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Comment by jmnicolas | Hacker News Reader

Although I use managed languages, I wouldn't want my code audited by the NASA.

When 180+ IQ brains analyze your work they're bound to find "horrible defects" that no "competent" programmer would ever make.

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It is probably too easy to confound the NASA engineering achievements with just raw intelligence. They have a huge body of standards and methodology on about every level of software engineering: time-proven coding standards, systems design guidelines, testing procedures, quality assurance, and the talent to execute on it.

I just remembered an old article [1] about the software development process at NASA and how it is not putting reliance on the kind of rockstar-programmer-genius culture that is so common in other parts of the industry.

[1]: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

I just refactored some code yesterday, I feel pretty confident, I'd love to know what they think :P Though my app is just some silly ruby code, not a realtime human life critical C embedded software.

Awesome, let's walk through every library, system, and machine call exercised by your ruby code. What happens if you gc while hitting a chunk of ram that was just hit with a corruption causing cosmic ray while your OS paged out your app because your intrusion detection/prevention service went defcon two on a leap millisecond that was announced since your last OS patch and your locale was set to C?

Please support your answer with tracing analysis over a set of one billion Monte Carlo simulations and present an accurate and up-to-date IDEF6 model of the application system.

Parking an SUV on Mars is a lot more complicated than parking one at the grocery store.

Plus, if the one on Mars kills anyone, we all know how that movie goes. One does not simply walk away from killing an extraterrestrial.

I'm going to lick someone with a very bad cold now, just in case.

If anything weird happens I blame Matz, and after that Linus >_>

Universal law: look at your code again in a year and you'll wonder what the hell you were thinking.

2 weeks

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