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April 18, 2006
NASA Studying the Reuse of Spacecraft Software
That's right folks...with every project NASA uses your tax dollars to reinvent the wheel. The insanity of it all is staggering. Actually they recently started trying to reuse code, but they are currently evaluating it to see if it's worth the "effort". Most corporate programmers have been reusing code for that last 15 years or so. Hell I've been reusing code for that long myself. On one level I can understand why starting with a clean slate helps because you can rethink the problem from the ground up. A blank canvass definitely encourages you to look at your problems in new and creative ways. Sometimes I do that myself...if I were going to code this today with nothing of the past to worry about what would I do? But the reality is the number of those kinds of ground up redesigns are rare. In my entire career I've participated in only one. It's just not the way things are done in the corporate world. I think NASA could be much better served by writing one massive set of functions and use a single set of Spacecraft Software for all crafts going forward. The functionality of this software is ultimately similar from craft to craft. And by having a standard that you work from you could instead spend new software budget money on refining and improving the existing software to make it better.
Read more over at Space.com .
Posted by ManDrake at April 18, 2006 12:22 PM
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Comments
Given How some corps. keep building on old bad code NASA may have some gounds. As for starting form scratch each time my HP Calculator has more memory thatn the orginal shuttles.
Posted by: Royal at April 19, 2006 2:51 PM