Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led the team that wrote Apollo's onboard guidance software, has died.
Hamilton ran the software engineering division at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory during the 1960s, building the code that flew Apollo 11 to the moon. Her team's software caught and handled an overload of computer alarms during the lunar landing, a save credited with keeping the mission on track. She later popularized the term "software engineering" at a time when the field was not taken seriously as an engineering discipline. In 2016, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for that work.
Her death matters because software reliability is still an afterthought in plenty of products that matter far more than a moon landing. Hamilton's insistence that code deserved the same rigor as bridges or rockets predates by decades the testing and verification practices the industry now treats as standard. The industry she helped name still argues about whether it deserves to be called engineering at all.
That argument alone is a decent measure of how far ahead of the room she was.