[DoreenMichele]

First female IBM fellow.

First female winner of the Turing Award.

Lots of other notable stuff.

Sadly, this is the first I've heard of her. Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer.

Edit: To be clear, I really meant "I hope other people here are familiar with her work, even though I am not because I'm not a real programmer." I'm happy to see that some people are, in fact, familiar with her and her work.

[mumblemumble]

> Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer.

Sadly, no, it's not just that. Most my immediate colleagues, for example, don't know of her or her work, either. It's one heck of a field.

She had expressed some dismay, in interviews, at being the first woman to win the Turing Award. Not the Turing Award part, of course, the "first woman" part. She was far from being the first deserving candidate who didn't happen to be a dude. So I hope she wouldn't mind linking this here, even today: https://www.hillelwayne.com/important-women-in-cs/

[formerly_proven]

There's a weird gap in that lineup in that practically every person on that list is pretty old (born in the 30s-40s) and their achievements usually date from around the 70s.

Is this just because achievements are usually recognized in retrospect, or is this because the 50s to 70s were the most influential portion of computer science (since all groundbreaking things were discovered in the beginning), or is this because women were pushed out more and more by the 70s?

[pmiller2]

Yeah. If anything, I would say it means they're not a "real computer scientist," whatever that means.

Just to put the second part of your comment in perspective, there have only been 3 female winners of the Turing award, total, by my count.

[dspillett]

> a "real computer scientist," whatever that means

At university we would say that computer science was the art, where programming was the craft[1]. It is probably fairer to state that programming is an application of the science.

[1] Though with less of a sneery tone than used when people said "mathematics is the art where computer science is the craft"

[mumblemumble]

I think that this might be exploring the analogy's breaking point.

It can be quite easy to draw a clean line between theoreticians and implementors in other fields. Biologists and veterinarians, physicists and engineers, etc. But who was the last major computer science theoretician who wasn't also a skilled programmer or system architect (or both)? Alonzo Church?

[segfaultbuserr]

After looking through all the Turing Award winners, my answer is Stephen Cook - a CS mathematician who did nothing on engineering, discovered the concept of NP-completeness.

[belorn]

I create programs professionally and I know very few winner of the Turing Award by name. If someone said "who was the first native-English speaking Turing Award winner" I would not be able to answer unless I went through each winner and manually checked. I suspect quite few programmers in the world (and people on HN) are familiar enough with Turing Award winners that they can answer questions like that.

I would guess that people who work on building compilers and compiler optimization are more likely to know her name than programmers.

[CarbyAu]

And it doesn't mean even that.

Many worthwhile people in the world. Not all of them are famous to the people who would love to know them.

At least we can both get to know her more starting now.

[globular-toast]

Interesting. If you search for "died" on HN in the last month, say, you'll find many examples. Most have 0 or 1 comments, many have around the same as this has now, but none are about it being sad to not have heard about that person. Any idea why this one in particular made you feel that way?

[DoreenMichele]

Many years ago, I had a good friend named Frances who lamented the fact that people generally could not keep it straight that Frances is a girl's name and Francis is a boy's name. Rembering that friend, I clicked on the link to check the gender because people don't always follow the rules about such things and because I was short of sleep and wondering if I was even remembering that correctly.

Given my reason for clicking the link, I believe it's the first time I've seen her mentioned on HN. I likely would have clicked on any article with the name Frances in the title and remembered the name if I had ever seen it before.

Because I'm a woman, I actively keep my eye out for female role models. I have a fairly strong math background (for the world at large -- not for the HN crowd) and spent some time looking up info on Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female Fields Medalist, and even blogged about it at the time.

Given my interest in female role models and my personal association with the name Frances, I think I would have known the name had I ever seen it before. It would have likely stuck with me.

I've been here eleven years. It seems I've never seen her name before. And, in fact, if you search for it, it comes up (in the titles section, as part of a description, not really a title) only once ten years ago (until the past 24 hours).

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=frances+allen

[kbenson]

> the fact that people generally could not keep it straight that Frances is a girl's name and Francis is a boy's name.

I literally just looked it up, because I wasn't sure. The simple rule presented is that if it's Frances with an e like in "her", then it's the name historically used for women, and if it's Francis with an i like in "him" then it's the name historically used for men.

It truly is a shame that the farther you go back in computer science, the more likely names whose traditional gendering is somewhat ambiguous are to refer to women, and how now that luminaries of the field are passing away, how much more even the field was between the sexes in the past.

We often talk about how we need to bring more women into the field of Computer Science, but I think it's important to note we're trying to bring them back into the field, because they were here from the beginning and it wouldn't be the same without their contributions.

[DoreenMichele]

They've now added the black bar and substantive comments about her work are finally at the top of the discussion (instead of my relatively vacuous remark). I'm happy to see her getting a proper send off appropriate to her level of contributions to the field.

I think this isn't really the time or place to get into gender issues and the field of Computer Science, especially not for me. I see things very different from most other people here and that makes communication challenging.

In this case, that would amount to a terrible derail from the focus on honoring the work and life of Frances Allen.

[kbenson]

> I think this isn't really the time or place to get into gender issues and the field of Computer Science

It's worth noting that, according to the article, Frances Allen actually spent some time focusing on exactly that.

As important as distinguishing her work in the world of computing and programming, Fran was also committed to her team by embracing their ideas and synergies and, in particular, supporting women. She spent many years as a mentor through IBM’s mentor program.

...and later...

“Professionally, Fran spent a lifetime working to advance the field of computing and pioneer new breakthroughs. Personally, she was equally focused on inspiring and motivating young people – especially women – to do the same,” said Fran’s nephew, Ryan McKee, on the IEEE honor.

So I imagine she would be quite happy to have the topic brought up (at least in a positive manner) in discussion of her life and career.

That said, I brought that up to highlight her achievements and character, not to bring you into that conversation if you don't want to be in it, which is your choice, and I can see avoiding that topic as a useful strategy if you think it can't or won't be handled appropriately by the people involved. As such, don't feel compelled to respond about any of that if you don't want to. :)

Edit: It occurs to me now you might have been referring to something entirely different than I thought, in which case I wasn't trying to bring anything of that into the discussion at all, and my wording was purely an attempt to avoid that type of discussion as well.

[DoreenMichele]

The elephant in the room is that I'm probably the highest ranked woman on HN. This is likely a large part of why my relatively vacuous remark was the top comment for some hours. I know from past public remarks and private emails that some people here look to me for guidance on gender issues.

I've given my guidance for this issue today: We are here to honor the life and work of Frances Allen. Everyone please, kindly, focus on that and don't be offended that I'm trying to step away from the discussion at this point.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

She has been mentioned in comments before. Mostly in the context of compiler optimization, programming models, the history of C vs. other programming languages as systems programming language, and so on. Mostly an excerpt from a book where she said in an interview something along the lines of "We had such good things, and then came C..." (implying we lost the good things(with C))

[DoreenMichele]

Yes, I'm aware. But it's a really large forum with a lot of traffic and I'm not a programmer, so those comments are less likely to be read by me than titles.

[rvz]

> you'll find many examples

For example: [0]

> Any idea why this one in particular made you feel that way?

Perhaps there's something to do with the fame of the person?

It's difficult to say but it appears that the implicit HN 'criteria' for this is in computer science is to at least be famous enough to be an ACM Turing Award winner. Maybe this is why the reception to the death of another fellow computer scientist and engineer was low. [0]

Nevertheless, they are both worthy of the HN black bar to recognise their achievements to computer science. But I would expect to see a black bar for Frances Allen's passing but unfortunately not for Bill English.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24032820

[grappler]

That sounds like black bar level stuff