Margaret Hamilton, NASA’s lead developer for Apollo program, stands next to all the code she wrote by hand that took humanity to the moon in 1969

    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      62
      ·
      1 year ago

      She was the first software engineer who was hired for the project and did write a good chunk of the code. She was more than someone who simply delegates and leads. Hell, she is the one who coined the term software engineer. She played a hell of a role in the history of software development. Let’s not try to diminish that.

      • Jee@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        33
        ·
        1 year ago

        He isn’t trying to diminish but these misleading exaggerated titles are pretty annoying and confusing at times.

        • SeaJ@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          1 year ago

          I agree that the title is misleading but simply saying she was the one directing the team without also mentioning that she absolutely did write a chunk of that is also misleading and diminishes her contribution to the code.

    • Akulagr@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      43
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Similar to what happened with the first image of a black hole. The whole thing was somehow attributed to one lady in the press. Turns out, it was a whole team of scientists working together to achieve that.

      • Rachelhazideas@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        22
        ·
        1 year ago

        The problem isn’t that the whole thing was attributed to one lady. The problem was how quickly people were to discredit her and minimize her role, something that was guaranteed to never be a problem if she were a man.

        Funny how the credibility of male scientists and engineers are never questioned in posts like these, and yet becomes a hot topic when that person happens to be a woman.

        • tal@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          23
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Funny how the credibility of male scientists and engineers are never questioned in posts like these

          I haven’t seen a comparable image for a guy or a girl prior to this one presenting a person as having written code when they actually just led the team that wrote the code.

          I do recall Al Gore claiming that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” when he was responsible for obtaining funding for Internet infrastructure and getting ripped pretty hard for that.

      • rambaroo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        No it isn’t, unless you think PMs are programmers. She was the lead developer and created the foundation for the software, then drove the project home. She wasn’t a non-technical person writing requirements for engineers to work on.

        • Shardikprime@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          But from that to the title statement of “she wrote ALL the code” is a long stretch, which is where my analogy is coming from

      • phareous@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        1 year ago

        To be fair though, i don’t think she took sole credit nor did the blackhole researcher. Others in the media, etc. did that

    • Anemervi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Also the code is much shorter than that, the pile in this picture is just everything they had laying around at that time, so maybe different revisions or just copies. The code they used is like 1-2 of those in length.