Why did the AK-47 become so popular?

Unlike the ar* and generally americans weapons, it can shoot in 'sandy' situations.

> The gun is nothing special. Its controls are unsophisticated;

That is main feature though. Nothing special _is_ what is special.

When you write code, try to remember the AK-47. Keep it simple, loose components, try to make it fault tolerant if you can. Make it not just easy to use, but also easy to disassemble, inspect and rebuild (design grey boxes not just black boxes).

Is there an AK-47 design pattern, or are they called "stories" these day, anyway I feel like there should be one.

Well, and then of course convince a mega-corporation to buy 100m units of it ;-)

I'll see your Wikipedia link and raise you one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_dimensions_of_quality

When you're getting shot at and your life depends on being able to shoot back, reliability trumps all other metrics.

During my mandatory army service (Bulgaria) I was given AK-47. I had to be responsible for the gun for the whole 1997, but shot only few times, since the country was going through hard period, and we were not allowed much ammo. Also had to make sure that I shoot on manual, or was it semi-automatic. From what I remember I had to get used to my weapon, as each one was uniquely biased, so you had to understand yourself how it shoots. Had to clean it every day at 2:00pm, and had to cover disassembling and assembling it for some relatively short time (actual times escape me, but was somewhere in the dozen of seconds to a minute).

Losing the gun was punishable by 7 years military prison (or at least that's what they've told us). Also while guarding and if someone was approaching you should first fire an alert bullet (if that's the right name) up in the air, and then shoot at place (if the object keeps moving).

I did not even cared about it. Later I was supposed to be with RPG-9, but since the major and the captain of the brigade discovered my typing and computer skills I was put in an "ad-hoc" position - sleeping in the same room with all drivers, cooks, etc, while just doing computer stuff and delivering the mail from the city (along with starting the wood stove, and some cleaning).

This was a component affecting the Nazi invasion of Russia - german machines build to tight tolerances didn't handle the extreme drops in winter temperature as well as the looser tolerances of the Russian machines.

A friend of mine once played with a Russian motorbike from that era, and said if you tipped it side to side you could hear the pistons clunking about.