Are you fluent in Fortran and Assembly?

elecplus · 30 Oct 2015, 16:33

Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages

To keep the Voyager 1 and 2 crafts going, NASA's new hire has to know FORTRAN and assembly languages.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a ... -engineer/

klikkyklik · 30 Oct 2015, 16:35

Whoa! I have assembly covered, and I'd teach myself Fortran for the privilege of working with those spacecraft!

Engicoder · 30 Oct 2015, 17:02

We were taught FORTRAN as part of the general engineering curriculum when I was at university. Also had to write a basic FORTRAN compiler as part of a compilers class. I bet the Voyager code even predates FORTRAN 77 since it was launched in 1977.

klikkyklik · 30 Oct 2015, 17:04

From: http://www.wired.com/2013/09/vintage-voyager-probes/

"The spacecrafts’ original control and analysis software was written in Fortran 5 (later ported to Fortran 77). Some of the software is still in Fortran, though other pieces have now been ported to the somewhat more modern C."

klikkyklik · 30 Oct 2015, 17:13

Having to write that in Fortran... those poor programmers.

Engicoder · 30 Oct 2015, 17:39

klikkyklik wrote: Having to write that in Fortran... those poor programmers.

FORTRAN has is strengths. Its really good at simple array processing. Its has been used heavily in scientific computing where you are applying algorithms that use basic data structures to huge arrays of data.

Findecanor · 30 Oct 2015, 17:44

I did some assembly language programming when I was young... My first programming language was BASIC, my second was 6502 machine code on the Commodore 64. I then did some 68000, 68020 and x86.
I was in the demo scene for a little while.. and it is fun trying to find out new algorithms in machine language and do them as fast as possible in machine code.