Mission-critical systems: what language?

[szlamany]

I've done contract work with Anthem Blue/Cross in the U.S. - they use COBOL still. Still shipping around a 1000 byte fixed length record (they don't have to be HIPAA/EDI among themselves).

But it was more about the hardware setup - the difference between production and development systems. How software went through many review processes on the development side before the production side even looked at it - and once they started looking at it you lost site of the change you made forever...

My own software products for medical claim processing was written in VB6 with MS SQL backend - it was the MS SQL that was "mission critical" worthy. We migrated from Digital-VAX minicomputers (which were mission critical worthy throughout the 1990's).

I work with municipal governments where they have the desire to have mirror'ed copies of DB's so failover's when hardware issues arrive can be dealt with.

Even in space exploration it's all about redundancy. They lost that deep space telescope a week or so ago - originally lost the "4th" alignment-wheel which was a redundant one anyway months ago. Left with 3-alignment wheels they all realized that losing one more would be mission-loss (and so it was).

I was recently burned by a MS update related to http.sys - making me realize that I really need to call the windows api's for http-stuff from C++ directly (eventually) so that I can be in control of my own destiny in this regard. That's mission-critical for me.

Mission-critical in regard to operational data backup is to make sure your offsite backup is not the bank-next-door - a chemical spill at the train-yard down the street makes the backup as useless as having it in the computer-room with the hardware. A tsunami at the nuclear power plant makes having it in the same-town a loss for the entire operation.

Mission-critical can surely take on many, many meanings.