Many programmers talk about Ada Lovelace, who was certainly awesome, but should be talking about Margaret Hamilton. Before anyone heard of Dijkstra&#x27;s work, Hamilton was straight up inventing everything from real, software engineering to properly handling fault-tolerance and human interfaces. Here&#x27;s what she was doing (see Apollo Beginnings rather than USL):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;htius.com&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;r12ham.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;htius.com&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;r12ham.pdf</a><p>Her Wikipedia page gives her due credit and shows just how much she and her team pulled off:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist...</a><p>Also note the size of that printout of her program. Try to think about how many people make one like that which doesn&#x27;t fail in the field even when parts of its environment and hardware are failing. Also while using low-level code with little to no tool support on 60&#x27;s era, embedded hardware rather than a JVM, etc. Margaret Hamilton was the first in the field of high-assurance programming that I&#x27;ve seen. A lot of firsts.<p>So, I give her credit where possible. The industry should even more as she wasn&#x27;t a theoretical programmer like Ada Lovelace: she engineered actual software, co-invented many of the best practices for it, deployed them successfully in production, and then made a tool that automated much of that from requirement specs to correct code.<p>While programmers and industry ignore her, at least NASA gave her positive mention as the founder of software engineering and ultra-reliable software along with the biggest check they ever cut to an innovator:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;home&#x2F;hqnews&#x2F;2003&#x2F;sep&#x2F;HQ_03281_Hamilton_Honor.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;home&#x2F;hqnews&#x2F;2003&#x2F;sep&#x2F;HQ_03281_Hamilton_...</a><p>Where would our systems and tools be if more attention was put into her methods, even just principles, than informal use of C? ;)