Magellan's main computer is programmed to take a fix on the two stars each day to determine the spacecraft's actual allignment. The crash of an Airbus A320 jet that killed 97 people in India last week has reignited a dispute in France over whether the computerized, highly advanced aircraft is too complicated to fly. The French pilots union is urging the airliner be grounded in France. But the maker of the plane, the four-nation consortium known as Airbus Industrie, said the plane was quite safe and the French pilots were opposing it to protect their economic interests. But such production code is surely the responsibility of a team of programmers, each module being evaluated by more than one peer and supervisor.
All programmers make errors.
Certainly, we must expect programmers to make such mistakes whatever their launguage, and however well they understand it. Some languages do assist error-catching more than others, APL being the extreme worst case, for example. That way, the thing being left stayed constant even if you added or removed interior levels. That is not the point, however. The real question is whether or not any real language is sufficiently free of such traps as to significantly reduce the probability of errors.