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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 Nerdfest on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:49PM
True, but there the same does not really apply for Fortran. There are better languages, and Fortran does not really lend itself to writing easily maintained code. It's still miles better than COBOL though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @05:26PM
Every person who I've heard say something like that turned out to be someone who never programmed in FORTRAN. Where does that incorrect line of thinking originate? What is it about FORTRAN that makes it un-maintainable? Is it the GOTO thing? You know, where Dijkstra's paper was blown out of proportion and suddenly GOTO equals bad programming (Knuth, among others doesn't agree with this, by the way). For what it's worth, I've written millions of lines of FORTRAN and I don't know if I ever used a GOTO, but I have a young colleague who had to interface FORTRAN code and he was of the understanding that GOTO's are an essential part of the language! Is that where you're coming from too? Because it isn't correct if that is the case.