Margaret Hamilton, NASA’s lead developer for Apollo program, stands next to all the code she wrote by hand that took humanity to the moon in 1969

  • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The code is also remarkably far simpler than people expected. It’s mostly pointing, timing and adjusting. User interaction was minimal and they weren’t using unknown or hard to memorize apis from multiple different people and groups (All of which would be decided on long before this point. NASA doesn’t fuck around with documentation. Look up their practices).

    The feat of getting to the moon is incredible, the feat only 8 people wrote the code is amazing, the fact the computer would be unusable in the modern world and was outdated by the 80s really shows.

    But the actual code isn’t that complex (mostly because it couldn’t be, and shouldn’t be) and was written in assembly.

    But it’s still damn awesome, I wish they focused on that instead of the misinformation in the title.