Mission-critical systems: what language?

[dee-u]

Just wondering what language are used in those mission-critical systems like in space exploration agencies, medical fields, etc?

[jmcilhinney]

You'd probably find a lot of them written in C or C++ or even asm, but old ones might be COBOL or maybe Fortran. High-level languages can be used for mission-critical systems too though. Being mission-critical is more about up-time than execution time, so maximum efficiency is not inherently required. Obviously reliability is paramount and leaner code will hide fewer bugs.

[Niya]

I believe Ada was specifically designed for mission-critical programming.

[TysonLPrice]

You'd probably find a lot of them written in C or C++ or even asm, but old ones might be COBOL or maybe Fortran. High-level languages can be used for mission-critical systems too though. Being mission-critical is more about up-time than execution time, so maximum efficiency is not inherently required. Obviously reliability is paramount and leaner code will hide fewer bugs.

I wouldn't think COBOL would be in that list\category. It was good for common business programming but if something in a COBOL shop needed to be really fast it would generally be written in BAL. I also thing of mission critical as being "seven nines" versus execution time.

[dunfiddlin]

They landed on the Moon with little more than a glorified calculator on board! The language they used on those missions was English (well, what passes for English in the US! ) One might argue that nothing they've tried since has been half as successful!

[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.

[Witis]

They landed on the Moon with little more than a glorified calculator on board! The language they used on those missions was English (well, what passes for English in the US! ) One might argue that nothing they've tried since has been half as successful!

"That's one small step for man", I never could quite make out the second part clearly!!! Perhaps they need to add subtitles???

[Niya]

I've done constract 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.

Repworthy post!

[dee-u]

I've done constract 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.

Just wondering how do you implement your offsite back-ups? I've considered using internet but uploading gigabytes of data should really be slow.

[szlamany]

My shop is a software development shop - personally I keep backup's in my kitchen at home, dropped off in vaults at client sites - or simply backed up to client sites.

I think some of my customers have used Iron Mountain - not sure what they all use exactly.

I know one has a courier show up every day with tapes to be used in that nights backup and takes the "latest" stash off to wherever that local service keeps them.

One of my customers used a firm from Washington DC to hack into their networks - even broke into their physical offices - that was when they were getting HIPAA certified and needed to have a consultant find the holes and then react to the audit in fixing them.

"Due diligence" that would be called

[TysonLPrice]

We also send backups off site via courier everyday. Twice a year we take a set of backups and bring up all our systems from a remote location to prove we can.

[techgnome]

I think it kind of depends on what "mission-critical" means... it can mean different things to different people depending on their roles... but... I've seen a wide variety of languages used for so-called mission critical systems... I know COBOL is still used out there in financial areas, as well in some areas in the Air Force... when I was in the Air Force I personally used Access, SQL, VB3/4, C++ to improve the efficiency of a couple of offices... I'm sure to them the systems were mission critical. Basically, you use what you have available, it may be the best or not at the time, but it's what you have. The system I work on now is a web-enabled system, the nuts and bolts of it run on the server end and uses mostly Vb.NET with some C# here and there (and is growing as we hire more and more people proficient in it), with some client-side scripting in JavaScript, there's also a ton of SQL going on as well. To our clients, the system is mission critical... if it doesn't work, they're not raising money (we target non-profit fundraising organizations).

As for backups... I'm not sure how we do it here, or at my last place of employment, but two lifetimes ago, we'd run nightly backups that we then stored at someone's house that night (she'd take home the backups that ran the overnight the night before), then weekly backups were sent to an offsite location every Monday morning, kept for a 6 month period before the tapes would be erased and sent back to us. In addition, we would run hourly transactional backups on the SQL Server databases for the ones we hosted, with daily full backups.

-tg

[szlamany]

I have several customers that run every-hour transaction log backups of SQL - and we have used them to rollback to a 7:00 am "moment" (for instance) at least twice from what I can recall.

Back in the early 1980's at one of my first jobs we had a librarian who actually was in charge of the backup tapes. I think it took like a dozen reels to backup the system every night - and we had racks and racks of tapes all numbered and some crazy sequence patterned into it. 800, 1600 - 6250 density? Amazing the crap you can remember...

[szlamany]

Wow - not like you can go off topic in chit chat - but I looked up some info on Digital Equipment Corp - DEC - they were the fifth domain registered - dec.com - and I was on that network back in the mid 80's!!

Who knew at that time how big this interweb was going to become! And where does Al Gore think he was involved in this realm. I remember when they had 5000 nodes - apparently they got up to 10,000 nodes by 86! You could get onto the dec.com network and go to any machine anywhere on that network!

Ethernet initially competed with two largely proprietary systems, Token Ring and Token Bus. Because Ethernet was able to adapt to market realities and shift to inexpensive and ubiquitous twisted pair wiring, these proprietary protocols soon found themselves competing in a market inundated by Ethernet products and by the end of the 1980s, Ethernet was clearly the dominant network technology.[1] In the process, 3Com became a major company. 3Com shipped its first 10 Mbit/s Ethernet 3C100 transceiver in March 1981, and that year started selling adapters for PDP-11s and VAXes, as well as Multibus-based Intel and Sun Microsystems computers.[12]:9 This was followed quickly by DEC's Unibus to Ethernet adapter, which DEC sold and used internally to build its own corporate network, which reached over 10,000 nodes by 1986, making it one of the largest computer networks in the world at that time.[13] An Ethernet adapter card for the IBM PC was released in 1982 and by 1985, 3Com had sold 100,000.[9]

From wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet

We were able to network mainframe-like VAX's across state lines if we wanted to!

[techgnome]

"And where does Al Gore think he was involved in this realm." -- If I remember right, he worked for one of the companies that engineered the early ARPANET ... don't remember if he was on one of the engineering groups or not, nor do I really care to research it completely... :P but that's what I remember from that "controversy".

-tg

[szlamany]

Anyone ever use gatekeeper.dec.com

http://gatekeeper.dec.com/what-happe...atekeeper.html

How about altavista.com??

[arunb]

COBOL is basically meant for financial and statistical applications. Therefore most functions available in COBOL are geared for financial applications.

For control systems, FORTRAN was used, I read this in an old article where they mentioned FORTRAN was used to code a guidance system for a satellite. As FORTRAN has a large library of routines and programs it is still used in many scientific and engineering applications.

ADA is used in defence systems for missile guidance etc. and also in avionics for aircraft control.

For general industrial applications PLCs and their proprietary languages are used, though nowadays C is also used.

[TysonLPrice]

COBOL is basically meant for financial and statistical applications. Therefore most functions available in COBOL are geared for financial applications.

For control systems, FORTRAN was used, I read this in an old article where they mentioned FORTRAN was used to code a guidance system for a satellite. As FORTRAN has a large library of routines and programs it is still used in many scientific and engineering applications.

ADA is used in defence systems for missile guidance etc. and also in avionics for aircraft control.

For general industrial applications PLCs and their proprietary languages are used, though nowadays C is also used.

I disagree that COBOL was ever meant for statistical applications. It really wasn't meant for sophisticated algorithms. To me, and I worked with it for many years, it is basically a straightforward reporting and basic mathmatics tool. I guess I should qualify I'm referring to the older versions. I haven't touched COBOL in over ten years.

If you wanted to get serious with statistics, or sadistics as I refer to it, then SAS was the way to go.

[szlamany]

Last time I was in a COBOL shop - the COBOL was used for operational aspects - general maintenance of databases, creating flat files for EDI transmission (shipping company) and such.

When it came to doing analysis of business process - kind of like data mining - the more statistical aspect - they used DIBOL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIBOL

That shared the COBOL syntax but added the FORTRAN-like math capabilities.

I must have coded in a dozen different languages since 1980

[Shaggy Hiker]

"And where does Al Gore think he was involved in this realm." -- If I remember right, he worked for one of the companies that engineered the early ARPANET ... don't remember if he was on one of the engineering groups or not, nor do I really care to research it completely... :P but that's what I remember from that "controversy".

-tg

Actually, the story behind the "controversy" is that Gore never made the statement that was attributed to him. The statement came from a conservative poster paraphrasing something he said in a speech in NH. Even the evil, green, Gingrinch said that what Gore had actually stated was correct. Not that anybody cares.

My father worked for DEC for most of his career. I remember hanging out at his office playing on their network a bit. They had some cool games for the time, such as Adventure, which was similar to Zork (in fact, it might have been Zork, or perhaps they had both). The scene that really stuck with me was when I came to a clearing in the forest with a grating in the ground. I never could get the darn thing open. Many years later, when I was in grad school, I went caving with a few people to Wayne's Lost cave in Indiana. The entrance was through a hole in the ground located in a clearing in a forest. Yes, there was a grating over it. Tooke me well over a decade to get that darn key, but it was worth it. Fortunately, we had plenty of light for the 1000' belly crawl to the maze of twisty little passages, and nobody was eaten by a grue. It was a near thing, though, and that dwarf with the bloody axe was murder to get by.

Our backup plan involves a gang of drunken, but very fit, Hell's Angels geocaching our data in remote locations around the country. The security is pretty good, but restoring can be difficult. And to whoever took the July 2010 tape from the box and swapped it for the set of naked playing cards, we'd really like it back.

[szlamany]

ADVENT.exe - that was a really great game! Reaching the end game - you found the "bodies of the original implementers - surrounded by empty coke bottles"!

Also had a networked app - something like Star Trek - where you manned a fleet of starships and battled others - all on green-screen 80x24 dumb terminals.

[szlamany]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:You_are_standing.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure