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Frosty Piss writes:

If you thought Fortran and assembly language programming is pointless and purely for old-timers, guess again [theregister.co.uk]. NASA's Voyager program manager 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 said. 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 lucrative for those who know how to do it. 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.

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