She was on the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Board from 1981–85, and from 1987–93, and was Chair of SIGCSE from 1991–93.
She joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin as an instructor in 1975, then a lecturer in 1977, a Senior Lecturer in 1981, and retired in 2000.
Dale wrote 16 textbooks on Pascal, C++, Visual Basic, Java and Ada.
(with John Lewis) Computer Science Illuminated (5th Edition 2012).
ISBN 978-1449672843 In the year 2009[1] she was named an ACM Fellow.