• Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      She looked like my wife.

      (Posted with permission.)

      (Oh also my wife is still alive, she’s still is/am, thankfully, and I will be devastated when she isn’t.)

    • BillyClark@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      That caption is not completely correct. That is the code that she and her team wrote, not code that she wrote by herself.

      It would be absurd to think she wrote that amount of code by herself. It doesn’t stand up to a moment’s consideration. I can give you a couple of obvious reasons.

      First, it would take anybody a long time to write that much code, but it was quite literally a space race. They simply wouldn’t have one person doing something when a team could do it faster.

      Second, that is all mission-critical life-or-death code. You have to suffer over every line of code to make sure that it isn’t going to kill somebody. The last time I checked, which was admittedly about 30 years ago, in the space industry, a developer was expected to do something like 12 lines of code per day. Even if they could do more back then and each page was a day, which again, would be far more than acceptable for this type of code, that stack has got to be way over 20 years worth of work. She would have had to start when she was like 13 years old.

      • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Further details, her specific team had 100 software engineers on it, and the broader apollo computer system team that she helped manage had 400 software engineers.

        That stack is literally the culmination of hundreds of developers’ work over a period of 8 years. She absolutely should get credit for herding all of those cats and being the one making all the big decisions, but it’s insulting to the hundreds of engineers, many of whom were also women, to claim she did that all herself.

  • mercano@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    One of the very few people to appear as themselves in an official Lego set. (Qualifying the statement that way because Mark Hamil, for instance, has appeared in many Lego sets, but as Luke Skywalker or the Joker.)

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      To add on, “worked” is an understatement. She was the one that coined the term “software engineering.” One of the main founders of the field.

      • mobyduck648@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        While 90 is a decent number of years, it really goes to show how young the field is in the grand scheme of things. How many professions out there have most of their practitioners’ lives overlapping with those of its most important founding figures?

        RIP to a titan of the profession, history will recognise her achievements long after all the systems we maintain stop running.

  • nkat2112@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    What an amazing woman. Thank you for sharing this article, OP. It was very touching to read this story. I feel sad that she has passed away.

  • Skeezix@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Amazing she was wicked witch of the west actor AND a computer scientist