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In this video around 2:25 on programmer stereotypes it is mentioned in the part named female programmers that the code Margaret Hamilton wrote for the Apollo mission was so flawless that some use it as evidence that the moon landing never happened.

Is it that true was code quality ever used as moon landing denial fodder? Seems a bit odd to me. I realise that video is satirical in nature. It may be hard to take it seriously by that part really did make me wonder.

Oddthinking
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Neil Meyer
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  • Dear commenters, [welcome to Skeptics!](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1505/welcome-to-new-users) Please note that we don't accept speculation, discussion and pseudo-answers in comments here. Please use the answer box below, and be sure to provide references to support your claims. – Oddthinking Jun 07 '23 at 23:08
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    Was the code flawless? There's the infamous [1201 and 1202 alarms](https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/apollo-11s-1202-alarm-explained). – Schwern Aug 07 '23 at 15:56
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    @Schwern: The software reacted perfectly to a situation caused by the hardware. The software did all that it was intended to do - and more. Its resiliency handled a hardware error that no one had expected. – JRE Aug 07 '23 at 16:27
  • @Schwern, there was a long discussion about this in comments a couple of months ago. I argued that the code worked as intended, detecting and reporting a situation that it knew it couldn't handle. Others argued that since it couldn't handle it, the code wasn't perfect. That discussion has since been deleted, and it looks like it's about to start up again. – Ray Butterworth Aug 07 '23 at 16:42
  • @JRE, see my comment to Schhwern. – Ray Butterworth Aug 07 '23 at 16:42
  • @RayButterworth And this is why we call them "issues" now and not "bug reports", doesn't matter to the user! – Schwern Aug 09 '23 at 16:19
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    I think the answer is "yes, everything has been used to deny the Moon landing, often in contradictory ways". This question seems to ask us to hunt for a "notable" claim which I don't think we do here; this isn't a conspiracy finding service. A more interesting question might be about the *premise*: is the "flawless" code execution proof against the Moon landing? Was it really flawless? – Schwern Aug 09 '23 at 17:30

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