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But cars do have that level of reliability, in ECU (sans hardware I guess, still flash memory). It's just everything else around is ass

Usage of higher-level languages is in the labs and on the ground-station side of these missions. No FORTRAN interpreter runs on a space probe.

In the 1970s, there was a distinction between "machine language" and assembly language. Assembly (or assembler) language is the symbolic source code that a programmer would use. Machine language is the binary dump of the actual text segments that the CPU directly interprets to run.

Voyager runs on assembly. only 10 instructions. Very simple and real RISC processor