"Eleanor McHugh" <eleanor / games-with-brains.com> wrote in message 
news:E28E04F4-C633-487A-9232-3175E6FFD7A8 / games-with-brains.com...
> On 15 Apr 2008, at 13:28, Michael Neumann wrote:
>> You will never ever be able to use Ruby for aviation software, neither
>> Lua, Python, Perl etc.
>
> You provide the budget, I'll provide the code ;) Having designed and
> implemented avionics systems I see nothing in Ruby or any other
> scripting language that would stand in the way of using it to do the
> same thing. In fact Lua began its life as a language for device
> control. That's not to say that MRI is particularly suited to the
> task, but the necessary changes could be made if anyone wanted to
> without having to change the language syntax and semantics.
[ SNIP ]

I know nothing of avionics software, but I'd assume 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics_software is reasonably accurate. Half 
of the stuff in that article is what you'd like to do on any project if you 
didn't have impossible deadlines and shabby processes, and the other half is 
simply extra rigour because errors are much less acceptable.

What I don't see is any particular emphasis on specific languages. 
Considering that there seems to be no shortage of avionics software written 
in C/C++, I don't immediately see why Ruby or Python wouldn't work either, 
especially considering the intense process the software goes through.

I tend not to discount any particular language prima facie. I recall over 
ten years ago having a colleague demonstrate a responsive, reliable (as near 
as I could tell) and feature-rich moving map display program for small boat 
navigation, and I asked him what it was written in. He replied, Visual 
Basic. He later went on to sell it commercially.

I'm inclined to think that 90%+ of software reliability comes from training, 
experience and above all, process. Not the programming language.

AHS