As a whole the F-35 is one of those big disappointments that was the direct result of each service branch having a say in requirements of the aircraft.  There are more than a few documentaries and articles outlining this in fantastic detail.<p>Ars ran a similar article to this one in January: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;f-35-software-overrun-with-bugs-dod-testing-chief-warns&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;f-35-s...</a><p>I was an employee at Lockheed during the time of when the &quot;JSF&quot; vendors were competing for the contract.  While I wasn&#x27;t directly involved in any F-35 programs (I was on the MS2 side supporting NATO programs, particularly ASOC &#x2F; SCCAN - that&#x27;s another story in itself...) I was friends with a few programmers responsible for the main flight systems of the early aircraft (I&#x27;m unsure if that system was ultimately used in the production version or not) and the attitude seemed to be that the aircraft would never make it to operational use anyway.  I was a, relatively, new and naive employee (first employment after college) and it struck me as odd that the plane was a joke internally to the company, at least those &quot;building&quot; pieces of it and it makes me wonder today if the lackadaisical attitude was ripe across all facets of the program.  If so it makes sense today of all the failures the program has endured.  The aircraft has always underperformed and been overbudget.<p>Ultimately the tax payers foot the bill for a next-gen aircraft that continually gets beat by task-specific variants that are decades older unfortunately.  I used to joke around with people about how the $1000 toilet wasn&#x27;t far off once I learned about how every program&#x27;s goal was to be cost plus and then milk scope creep to the Nth degree.<p>The programs I was involved with were selling commodity Sun + Cisco + some overpriced serial to Ethernet bridges (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spt.sunhillo.com&#x2F;products.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spt.sunhillo.com&#x2F;products.php</a>) tied to some archaic war&#x2F;peacetime ATC software.  It was absolutely astounding what those packages cost and what was actually delivered.<p>I saw some were asking what language for some of these systems and if it were along the lines of what I was exposed to it was a mix of anything and everything.  Most critical systems were written in ADA, as suggested, but I saw Java (think awesome Java in the early 2000&#x27;s), TCL, shell scripts and the like as major components to these systems.  In fact I remember a dev having problems getting working out reading serial data from a GPS receiver to set proper system time - so he just bundled ntpd in the build as his own work.<p>Working there was an eye opening experience for both good, and bad reasons.  The stereotypical jokes were, unfortunately, true to an extent and I couldn&#x27;t continue to justify pretending I was working on cool, unspeakable things that were shrouded in James Bond&#x27;esque mystique.<p>Ultimately I was proud walking in day one and couldn&#x27;t get out of there fast enough.  The people were great, but the management and true colors of the company were centered on, IMO, calculated enrichment of select groups of people.  It was never about the best product - it seemed it was about who was next in line to get fed.