[jalbertoni]

It really isn't that hard once you have to do it, as long as you have the time to get a test / feedback loop with the client going. They probably had a dozen test versions of the Furbies for whoever was doing QA to play around with.

With the moon lander code, they surely had a very good specification of what it was supposed to do.

I worked with the second case once, some IoT-ish sensors that would be buried in the ground in greenhouses, to monitor soil data. The business logic was 90% specified, and of course, the remaining 10% took 50% of the time. Before you ask why we didn't do it in C at the very least, we had a very solid codebase from the previous products. Sure, we had to port things from a Toshiba microcontroller to an STM8, different architectures, but since we were working with 8 or 16 bits inputs it was kinda trivial to test every single possible input to make sure things matched.

My only previous experience with assembly at a Computer History college course where we coded for the PDP-11, the 6502 and a stack machine. So yeah, not a lot. Winging it while admitting you don't know what you're doing can get you decently far in some circumstances.