[Gambas-user] A little article on Gambas on Phoronix

[Rob Kudla]

On 11/27/2013 03:18 PM, Randall Morgan wrote:
> When I think of mission critical, I think of things that could cost
> someone's life if failure occurred. Things like, aircraft guidance systems,
> embedded medical devices, automotive steering and breaking systems, rail
> switching systems, etc. 

Those are actually a separate class, usually called "life-critical". A lot
of proprietary software packages have EULAs that actually forbid their use
in such applications. And while I don't know about Gambas, I've been aware
of a frightening number of medical software packages with at least a VB
interface, including my late partner's ICD's control software, complete
with VBRUN600.dll (pretty sure the software in the ICD itself wasn't VB,
but in non-implanted devices it might be -- and in any case, I'm betting it
wasn't ADA).

> You can argue that almost any software is mission
> critical for it's mission. 

Nope, "mission-critical software" is a term of art that means "software
critical to the operation of a business". For Amazon, a web server is
mission-critical, as is whatever they use to handle fulfillment so quickly.
For banks, there's the core system, teller interface and whatever other
ancillary systems without which they can't open for business, written in
languages that range from RPG to Javascript. For a recording studio, it's
something like Protools or Ardour, especially once enough projects are in a
given tool's format that switching would require days or weeks of work. And
for Benoit's company, it's the software he wrote in Gambas.

I once worked for a company whose most mission-critical software was a
Lotus spreadsheet macro that they had overgrown, causing the data to
overwrite the "code". Yes, really. They were dead in the water without it,
sent everyone home, couldn't so much as access their customer list or open
orders. I fixed it for them in a few days, converted it to a DBMS with a
nice Turbo Pascal client, but it just goes to show that mission-critical
software depends on what the business needs, not what's stable, secure or
even sane.

(No Z80 machines in my past except a Colecovision, but I had at least 5
6502-based ones... still really enjoy that flavor of assembly language,
especially with modern macro assemblers.)

Rob