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
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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She didn’t write all of that, she had a team of programmers working under her
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.
He isn't trying to diminish but these misleading exaggerated titles are pretty annoying and confusing at times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Et al of the world, assemble!
Yeah people come on this is like attributing all the code for open ai to the PM
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.
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
I'd like to work under her.
I wouldn't have minded working under her
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.