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
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Imagine having to look for the missing semicolon in there.
It's probably written in Fortran66 or similar. No semicolons, but so many line numbers...
It's written in assembly. You can check out the source code on GitHub.
For people unfamiliar with assembly, it's one step up from raw 1s and 0s. Just vaguely human readable abbreviations for given sets of 1s and 0s. There are no built in loops or if statements, you have to build all that shit yourself from scratch every time you want to use one. And there's exactly one built in variable you can use called the register
Admittedly, the last time I touched real Assembly was 20 years ago.
There's a couple Zachtronics games, TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O, both that use a limited form of Assembly, that are probably filling in the gaps in my memory.
I soooo wish IBM had gone with the Motorola 68000 family instead of the Intel 8086 family of chips for the PC. It had a far, far nicer instruction set.