Since soil samples on mars seem to be strongly oxidizing, even containing perchlorate, the vegetables are likely to catch fire upon touching martian soil.
9 karma · joined December 4, 2012
No indentation allowed. Even though the modern compilers supported it, it looked ugly to veterans who had worked with fixed-format compilers for 30 years.
No comments in the code allowed. The function had to be entirely clear by looking at the code. Any code that needed comments for clarification was considered too 'clever' and 'obfuscated' for production.
No new language features allowed. IBM maintained languages and tools always acquire large amounts of feature bloat over the decades. Only a small subset of these features was 'white listed' by the CTO.