Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.
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.
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.
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.
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.