Why Can We Write Software To Get To the Moon, But Not To Count Votes

minstrelmike shares a report. From the article: The best way to get a feel for what NASA’s job was like is to read some of the code, now immortalized in a GitHub repository. Choose a file at random. GROUND_TRACKING_DETERMINATION_PROGRAM.agc, for instance, has 204 lines and more than 85 of them are comments. Each of the lines consists of only one operation, unlike modern languages, which can pack dozens of operations with multiple options into one line. The simplicity becomes obvious …. The Apollo Guidance Computer had only 36k of ROM to hold the compiled version.” You didn’t need security, function was the only thing that counted, and you only had to do one thing. A Go app compiled with version 1.7 that only prints “Hello World” is 1.6 megabytes alone, and the Go world was totally thrilled with this news because it was 2.3 megabytes before.” And you didn’t need to deal with lawyers. There are 22 thousand words in the basic Terms of Service for renting a machine in Amazon’s cloud. There is also an entirely different TOS for using the website to rent the machine. Then each individual product often has its own TOS, like this one for Activate. Add them up and they’re much longer than the 36 thousand instruction words in the ROM in the Lunar Lander’s computer.