?

(I'll just pre-empt that if you say "Rust", Rust wasn't around until recently and the F-35 project started in '93. These things span decades, while only a few programming languages do)

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The incredibly obvious answer is Ada, given the DoD commissioned it and the fact that it was used for the F-22.

I wonder if DoD desire to tap into a bigger pool of C++ programmers also brought a lot of people who was not trained to write a high-reliability code.

C++ is a pre-standard "Eh, just do whatever" language in 1993.

Bjarne's 2005 JSF rules have the same effect as an "Employees must wash hands" sign. It's not the billion dollar fast food chain's fault that a minimum wage employee didn't obey the sign and now you've got food-borne illness. They put a sign up!

He always misses the amount of avionics bugs that the F-35 suffered from, in spite of the rules.

Ada is far safer than Rust (not in edge case memory allocation problems, but in day to day application programming), and not only existed at the time, it was the industry standard for aviation (for good reason). Entire educational programs and pipelines existed for it.

Boeing and other defense contractors dropped it because C++ programmers were cheaper on paper (not realizing/caring that good C++ engineers were more expensive).

One of my current coworkers used to work on on-board systems for military aircraft. Anecdotally he tells me the critical systems for the ones he worked on were Ada but other systems could be C++.

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