The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth.
And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.
50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use.
The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels or Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.
@blacklight @somcak The skills and knowledge are still there, but they're being blocked to save a bit on expenses.
@Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight Ever programmed for a ATtiny?
@Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight Not all of them, I can assure you :-)
Btw, here is a modern Forth with compiler/interpreter that's quite happy with 1K RAM and 4K ROM:
@Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight Other than #Scratch #GraphicalProgramming is exceedingly rare as far as I know.
@Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight
We need an abstraction layer that code can run on all the different abstraction layers on the market
@crazy_pony @Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/ - s/standard/abstraction layer/g
@szescstopni @blacklight
I don't think the skills and knowledge actually ARE still there. "People" don't write software anymore, code generators do. Drag and drop and the machine generates javascript or C++ or whatever.