Comment by echohack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echohack | Hacker News Reader

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.... and the rovers run on RAD750 processors. 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?

> 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.

[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.

No code running on the Rover is written in Python.

Code deployed in space is not changed "if it ain't broken".

> "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.

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.

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