This is a good amount of knowledge that I use in my day-to-day job all wound up in one place. Most excellent -- takes people years to get good at and accustomed to designing systems and software for a hard real time, safety-critical environment. We measure/characterize certain aspects of our software's performance down to the nanosecond (and more commonly, to the microsecond) ... pretty sure that's not the norm in most disciplines :). FWIW, we use Ada, a restricted version of C, and a version of C++ that's so restricted that it's really more like our restricted version C than true C++. Industry trend seems to be away from Ada and toward C, at least for non-military aerospace. We use Java, C#, Python, etc. etc. etc. for our ground-based stuff -- restrictions are only on flight software.
Too hard to find people who know ada, and more difficult to do some of the low-level things that operating systems need to do (for the same reasons that it's safer). Might not be the case for application software -- I work mostly on platform/OS software.
