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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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I can clearly recall the years when I worked for Ace Hardware for lack of a "real" job. The software they used was top of the line - a proprietary multi-tasking version of DOS called SuperDOS - and it was crap. One IBM PC ran three stores, two in our area and one in Reno, NV - using RS232 serial ports. It was easily the least reliable system I've ever seen, but it worked. The problem was, the software didn't do the things that a hardware store and lumber yard need it to do. I decided then and there that any programmer who intends to work on an industry-specific software product should be required to work in the target industry for 2 - 5 years before being allowed to code a single line.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Maybe any other rocket would've had at least two oxygen valve failures 
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Boeing used to make planes to blow up things, now they make things to blow up planes.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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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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According to Wikipedia, the first comefrom dates back to 1973.
My first encounter with comefrom was in the Babbage programming language, from 1981 (Babbage - The language of the future[^]). Babbage has a lot of other nice features, such as the 'conditional threat statement: DO so and so OR ELSE; For function calls, you have not only call by value and call by reference, but also call by long distance. For case switches, it has the BRIEF CASE statement to encourage portable programming.
A few years ago, I needed programmatic access to the backtrace in an exception handler (maybe there were libraries to do it, even at that time, but I found none, and it wasn't that much work doing it myself). 'ComeFrom' was an obvious name for the stack traversal routine, to show where execution came from when walking into the code causing the exception.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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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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