I agree that it's an exemplary piece of self-documentation.  Note that the
museum-piece code sample has a page number in the thousands.  Certainly the
people who picked it chose one with enough comments that a non-programmer
would find something to read.

How much do you want to bet that the other thousands of pages are as well
documented?  Hint: I'll take your bet without ever seeing the rest of the
program.

Now, the space program code was better documented than most code.  There
were people who actually got paid to read the code looking for bugs, and
they expected at least a few clues.  I know because as a NASA co-op at the
time I was one of those people.

I worked with an ex-IBM assembly-language programmer at about that time.  At
the time, IBM had a rule something like "2 comments for every 3 lines of
code", and inspectors to enforce the rule.  He used to write poetry down the
comment side of the listing, and it always got approved even though he was
writing stuff that had nothing to do with the program.

I'm sorry to muss your rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, but the 99%
undocumented pile of crap rule is not new.  It's just that nobody chose the
crap to put in a museum display.

You write code differently if you think another human might actually read
it.  It's a fact of life that the vast majority of source code is never read
by any human other than the original author.  Based on my experience, I
suspect that the vast majority of the good reputation of open-source code
stems from the fact that the authors expect someone else to actually read
their code.

I don't know about you, but I don't think I have ever sat back and read
anyone's source code -- either my own or someone else's without spotting a
potential bug or at least a better way of doing something.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Olin Lathrop [mailto:olin_piclist@EMBEDINC.COM]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 5:36 PM
> To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject: Re: [EE:] The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC)
>
>
> > > http://www.perljam.net/misc/apollo11-code.jpg
> > This is totally cool but NOT Apollo 11: the listing date is
> Dec 19, 1969,
> > 5 months after the fact.
>
> At least someone understood the value of comments back in 1969.  Maybe
> because back then you couldn't get near a computer unless you
> actuall knew
> something about them.  Too bad that 99% of code written more
> recently is an
> undocumented pile of crap.  Now that anyone can get access to
> a computer and
> a high level language compiler, that's exactly what we're getting.
>
>
> *****************************************************************
> Olin Lathrop, embedded systems consultant in Devens Massachusetts
> (978) 772-3129, olin@embedinc.com, http://www.embedinc.com
>
> --
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>

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