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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, @10:10PM

    by moondoctor (2963) on Thursday November 05 2015, @10:10PM (#259119)

    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.

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