A system is business critical when a failure in its workings can lead to financial loss, or worse. By this definition it means that every information system that costs significantly to operate, is a business critical system. If there is a failure in the original design of the system, it will perpetually lose money to its owner.
Information systems come to be from the combination of electronics, people and what we call “programming”. It is not clearly defined what programming means, as it is too easy to say “writing computer programs”.
There are computer programs that are economically feasible to operate, and programs that are not economically feasible to operate. We are now defining programming to be “writing computer programs that are economically feasible to operate”.
So what is good programming? Or what is bad programming? Because we are defining programming to be specifically related economic feasibility of the program, good programming must mean the kind of programming that leads to the lowest possible cost of operation.
In addition there is also the factor of how long it takes to write the code. If there are two programs, each cost the same to operate, but the other took only a week to write where as the other took a year, one is clearly better programming than the other.
To summarise, programming means to write a program that is economically feasible to operate. The ratio between the time taken to write the code and the resulting level of economic feasibility, reveals the efficiency of the programming. More than anything, programming is a practice of managing this relationship between input and output.
With this in mind, the programmer should be allowed a sufficient level of freedom in terms of choosing the tools of their trade. It is not possible for the programmer to achieve great results otherwise.