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She wrote all this code by hand to take humanity to the Moon (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/nextfuckinglevel@lemmy.world
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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

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[–] 183 points 3 years ago (18 children)

She didn’t write all of that, she had a team of programmers working under her

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  • [–] 57 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 32 points 3 years ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 40 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah people come on this is like attributing all the code for open ai to the PM

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years 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.

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  • [+] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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