.. on room-sized computers. VLSI hadn't been achieved yet, so Apollo flew with a suitcase-sized computer made from discrete gates and core memory programmed in assembler by Margaret Hamilton and others. https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

I doubt the satellite bothered with a processor.

Not trying to be pedantic or a dick, but you should refer to that language as assembly, not assembler. It is a non trivial difference as assembly refers to the language and assembler refers to the software written to parse assembly commands into machine code (binary strings defined in the given machine's instruction set that are meaningful to the processor).

Otherwise it's similar to referring to the language C as Compiler, which is just silly :)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1176138/assembly-vs-assem...

Also, to your point, agreed. It took several years before we could actually fly high level, compiled languages in space, the first being HAL/S on the Shuttle (completed in 1975).

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/XPL/hal.html

Cheers

This is the most pedantic thing I have seen in 2016.

I dunno how other !English languages handle it, but in German both are simply called Assembler. It would also seem that this distinction isn't generally made, due to the human ability to deduce meaning from context.

You must be new to HN.

I'm gonna need a source on that.

The first actual formalised and widely used programming language was FORTRAN in the 50's.

Which just had its 60th birthday a couple weeks ago.

From the article you linked:

> the first compiler for it was implemented in 1975

Although a few high-level languages existed at the time, compilers back then were not capable of code optimization. The only way to write code tight enough to operate a spacecraft would have been Assembly language.

Nonsense. Fortran I (happy 60th birthday!) was an optimizing compiler, and would have failed had it not been.