Margaret Hamilton, NASA’s lead software engineer for the Apollo Program, stands next to the code she wrote by hand that took Humanity to the moon in 1969.
French General Maxime Weygand (issuer of those Letters of Transit in Casablanca whose name is confused with ”DeGaulle” when uttered by Peter Lorre) was, with some amount of proof, the illegitimate grandson of Austrian minister Klemens von Metternich; one of the most powerful men in Europe in the years between Waterloo and the rebellions of 1848, reliant upon “a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of bureaucrats, a kneeling army of priests, and a crawling army of spies.”
Tribute in LEGOs
Why has my every effort to convert that to a Discourse-friendly .jpg failed?
Great 60s look! I think I owned a pair of shoes exactly like those.
Some sites have images with unfriendly linkages.
It can be a challenge to find one you can embed.
Wow, a prolific coder and a witch! Quite accomplished.
And school board member.
And she is less than 2 months shy of her 89th birthday.
I’ve seen that photo before. Absolutely amazing.
I’m a programmer. The biggest application I’ve ever written is 10,000 lines. Daunting to say the least. That might fill 1/2 of one the dozen or so books of code she is standing by.
And she had the processing power of maybe a 286. Probably less.
And they where going on a life or death mission.
And she didn’t have an IDE nor debugging tools.
What language was she writing in?
Assembler(!)
My question as well. Assembly? Machine code?
She is noted for paying attention to fault-tolerance (exception handling), which prevented the Apollo 11 LEM from crashing when the crew overtaxed its capabilities.
It being assembly language does slightly mitigate that huge stack of printed code, though. Assembly languages aren’t noted for their line efficiency.
And, of course, assembly language tends to be somewhat opaque: probably two thirds of the content of that stack is the documentation of the code.
Could be, but it took the programming community a minute to realize the value of extensive documentation.
Can we be the actual SDMB for a moment and fact check? Hamilton is a brilliant programmer, but she didn’t hand-code that entire stack by herself. There is a LOT of half-true disinformation about her and that picture.
Here’s an exhaustive reddit post that brings receipts and debunks the lazy “facts” that get thrown around and confirms the cool stuff she actually did do.