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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: 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.