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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 06 2015, @07:16PM
Maybe it's because BASIC was my first programming language, but I feel like if you can't learn Fortran in your sleep and be reasonably competent inside a week, maybe you should consider a career in something less programmy?
I had a "sleeper" of a Fortran class in 1984, then didn't do anything at all with it until 2007 - it wasn't hard at all to understand after all that time. My job in 2007-8 was to port the Fortran to C++ and parallelize the execution while getting identical results, maybe this is different from "programming in" Fortran, but, again, it doesn't seem like as hard a language to learn as all the new object thingies.
I suppose if somebody still has a huge legacy system coded in Fortran, that could be a challenge, but I would think the challenge is more in the huge system than in the Fortran syntax. If you've "trained to" the huge system for a couple of years, whoever is dependent on that system would be wise to keep you around - they might find another Fortran speaking fossil easily enough, but never one that knows their proprietary pile of spaghetti like someone who has worked it for years.
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