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posted by martyb on Thursday November 05 2015, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-sky-is-NOT-the-limit dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by moondoctor on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:14PM

    by moondoctor (2963) on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:14PM (#259095)

    "Slow, bloated programs were not popular in those days."

    I'd go so far as to say that they weren't tolerated. They sure are now! That ever increasing overhead has bred laziness. Machines execute staggering amounts of code these days, but don't get that much faster (or stable!) in real life use.

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  • (Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Thursday November 05 2015, @10:22PM

    by SanityCheck (5190) on Thursday November 05 2015, @10:22PM (#259129)

    Bloated programs are preferred by cloud providers as they pad their pockets.

    Regardless I try to optimize even the most innocuous things, but then I have to spin up more than required resources anyway to leave some breathing room less I be awaken in middle of the night by the China branch.