Speaking of best practices…

I believe everyone must have followed the latest news about NASA and the Curiosity mission. I won’t go into the details of the mission, but I can say that its purpose was to land a mobile laboratory on Mars.

That goal alone is already quite fascinating, but what really made me think was: “What programming language does NASA use for a mission like this?” That question was just a seed that minutes later sprouted a dozen more doubts — such as “What are the spacecraft’s specs?”.

Well, most of these questions can be answered by our friend Wikipedia. But take a look at what I was able to find: below is the coding standard document used to program Curiosity. The most interesting thing is that there’s no magic formula — what they do is exactly what everyone knows is right, but often doesn’t put into practice. See for yourselves:

JPL Institutional Coding Standard for the C Programming Language (PDF)