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Morton Thiokol told NASA not to launch the Challenger that day. NASA overruled them because President Reagan was visiting.
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Morton Thiokol ultimately approved the launch, against engineers recommendations.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Morton Thiokol only approved the launch after NASA threatened to blacklist them for future contracts.
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Agreed, it's a tough spot for them, nevertheless they bowed to the pressure.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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obermd wrote: They lost this when they removed engineers from the C-Suite.
Entirely correct. Of the three major defense companies I worked for in the past, none still exist. The end was clear once the MBAs and other unqualified suits took over management from the engineers who successfully ran the companies for decades.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Case in point:
the 3 top level people at SOuthwest airlines are all accountants. They gave out over $5 Billion US dollars in stock dividends. They ignore the 1908s' level tech running their IT operations. IT cost them fines and passengers back in 2022(?) when they cancelled thousand of flights do to issues with their IT. Their IT is admittedly underfunded.
Cegarman
document code? If it's not intuitive, you're in the wrong field 
Welcome to my Chaos and Confusion!
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and outsourced their software to people who don't know planes.
Understanding the domain of where your code is going to work is critical, especially so in things that can go boom.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Maybe any other rocket would've had at least two oxygen valve failures 
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Perhaps, for the first time in this millennium, FORTRAN comes in the Top 10 TIOBE Index - TIOBE [^]
As a side note, my 'mother-tongue' is FORTRAN, being the first computer language i learnt in 1987.
Hope this news isn't a repeat.
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The joy of fixed column coding.
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Not to forget the now infamous GOTO, which was indeed a saviour in those days.
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Amarnath S wrote: GOTO, which was indeed a saviour in those days
Not in 1987! Maybe it was true in 1967, although we had had Algol since 1960 (or 1958 for early blomers).
In 1968, we had the first major revision of Algol. Pascal arrived in 1970, Modula in 1975, C++ in 1985.
Dijkstra's "Go to statement considered harmful" is dated 1968.
If you considered GOTO 'a saviour' in 1987, you were either badly uninformed or extremely slow in adopting modern programming trends.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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You will pry my gotos from my cold dead hands.
finite automata, FTW
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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In 1987, I was in my pre-final year of Mechanical Engineering degree. Computers were new, having been introduced in India in early 80's, and programming was entirely new to me. Getting hands onto a computer was indeed rare, and somehow I got hands on a VAX VMS mainframe system. Compiling, linking, running - were all new. I had just learnt that there's something called as a 'file' - because the only files known were office files. And we were writing 'files' to implement the Newton Raphson method, the Regula Falsi method, etc.
Against this backdrop, GOTO was indeed a saviour, because what it did was indeed magic. And all my files were not more than 70 or 80 lines long, as it was college-level code.
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It rather depends whether you are talking about the 'vanilla' GOTO statement. which exists, in some form, in most languages, and at least arguably has a limited number of valid uses, or Fortran's 'Computed GOTO', which I can only recall using once in my life as a Fortran programmer, and which is probably one of the most bug-prone programming constructs ever devised!
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One of my Computer Science professors back in the late '80s had the memorable quote: "Be wary of anyone who refers to Fortran77 as 'the new Fortran'." 
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During my student days, we wrote a spoof Fortran language proposal to add the COMEFROM statement to replace the much derrided GOTO
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Nothing wrong with that Richard 
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Seems you are not quite up to date if you are making such statements.
And thus don't know the difference between FORTRAN and Fortran... 
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Old timers Fortran programmers are retiring and need replacements.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Maybe they can become trainers, coaches. Income after retirement.
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The problem with that is, whoever of the old gurus said (in the 1970s): 'I don't know what languages will look like in year 2000, but they will be called Fortran!'
Fortran 2023 has very little to do with the Fortran I learned in my studies in 1978-83. (Fortran was limited to the first two years.) I do not recognize today's Fortran as anything even vaguely resembling what I learned back then. If I were to teach it, I would first have to learn it as a new language.
Is GOTO at all a relevant statement in modern Fortran?
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Agree.
As I remember, FORTRAN 90, which I came across in the late 90's had the concept of Pointers. Today's FORTRAN may even have the concept of Classes. And the GOTO may be like "Hey GOTO, GO AWAY FOREVER".
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