A Look into NASA’s Coding Philosophy
This article is very much at odds with my 15-year (1988-2000, 2001-2004) experience writing software at NASA (albeit at JPL, which is to say the unmanned space program, but still NASA).  In my experience there was just as much politics, marketing hype, and general bullshit as I've seen in the commercial world.  It was actually pretty amazing to me some times that things worked at all, let alone that they worked as well as they did.  I think the real secret at NASA is not that they are better at writing code, but that they write it slowly (development cycles are measured in years) and they test the living shit out of it.  Then, once it's working, they don't change it except under extreme pressure.  But while it's being developed it's just as much of a sausage factory as anything else.