My mother's college roommate went to work for NASA and worked on the Apollo projects starting in the 50s. Programming at that time was all women, and it was def

My mother's college roommate went to work for NASA and worked on the Apollo projects starting in the 50s. Programming at that time was all women, and it was definitely seen as menial work. The literal astrophysicists and computer scientists were doing the "real" work, and the women were "just punching cards." That wasn't the reality of it, of course. Those women were doing massive amounts of the work around the logic of the systems. But there was a hierarchy, and everyone knew it. Wasn't until the 70s and 80s that things turned into a man's world. Once people figured out that there were hard problems to solve and plenty of opportunities to yell, "Yeah! We Really Fucked that problem in the ass!" Yeah, right about that time, the women started leaving. My mom's roommate didn't quit NASA until she retired quite nicely in 1995. And by that time it was a very different place. You can laugh and mock someone who started with punch cards all you want, and maybe even think she's a dinosaur who didn't keep up. But this woman taught me assembly, C, Lisp, C++, SQL, and Python. Not too shabby for a punchcard programmer from the 50s. I'd say she kept up just fine. But boy, did she want out of that environment. She was not a happy camper by the time the 90s rolled around. The thing you aren't getting is that it's the people on the ground who did a lot of the work to make programming languages not suck.