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If you thought Fortran and assembly language programming is pointless and purely for old-timers, guess again.
In an interview with Popular Mechanics this month, the manager of NASA's Voyager program Suzanne Dodd said the retirement of the project's last original engineer left the space agency with a shortage of people capable of communicating with the 40-year-old craft.
[...] "Although, some people can program in an assembly language and understand the intricacy of the spacecraft, most younger people can't or really don't want to," Dodd was quoted as saying.
With high-level languages now the standard for developers, knowing how to fluently code in assembly has become a specialized skill, as has fluency in languages such as Fortran. While obscure, the skill set is potentially lucrative. Along with NASA's aging fleet of spacecraft, many businesses still rely on languages such as Fortran or COBOL for specialized tasks and critical infrastructure.
[...] According to CNN, 80-year-old Larry Zottarelli is retiring from NASA next year, and he is the last original Voyager probe engineer. He will be replaced by a younger engineer, who has spent a year learning the ropes, we're told, proving that knowing a little bit about yesterday's technology can go a long way into the future.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @08:37PM
Yeah a highly sought after skill... at most they need like 2 or 3 guys. One of them is already doing it. I know let's make an article and convince 20K gullible morons with a stupid article that they can learn assembly and go work for NASA.
I know that NY Life has something like 60 Assembly programmers to run all their legacy apps... They needed more so they would train you and you can spend years working on Assembly programs building a skill that is entirely unmarketable elsewhere... up until last year when they outsourced the whole thing to India.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by moondoctor on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:03PM
While I agree that they're exaggerating the jobs available to those that know or learn assembly, dismissing it is a mistake. Programming in assembly in less than a meg is very good at teaching you about how to approach things logically and efficiently. Honestly, in my book if you can't write at least a bit of machine code you can't truly understand computers...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:31PM
As someone who first programmed in BASIC and very soon after in hand-translated machine language (couldn't afford or get access to an assembler until much later), I must say that knowing assembly language gets to be less and less useful as the years go by, even for educational purposes, to 99% of programmers. I would say that knowing how to program in C fulfills this basic requirement of "knowing how a computer works" at this point: if you can master pointers and the difference between heap-allocated and stack allocated and an array of references to objects versus an array of objects, I'd say you have all you need. Oh, and learn that you want to keep things (code/data) small and access to them as linear in memory as possible in order for them to fit in the CPU cache.
(Score: 2) by moondoctor on Thursday November 05 2015, @10:10PM
Yeah, overall you're right. You can get by fine without knowing what a processor is actually doing. I would still argue that having to give a processor it's native command directly will change a person's understanding of how computers really work, and make them a better programmer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @04:48AM
I must say that knowing assembly language gets to be less and less useful as the years go by, even for educational purposes, to 99% of programmers.
Is it just a coincidence that 99% of programmers are garbage? Maybe they need to understand what they're doing rather than just relying on their toy languages all the time.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:49PM
True, but there the same does not really apply for Fortran. There are better languages, and Fortran does not really lend itself to writing easily maintained code. It's still miles better than COBOL though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @05:26PM
Every person who I've heard say something like that turned out to be someone who never programmed in FORTRAN. Where does that incorrect line of thinking originate? What is it about FORTRAN that makes it un-maintainable? Is it the GOTO thing? You know, where Dijkstra's paper was blown out of proportion and suddenly GOTO equals bad programming (Knuth, among others doesn't agree with this, by the way). For what it's worth, I've written millions of lines of FORTRAN and I don't know if I ever used a GOTO, but I have a young colleague who had to interface FORTRAN code and he was of the understanding that GOTO's are an essential part of the language! Is that where you're coming from too? Because it isn't correct if that is the case.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday November 06 2015, @01:11AM
Some choice quotes from Donald Knuth about this very thing:
"By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality." -- TAOCP 1st Ed, Volume 1, Preface.
"People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird." -- TAOCP Volume 1, Fasc. 1
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:29PM
You think their readership reaches 20K people who might be influenced? Not bloody likely.
Learning the older / esoteric languages seems like a skill to develop on-the-job at a company you already have some security with. Stepping out and learning Hitachi COBOL 2002 on spec and then looking for a job sounds like a formula to get yourself locked into a job in west BFE with no prospects of advancement or transfer. Now, if you already live in west BFE and like it there and know they need a Hitachi COBOL 2002 guy and you're the most likely candidate if you get yourself some dusted skillz, that's a reasonable thing to think about.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Common Joe on Friday November 06 2015, @05:46AM
I was going to say something like what you said. The problem is that there is no loyalty anywhere, so when you sign up for a dead-end language like FORTRAN, there are only very limited places to use it and they may downsize you at any time. The businesses of today have beaten it into our heads: stay fresh or be out of a job. Those who use these languages well should be commanding a high price because they should be hard to find. If you are out of a job after using FORTRAN or working on remote satellites, you'll probably have a very hard time in the job market proving your worth in today's world $LatestFad.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 06 2015, @07:16PM
Maybe it's because BASIC was my first programming language, but I feel like if you can't learn Fortran in your sleep and be reasonably competent inside a week, maybe you should consider a career in something less programmy?
I had a "sleeper" of a Fortran class in 1984, then didn't do anything at all with it until 2007 - it wasn't hard at all to understand after all that time. My job in 2007-8 was to port the Fortran to C++ and parallelize the execution while getting identical results, maybe this is different from "programming in" Fortran, but, again, it doesn't seem like as hard a language to learn as all the new object thingies.
I suppose if somebody still has a huge legacy system coded in Fortran, that could be a challenge, but I would think the challenge is more in the huge system than in the Fortran syntax. If you've "trained to" the huge system for a couple of years, whoever is dependent on that system would be wise to keep you around - they might find another Fortran speaking fossil easily enough, but never one that knows their proprietary pile of spaghetti like someone who has worked it for years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @04:44AM
Not everything is about jobs; education is important in and of itself. Learning assembly can help you understand what is happening in the background. It would help if a lot of these Java-type losers understood what the hell they are doing.