I was involved in writing the short term collision alert system for the New En Route Centre down in Swanwick, UK. Basically proving something won't kill is extremely important in this environment. The language is almost irrelevant. Proving every single piece of logic has been exercised (an OR statement had to have true true, false true, true false and false false tests...now add multiple ORs to that). Mission critical software is another world.
Probably rather alien to the HN crowd ;)