I'd give the honor to Margaret Hamilton, a self-taught programmer who is responsible for the code that led to the first successful lunar landing.

In 1969, she was director of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory's Software Engineering Division, which developed the computer used in Project Apollo — one of the world’s first chip-based computers — under contract to NASA.

Aside from her role in the Apollo mission, she also wrote several scientific papers that made important contributions to ideas about fault-tolerance and reliability.

One of my other favourite facts from her life is that she originated the term "software engineering" — and offered a great example of how to do it.