Long story short, in circa 1969 higher-level languages were mostly the purview of academics. No one had a computer powerful enough to run a language compiler/ru

Long story short, in circa 1969 higher-level languages were mostly the purview of academics. No one had a computer powerful enough to run a language compiler/runtime, and programmers were real men(tm) and wrote assembly by hand because that was all they knew how to do. That's not to say that there weren't any advantages to using a higher level language, but in the case of something like the apollo computer, they couldn't risk compiler bugs or slow code gumming up the system and potentially killing the astronauts. Even today, certain ridiculously-high-performance or super low latency tasks (i.e. embedded devices, high frequency trading) drop down to the assembly level because that small bit of overhead the compiler adds (for such modern coddling conveniences as function calls and type safety) are just too much. It's not crazy, it's just what's needed for that particular job.