> 3. The FDAI's signals are more complicated than I described above. Among
> other things, the IMU's gimbal angles use a different coordinate system from
> the FDAI, so an electromechanical unit called GASTA (Gimbal Angle Sequence
> Transformation Assembly) used resolvers and motors to convert the
> coordinates.
This really isn't that different than many software tasks, just a different set of basic tools and jargon. When non computer people read a Haskell article that's how it sounds to them.
I'm willing to bet that these days, that transformation would be done in software! If you have to drive the ball, you'll still need the motors, and the resolvers for feedback, but the coordinate system transformation is "just math."
Depends on who wrote it. My own Perl code, and plenty I've seen, is extremely clean and readable; sadly, a lot isn't. I'm sure clean and readable C++ exists, but the stuff I have to work with - big codebases with tons of history - is not. "Terrifying" would be more apt in most cases.
The Perl code I write today is much cleaner and easier to follow than what I wrote 30 years ago. I hope that's true of my programs in other languages too.
I work with a lot of embedded and embedded-adjacent software, and even I think several of these rules are too much. Having said that, Holzmann's rules are from 2006, and embedded / space qualified hardware has improved quite a bit since then. These days planetary probes run C++, and JWST even uses JavaScript to run command scripts. Things are changing.
I aliased ls to ls -A ages ago. While of course this doesn't solve any specific problems, it keeps one much more aware of what all's floating around in your home directory dotfiles.
"In the Apple II ROMs, I even stuck in my own floating point routine. It wasn't incorporated into the BASIC, but I just didn't want the world thinking I couldn't write floating point routines." -- Steve Wozniak [0]
I worked at place in the late 90s where that was true, at least for anything Internet related. We were doing (oh so primitive by today's standards...) Web development and it happened so many times. I'd call downstairs and they'd swear DNS was fine, and then 20 minutes to half an hour later, it would all be mysteriously working again. But only if we called down heh heh.
On an unrelated note, one of the folks down there explained the DNS setup once and it was like something out of a Stephen King novel. They'd even been told by a recognized industry expert (whose name I sadly can't remember any more) that what they needed to do was impossible, but they still did it. Somehow.
They really were great folks, they just had that one quirk but after a while I could just chuckle about it.
