• CookieOfFortune@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    3 days ago

    In the vein of awesome women at NASA, there’s also Judith Love Cohen who worked on the abort guidance system for Apollo and was Jack Black’s mom.

    • MTK@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      I can make twice that amount of code in 24hours! And I am willing to bet it would be just as good as SpaceX!

      • infeeeee@lemmy.zipEnglish
        31·
        3 days ago

        Robert Downey Jr. was nominated to Oscar in 1992, at the age of 27, he didn’t win though. There was a joke about him in Simpsons in 1999, so he was already a well known name far before Iron Man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhjHVQsJOlo

        His life is more like an example of how people can get back to the top after years of heavy drug abuse.

        Martha Stewart wrote her first book at the age of 42, I would count that as the start of her career.

        This chart is a bit confusing, sometimes it lists when people started a later flourishing business, sometime when they were at the top.

        • smayonak@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 days ago

          Raising children or caring for the elderly is really more impressive than writing recipe books or pretending to be a billionaire arms dealer

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      I wrote a calculator in 6502 assembly one time. So I’m okay life achievement wise.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    3 days ago

    I’ve always loved that picture for the sheer look of pride on her face. This is someone who knows she did something great and is happy to show it off

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      It’s funny to look at this code because a large fraction of current programmers (perhaps a majority?) think that comments are a “code smell”, an indication that the code is fundamentally flawed. Granted, in that language code really couldn’t be self-documenting with descriptive variable and method names, but it was still sufficiently reliable and maintainable to get men to the moon and back.

      No unit tests either lol.

      • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        This is my first time hearing that anyone thinks comments are code smells. What’s the logic behind that supposed to be?

        • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
          5·
          2 days ago

          Fla already explained the rough logic behind it, but I also think a big part of it is that people have a habit of approaching advice like this too dogmatically. For example, guidance that says “commenting your code is not a substitute for sensible structure and variable names”, and someone may read that and go “I shouldn’t use comments, got it”. Certainly I have seen (and written) code that overuses comments in a manner that the average comment has pretty low information value — for me, this was because I was inexperienced at writing code other people would use, and comments were things that I felt I should do, without properly understanding how to do it. Like if there’s a line that says a += b, I don’t need a comment that says “# adds b to a”. That misses the point of comments entirely, and would make important comments harder to see, and the code harder to understand.

          Another area where I often see this overly rigid mindset is the acronym “DRY”, which means “don’t repeat yourself.” It’s a decent principle, and it’s helped me to identify larger structural problems in my code before. However, some people take it to an extreme and treat it as an absolute, inviolable law, rather than a principle. In some circumstances, repeating oneself would improve the overall code.

          If I had to choose between code that had sensible variables and structure, but no comments, and code that was opaque but heavily commented, I’d probably choose the former. However, in practice, it’s a “why not both” situation. It’s less about the comments than how well they’re used, and identifying comments as a code smell may be an attempt to get people to approach code readability slightly differently and using comments more wisely.

          • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            That makes sense. I’ve certainly been guilty of excessively DRYing my code. On one hand, it’s a fun little puzzle to work on. On the other hand, it’s been making it very hard to quickly iterate, and that’s especially bad for research code.

            • chilicheeselies@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              2 days ago

              It only nakes sense to apply DRY principles when you find you keep having to copy paste the same code to muliple locations on your codebase, and its reasonably clear it will never diverge from eachother. In other words, apply as needed to maintain development velocity (and in turn stability).

        • Fla@lemmy.zipEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Not an opinion i hold. But i’ve heard others say that code should be written in a way thats simple and easy to understand, e.g. variables/methods with meaningful names. Logic kept simple within aptly named methods that define what it does.

          The stance seems to be that if you should keep code simple enough, or named well enough that comments aren’t necessary in the first place (excluding niche situations).

          • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
            5·
            2 days ago

            I can even begin to imagine how I’d explain with only code how various hacks are necessary because of a bug in something it’s interfacing with, or how various mathematical expressions were derived.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              2 days ago

              I ran into this when I was doing the Accessibility/VoiceOver stuff for an iOS app. VoiceOver is (or was at the time - maybe they’ve fixed most of the problems) buggy as shit in lots of weird ways, and I sometimes had to do strange things in the code to get things to work properly in VoiceOver mode. I would always add comments explaining why I had to do these weird hacks before I would submit the code. The guy approving our pull requests was a young developer solidly in the “all comments are bad” camp and he would always just delete my comments. Sometimes, because he wasn’t even remotely aware of what VoiceOver was for or how it worked, he would also delete the changes I had made to get VO to work in the first place. For good measure, he also badmouthed me to our bosses whenever possible, calling me technically incompetent (because of the comments).

              The fun part was when our app failed its annual accessibility review (badly) and he had to scramble to restore all my changes that he had deleted. He didn’t restore my comments, though, which apparently led to us failing the following year’s review as well because other developers deleted my shit, having no idea why it was in the app. He and I had both been laid off at that point so there wasn’t any institutional memory of it at that point - another reason why comments are important, as they’re essentially the only form of documentation that there’s even a chance future developers will read.

            • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              4·
              2 days ago

              Yeah. Code explains how, comments explain why. I can see what happens, but I surely cannot see why someone thought this was a good idea. Please don’t write int addSomeSpecificFillerBytesBecauseTheLegacyAPICountsTheHeaderAsPartOfTheDataStructureAndTheCurrentAPIDoesNot()

      • dev_null@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        You know you can click them and see the descriptions and changes? : )

        Looks like they are proofreading PRs correcting spelling/whitespace, as the code was hand retyped from scans and has mistakes.

    • axEl7fB5@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago
      function isEven(number) {
  return number % 2 === 0;
}

      Dunno about making it “concise” but you can shorten the name of the function and the parameter and maybe use == instead of ===

          • Sludgeyy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6·
            2 days ago

            Planned obsolescence would be if they made their bricks break on purpose so you had to buy replacement bricks.

            Scarcity marketing? I don’t know what the exact term would be that you’re referring to. But with retirement.

            I think it has to do more with Lego not being able to produce thousands of thousands of different sets.

            Like you don’t just simply ask the Lego printer to make Margaret Hamilton Lego sets for a dozen people then tell it to go back to printing the newest set.

            Lego couldn’t make every set available if it wanted to

            • whoisearth@lemmy.caEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              Agree. I was more getting on the assumption I was reading in that it was politically driven which I don’t believe was the case.

  • queueBenSis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    30·
    3 days ago

    wish i learned about people like her back in history class. we just learned about the men on the ship. but not the vital people that made the ship land and come back without crashing

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      This song really hit me with that because it’s both an acknowledgement that the Apollo 11 mission deserves folk music and praise for everyone who got them there and back. Though it doesnt reference the programmers and mathematicians involved

      Hamilton was one of many heroes in the program. A lot of folks from the ordinary to the abnormal to the brilliant worked together and did just about the most extraordinary things anyone ever did. Every weld, every pipe fit, every wire run, every sheet stamped, every number crunched, every chemical mixed… was a part of that project.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        the most extraordinary things anyone ever did

        If I was inclined to parrot the “America is the greatest country ever” viewpoint, I would point to the moon landings as the greatest thing we ever did. And it was done by a large collection of smart, well-educated people doing science and mathematics - not by a bunch of hillbillies whose greatest accomplishment in life was figuring out how to mount a big flag on the back of their pickup truck. Even the dudes who rode those rockets to the moon were well-educated in science and mathematics in addition to being brave as fuck. It’s ironic that the “America is the greatest” crowd are also generally anti-science.

        The other greatest thing we ever did was defeating fascism in WWII. Ironically enough, this was achieved with literally a command economy, not via “free enterprise”. Also ironic that the “America is the greatest” crowd now loves fascism. I guess defeating the CSA in the Civil War and ending slavery (sort of) was also a great thing - and once again the irony there is obvious. It’s ironies all the way down (including captured Nazi rocket technology essentially forming the basis of the moon landings).

  • Etterra@discuss.onlineEnglish
    61·
    2 days ago

    Dark hair and glasses. Nerdy women’s style hasn’t changed much in 80 years, and I’m here for it.