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by mumblemumble 2148 days ago
> 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/
2 comments
formerly_proven 2147 days ago
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?

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pmiller2 2148 days ago
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.

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dspillett 2148 days ago
> 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"

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mumblemumble 2147 days ago
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?

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segfaultbuserr 2147 days ago
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.
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