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Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

This is not always true. A friend once built an application for the government (I don't remember any more specifics) in Python. He delivered it to them and mentioned in a document somewhere that it was written in python. This was unacceptable to them because python was not on the list of approved languages. So, after some negotiating, he caved, switched the project to Jython (with minimal changes) and delivered it as "running on the JVM". This was seen as acceptable, and the delivery was accepted.

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I’ve seen software rejected this at a university as the IT teams (pleural) didn’t like the language it was written in. However the problem was solved by the software vendor withdrawing their quote as we were too hard to deal with.

There is nothing wrong with rejecting software because of the technology it uses.

Think about how important maintenance is. If an organization doesn't have in-house skillset to maintain and enhance software solutions they buy outright, why would they want it?

I agree, though this isn’t what occurred. University IT is wonderous to experience though I am speaking from an experience of just 1. Hopefully your mileage varies.

Why didn't they specify beforehand theor language choice? The negociation about Jython you describe should have taken place before the work started

It likely was, but buried in one of the hundreds of documents they reference.

That must have changed in the past 10 years because I was working on a DOD project in 2007 and it had a large python component.

In my experience in the aerospace industry working closely with USAF, it depends entirely on the program (as in military/civil program, not computer program) as well as the systems being targeted for deployment. I worked on projects that allowed Python 2, but not 3, some that only allow the Python that ships with Anaconda or Canopy. Many programs and classified environments are barely getting approval for C++11 and some unfortunate teams are stuck with uncompiled VBA macros behind Excel UIs because the security personnel for their target systems is unable to review compiled code in fewer than 6 months... it is a mess.

C++11 is becoming pretty common. The super computer centers (LCFs) uses C++11 now.

I wonder why that is. I know theres a list of DoD approved software licenses and guidance on using open source software but didnt know there was a list of languages allowed.

Probably more to do with the runtime environment.

This is exactly why.

Some governments (and individual institutions) will have restrictions on only supporting standards because it allows for competing implementations. Some will require multiple implementations directly. Still others may have restrictions based on whether there was a successful audit of the runtime environment.

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