So the latest Ask Slashdot was concerned with writing ultra stable software in C++. Of course you have the usual anti-C++ crowd immediately crawl out of the wood work but there was one post that was interesting… well ok not the post itself but the link they referred to was: They Write the Right Stuff.

In brief the article refers to the work of the “on-board shuttle group” and their software defect rate. I’ve had this very article mentioned to me several times before by a work colleague and only now have I actually gotten around to reading it. The most interesting part of the article was not what it said but what it didn’t. Notice at no stage was the programming language they used mentioned. Why? Because it is not relevant. In essence the trick to achieving 99.9% reliability is process control.

Infact I’m confident that the “on-board shuttle group” will pass the The Joel Spolsky test.