The Dark Side
From Elite Wiki
"Modding" or tweaking and writing OXPs - and eventually maybe even the Vanilla game code if you get to be good enough!
Sneak a peek at How to tweak OXZ's ... and see where it leads you!
Just for shock effect, the older OXPs are written in legacy code - either XML or OpenStep. Javascript was slowly introduced after 2006 as an option, and then as the best way of writing OXPs.
Oolite is currently written in Objective-C (72.5%), C (19%), JavaScript (7%) and fragments in other stuff.