[danso]

A little off-topic...but I was just reading "Coders at Work" and of the 15 coders interviewed, only one was female (Fran Allen):

http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html

Despite this, the author (Peter Seibel) begins his introduction by mentioning Ada Lovelace in the very first sentence. In the next sentence, he talks about the six women - Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum - who were called to be the first programmers of ENIAC.

I don't know if this was explicitly intentional on Seibel's part, a sort of gender-balancing of the book given its one female interviewee, but it was a nice reminder of how, at one point in time, it wasn't strange at all that women were among the forefront of computer pioneers. Today, the numbers have receded to the point that some people just think that women are inherently not "built" for programming. Well, some clearly were...this isn't like arguing whether the Navy SEALs should let in a real life "G.I. Jane"...given the history of women in programming, it's still a strong possibility that the gender disparity is heavily influenced by social trends and stigma and is something that we can mitigate.

(note: I'm not accusing Seibel of not having enough diversity in his book...it's very likely Fran Allen was the only woman available for his book and who played as interesting a part in history as Robert Knuth, Peter Norvig, and the other big names that Seibel interviews)

Edit: Also, the Fran Allen interview is really interesting. I jumped to it to see her thoughts on the gender disparity, but most of the interview is on her thoughts about early programming, teaching scientists to code, and how C ruined the art of compilers

[mjn]

Some of the depictions in the 1960s, interestingly, played up programming as a stereotypically "women's" occupation, complete with pop-psychology explanations of why women were particularly suited for it: http://blog.fogcreek.com/girls-go-geek-again/

[snogglethorpe]

The mother of a friend of my sister's was a programmer in the '60s (for some large company, IBM or the like), and to hear her tell it, the stereotypical programmer back then was more like traditional stereotypes of newspaper reporters than anything else: hard-drinking, chain-smoking, wise-cracking, cynical, etc.

It was pretty funny imagining her—a petite artsy (actually she was a full-time artist at that point) grandmother type when I talked to her—knocking back shots of whisky with the boys but apparently that's what they all did...

[justin66]

> I'm not accusing Seibel of not having enough diversity in his book...it's very likely Fran Allen was the only woman available for his book and who played as interesting a part in history as Robert Knuth, Peter Norvig, and the other big names that Seibel interviews

Adele Goldberg would have been an excellent interview subject. Not up to the level of interest of Knuth, but certainly up to the level of some of the others.

I try not to jump to conclusions with these things. There's no telling who returned Seibel's calls and who didn't.

[graycat]

At Watson, my office was on the same floor as Fran's, and we talked a few times. She had a heck of a nice smile. She played a role in a math subroutine library that could take special advantage of several processors, and I asked her about some of that. I mentioned that it was easy enough just to start some tasks. She explained, as I recall, how her work also did careful things about data alignment in interleaved memory or some such, etc.! That was really getting into the details!

She was one of the very few women I ever saw in a STEM subject and good at it.

Her husband was Jack Schwartz of the fundamental 'Linear Operators' with Nelson Dunford, as I recall, at Yale. Schwartz was long at Courant and did a programming language SETL, 'set language', for allowing programming via essentially set theory notation.

[dvdhsu]

> who were called to be the first programmers of ENIAC.

Interestingly, Ada Lovelace, also a woman, is considered the first programmer. She wrote a program to compute the calculate "a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with [Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine]." [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_lovelace

[sliverstorm]

To my understanding, women's involvement in early computers was largely as operators and for data entry. In other words, menial labor. It would be easy to retrospectively recolor this reality, if one wanted, as our understanding of what it means to "program" a computer has changed. Today a programmer writes code, back then a programmer manually entered code written by someone else. Recall the term, "PROM programmer" (burner). A PROM programmer certainly did not architect code.

I could be wrong, of course.

[roguecoder]

The idea that coding algorithms into something executable is "menial" labor is pretty insulting to all of us currently coders, but even given that women invented multiplication routines, using human-readable commands and the IDE. That originally all of what we now consider "programming" was assumed to be menial labor is beside the point; they were doing what we're now paid good money for.

[sliverstorm]

I think you misunderstand. What I am saying is that there used to be a role similar to a scribe- someone who toggles switches according to a paper someone else wrote. Someone who feeds into the machine, punch cards someone else wrote. This is the "menial labor" I speak of.

[pinterface]

You may be interested to know Seibel gave a non-zero amount of thought to the issue of women in "Coders at Work": http://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/women-coders/