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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: 5, Interesting) by Aichon on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:31PM
My first professional software development work was an internship in 2002 with a NASA contractor (Lockheed Martin) doing FORTRAN development for some meteorological software that had been in continuous use since the early '80s. I got to work with data streaming in from NORAD stations, was pulling down satellite imagery, and had a real sense that the work I was doing was of actual value. At one of my later internships (with a branch of Jacobs Engineering), we were tasked with updating the database used to store all of the information relating to the lunar samples. The then-current (in 2005) database was running on DEC machines from the late '70s in a program called Datatrieve, if memory serves. I was able to learn a whole lot of really interesting stuff, both about some of those old database formats as well as about how the lunar samples are cataloged and stored (I even got to suit up in a "bunny" suit and go into the clean room/vault at JSC where they keep all of the samples). Between the two jobs, I got to work with and see some ridiculously fascinating stuff as a college intern, and there was obviously a very high demand for people like me who were willing to learn those old technologies and keep them working in the new millennium.
And yet, despite that, I didn't pursue a job with either of those companies, nor did I even consider dropping a resume off with a space industry company at all. It had nothing to do with the technologies and everything to do with the cultures of large companies and government contractors. Too much red tape, too slow moving, too much maintenance-as-a-career, and too many office (and actual) politics for my taste. That work isn't for me, because I discovered that my preferences lie elsewhere.
But for those who thrive in those cultures (or who have no problems with them), I'd definitely encourage them to take a look, since it's a great business to be in. With that first internship, the two main guys on the project had found a job that they loved and had followed it through five or six different NASA contractors as the project got moved between the various players in the space industry over the course of two and a half decades. They had been there at its inception and were happy to extend and maintain it for as long as it existed or until they retired. Likewise, with the second internship, the folks I was working with seemed to either love the culture or lack the ambition to try something else out. Either way, they were content with the work and had years to go with it since shifts in those big government jobs take years to happen.
All of which is to say, I heartily agree with what you said. There will always be a massive demand for people willing to learn legacy languages, so long as we keep replacing the big ones every couple of decades. And those jobs tend to be very stable ones that can be turned into careers unto themselves. If that's the sort of thing you're keen on, then it's a great direction to go in. It's not for me, but that's okay since I found something else I love to work on instead. To each their own.