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Think Fortran and Assembly Programming is Boring and Useless? Tell it to NASA

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

Frosty Piss writes:

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 sjames on Friday November 06 2015, @06:15AM

    by sjames (2882) on Friday November 06 2015, @06:15AM (#259319) Journal

    Back in the day, optimizing compilers weren't so optimal and the machines were slow (by today's standards) such that going to assembly crossed significant thresholds. It allowed us to do things that just weren't possible in C (and especially in BASIC). These days not so much. The C compiler will produce asm that is as fast or faster than what a skilled programmer might produce.

    C is the new assembly language. If your Java or Python program isn't quite fast enough at some critical point, write that part in C and call it. Even in the rare case that you need some special feature of the processor not supported in C, it makes more sense to wrap a bit of inline assembly in a C function.

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