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I too, am a fan of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but saying that you're going to use PDP-11 until 2050 is a little overboard. Modern languages were made no

I too, am a fan of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but saying that you're going to use PDP-11 until 2050 is a little overboard. Modern languages were made not just for rapid development, but also modularity and to reduce potential human problems. Manually entering data in a PDP-11 is a goddamn error prone task. I don't think anyone here is suggesting they go run a nuclear reactor on Javascript, or throw away manual overrides and backups, but for goodness sake, you're going to have a hell of a time finding someone willing to dedicate their life to doing PDP-11 forever. In fact, NASA wrote much of the code for the rovers in Python and C... http://compass.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/ws-slides/havelund.pdf http://compass.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/ws-slides/havelund.... and the rovers run on RAD750 processors. http://www.baesystems.com/product/BAES_028145/rad750-family-of-products http://www.baesystems.com/product/BAES_028145/rad750-family-... I am not a nuclear engineer or a NASA engineer, but I would think that the environments of space and a nuclear power plant might have quite a bit in common. I guess the real question here is, is there really so little investment in energy that a more modern piece of software can't be written for these reactors in something like C?

weland 13y ago
> you're going to have a hell of a time finding someone willing to dedicate their life to doing PDP-11 forever. Between my enthusiasm for vintage computing and my job developing embedded systems, I'd do it in a split second, were it not pretty much in the other half of the world than the one I'm living.
vidarh 13y ago
Most NASA missions are not likely to cause a risk of large radiation leaks if something goes wrong. The likely failure modes and consequences of a failure are vastly different. And you seem to assume that there'll be a lot of new development for these systems, as opposed to very careful maintenance and small upgrades to complex existing systems.
kristoffer 13y ago
No code running on the Rover is written in Python. Code deployed in space is not changed "if it ain't broken".
koralatov 13y ago
[Y]ou're going to have a hell of a time finding someone willing to dedicate their life to doing PDP-11 forever. I'm not so sure about that. They've announced they plan to continue using the same system until the year 2050. To most people reading this, that's a job for life, presumably with good security and a decent salary. For many people, that's a really attractive proposition.
mseebach 13y ago
> "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but [...] Manually entering data in a PDP-11 is a goddamn error prone task. If there is a process involving entering data into a system that's error prone, then it's broken and should be fixed. Thing is, it would also have been broken 30 years ago (the human as the weakest link is not a recent radical discovery made by software engineers - it's one that it took nuclear and aerospace engineers, among others, quite a while to teach to software engineers), so chances are it was fixed 30 years ago. Also, since this is for a robotics system, I think the "UI" consists of servo motors and various sensors etc - not a clunky green on black terminal.

weland 13y ago

> you're going to have a hell of a time finding someone willing to dedicate their life to doing PDP-11 forever. Between my enthusiasm for vintage computing and my job developing embedded systems, I'd do it in a split second, were it not pretty much in the other half of the world than the one I'm living.

vidarh 13y ago

Most NASA missions are not likely to cause a risk of large radiation leaks if something goes wrong. The likely failure modes and consequences of a failure are vastly different. And you seem to assume that there'll be a lot of new development for these systems, as opposed to very careful maintenance and small upgrades to complex existing systems.

kristoffer 13y ago

No code running on the Rover is written in Python. Code deployed in space is not changed "if it ain't broken".

koralatov 13y ago

[Y]ou're going to have a hell of a time finding someone willing to dedicate their life to doing PDP-11 forever. I'm not so sure about that. They've announced they plan to continue using the same system until the year 2050. To most people reading this, that's a job for life, presumably with good security and a decent salary. For many people, that's a really attractive proposition.

mseebach 13y ago

> "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but [...] Manually entering data in a PDP-11 is a goddamn error prone task. If there is a process involving entering data into a system that's error prone, then it's broken and should be fixed. Thing is, it would also have been broken 30 years ago (the human as the weakest link is not a recent radical discovery made by software engineers - it's one that it took nuclear and aerospace engineers, among others, quite a while to teach to software engineers), so chances are it was fixed 30 years ago. Also, since this is for a robotics system, I think the "UI" consists of servo motors and various sensors etc - not a clunky green on black terminal.