What it takes to do stuff right

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.html

Incredible article (although pretty old) about how the software inside the space craft works. This gives an insight into how the people writing the code for those giant complicated beasts work. They go at that code base with an attitude that makes the average paranoid look happy-go-lucky. In fact, they approach software engineering kind of like other engineers do -- as if lives depended on it. It's old, it's slow, and it works.

Excerpt:

But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

Courtesy: a Slashdot.org post