Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory | Hacker News Reader

Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory

quantamagazine.org

94 pointspseudolus71 comments

> Still, for coder-scientists in academic systems that measure success by paper citations, things haven’t changed all that much.

This is true. Someone still needs to write code for all the systems and simulations needed to do science. But you don't get much academic credits for building these things. Academic career-wise, much better to run simulations using software others have written, and write papers about that.

Then again, being a programmer gives one a good position to leave academia and get a software engineering job.

I like that this article gives me more reasons than I already had to admire everybody involved, even the writer.

Sorry if slightly off topic: This reminds of me a great play about a young, fictional mathematician woman that comes to great insights about chaos and entropy in the universe.

The ending is beautiful.

"Arcadia" by Tom Stoppard

My favorite of Stoppard's plays. (Which is a very high bar.)

In a similar vein there was also David Auburn's "Proof" which featured a female mathematician following in the footsteps of her mentally ill mathematician father.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(play)

Arcadia was infinitely better imho. Proof is formulaic (didactic and on the nose on its moralizing theme) and propagates a number of stereotypes about mathematicians around mental health and the lone genius etc.

When I was a child, I was told by my 1st grade teacher that math was important because when I'm a mother with a wonderful husband, I would know how to do fractions and measurements to prepare cakes easier.

I would have loved to hear stories like this instead.

Ultimately, the people teaching young people math do not understand what it is or how to actually use it. If you took away their ability to do math, it is unlikely that anything would actually change in their life.

Mathematics is the closest thing that humans have to doing magic. It's about consistent axioms and finding true statements that are unintuitive. And it allows you to problem solve at a level that exceeds what experience can teach you.

No 'this is how you can use math' statement that I've ever heard in school has ever done it justice.

Here's another history of math and women story that you might be interested in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MpQG2xXVo

Boy, how the tables have turned.

What, no Mary Cartwright?

Good for them I guess? What a weird title, either say 'women' or 'programmers', the use of the phrase 'women programmers' makes it seem like some sort of alien concept.

It's become a common construction, but it bugs me too. You'd never say "men nurses", for instance. Makes it sound like nurses who specialize in working with men, not necessarily nurses who are men. It's awkward but it's sticking around, unfortunately.

[EDIT] more relevantly, "women doctors" definitely reads like an old-timey euphemism for gynecologists.

The headline "Two programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory" would have done a lot more to further the right of women to be in the STEM fields.

Pointing out they're female only further makes it look like most women are too incompetent to do math or science.

Except that it doesn't. Really interesting article too.

Yes, I expect it was very interesting indeed - I mean, who programmed these women and how did they even do that? And what did programming the women have to do with chaos theory, was chaos theory part of that process?! That sounds like some weird offshoot of MK Ultra.

Or did they mean "two female programmers", because that sounds like a much less interesting story.

edit: in case downvoters didn't get it, "woman" is a noun and when you use a noun in place of an adjective it can be written after the following noun and "of"; "defense department" and "department of defense" are basically the same meaning in English. Computer programmer is a programmer of computers. If you still don't get it, consider how strange "two men programmers" would sound.

It's really odd but for some in intersectionality circles, "female" is a pejorative. Best I can tell it has something to do with reducing women to being objects of reproduction. No idea if that was the motivation for the clumsy headline but people who are opposed to the word "female" do exist.

As a counterpoint, I find that when introducing people to coding, mentioning Grace Hopper's role in the development of compiled languages does a lot to break down the perception of it being a job for boys.

Not being associated with COBOL is hardly a bad thing...

I've been trying to pinpoint when programming transitioned from being considered "pink collar" work to "white collar" work in the general population. My parents were born in the 40s and I was born in the 80s, and when I went to college in the early 2000s they were still under the impression that programming was akin to secretarial work. (I didn't pursue computer science for other reasons as out-sourcing anxiety was at its head then, not because of their weirdly mistaken impression).

Remember that in the rise of the computers, the only thing akin to typing on a keyboard was typewriter work... which was given to secretaries...

Programming was never pink collar. When women were 'programming' mainframes and big analog computers back in the day, they were just punching in programs that were written by mostly men.

Basically they were doing a rote process like women commonly did with telephone switch boards, but operating on computer signals instead of voice signals.

If a modern day programmer gets carpal tunnel, and they buy a typist so they can just dictate code to the person - no one would consider the typist a programmer unless he or she also happened to have those skills - not simply becaues they type in code.

When my parents were working for GE, the engineers/scientists were men (like my dad), and their assistants who programmed for them were commonly women (like my mom), but they were no more "just typists" than programmers are today. Pay for someone experienced was around $50-60K adjusted for inflation, which I think tells you they weren't the equivalent of Google or Amazon "software engineers", but they were the equivalent of someone making that salary for some random business in flyover country today. Lots of people make that kind of money today doing the work that businesses like Google outsource because it's not exciting enough for their in-house talent that makes six figures.

Ok, but that doesn't mean that programming was pink collar, or generally associated with women at that point.

Well, anecdotally, the reason my mom ended up as a programmer is because she had an admission/scholarship to study engineering in college revoked because she was a woman - they didn't technically exclude women, but they told her they already had one in the department and didn't need any more. So she got a degree in math (this was before computer science was a thing) and ended up working for engineers, taking their problems and turning them into code.

Now I can't say how common this was without statistics, but you can see it paints a picture of how discrimination in one area could potentially affect another in a systematic way.

It could well be (and I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest it) that reduced discrimination in areas that require both technical and soft skills have caused an exodus of women from mere coding, because it's both more lucrative and enjoyable for many of them.

That's not my impression at all. To me, it deepens their accomplishment by acknowledging the headwinds faced by women in tech.

Your proposed headline would be a fine lead-in to an article solely about a research accomplishment, but this is also an article about two people making inroads towards better gender representation in STEM fields.

The tech industry bends over backwards to get women involved. Putting them on a pedestal only worsens the divide rather than closing it.

a) there are efforts to get women involved in the tech industry, but there is still a lot of discrimination b) the article describes programmers from the 1960's

Weren’t many of the programmers in the 50s and 60s women? The gender divide didn’t start to get really bad until late 80s, from what I understand.

A 'computer' was a predominantly female job role until.. I don't know, but some time post-war when we got bored of saying 'automatic computer' to describe the increasingly dominant method of computation.

Until the invention of the phrase "software engineer", is my theory.

Being a computer is different from being a software engineer or coder/programmer. Even when women were computers, they generally weren't the coders/programmers - this task was usually up to mathematicians or other subject matter experts who were generally men.

Women computers were replaced by software definable processors, not by software engineers.

I don’t think this is accurate.

The mathematicians/engineers were more like architects, and the women programmers weren’t merely compilers or input technicians. They actually wrote code, though this was also considered a drudge task back then (a view that was corrected later). Also, proximity to the hardware allowed many to grow out of their original job descriptions.

I'm still fairly new to the industry so I realize I'm likely missing historical context, but the only discrimination I've seen has been against men and in favor of women.

In my experience you learn much more about discrimination in tech by having open minded conversations than by seeing it firsthand. Much of it is subtle and happens out of view from others.

encouragement != being put on a pedestal.

Special treatment != Encouragement.

Can you please point me in the direction of this special treatment because I've never received any. I would love to fly through a FAANG interview because I'm a woman.

I'm not even being facetious, where is all this special treatment? Clearly I'm missing out.

The amount of "let's help women/minorities specifically" programs and scholarships are numerous, but this one caught my eye a few months ago.

> I'm going to give 40 women $9000 stipends to cover their living expenses while they take Lambda School's programming course.[0]

[0] http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/women-learn-to-program-t...

I already have my degree (in CS).

btw shout out to Jessica Livingston! Amazing program.

Take a few minutes to create a gmail with a female sounding username or even an HN handle that clearly belongs to a woman. Send 10 emails or comment here for a few days and see how differently you’re treated.

Look even at the disrespectful comments Jessica got in response to that announcement. How often, if ever, have you seen those sort of comments on HN directed towards male partners at YC?

I’m not even saying this facetiously. I wish more men in tech had the courage to see what it’s like to be a woman in tech. I think it would do everyone a lot of good.

What makes you think that? Note that your claim is not a subjective claim about how you feel when you see the headline, but an objective claim about how other people will react to the headline. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that removing the mention that the programmers were women from the headline would make the headline more encouraging for women interested in STEM fields?

I don't have any evidence either way for this specific claim, but there is no shortage of studies that show that how groups are represented in media have a strong affect on how people think about those groups.

No this is great, because "two programmers" most would automatically assume are men. Maybe once shit has been sorted out and its not some fantastic amazing thing that women are in tech and it becomes more normal we won't have to state "women programmers" but until then, I'm down for this.

My problem with 'women programmers' is it sounds weird and is probably ungrammatical(female is both a noun and an adjective - women is just a noun, and it is used as an adjective in the title), not that they specify the sex of people they are writing about when their sex had a big effect on what they could contribute.

And maybe it would be good if some people who jumped to 'two men programmers' (doesn't that sound weird?) automatically instead read the article and found out they were women?

Ok so your beef is with the grammar, cool. "two programmers who identify as female" there ya go

It goes from grammatically awkward to semantically awkward. I think OP/GP's point is that it's very odd that we go through hoops to avoid the clearest articulation of the point: "two female programmers".

Perhaps we could just say 'two female programmers'

People assume that a "programmer" is male because if he weren't, "woman programmer" would likely have been used. The meaning of a word is determined by its use. If we want "programmer" to include women, we have to use it for women.

Why is 'women programmers' or equivalent the 'in' or PC thing to say? It doesn't make sense, 'women' is a plural noun; here it's used adjectivally. I've never read 'men <noun>' by anyone literate.

Two _female_ programmers.

Or hey, as another commenter points out, who gives a shit that they're women? You don't achieve the (presumed) goal of it being unremarkable whether a programmer is male or female by remarking on it every time one is female.

Their gender is rather pivotal to the story told by the article. It's not presented as remarkable that these two programmers were women -- in fact, that was quite commonplace at the time -- but rather, the article argues that their contributions have been minimized in the intervening years in part because they are women.

As for the grammatical question, there are various theories why "woman" and "women" have started being treated adjectivally, e.g. [1]. I agree that it's problematic, but it seems to be a response to equally problematic baggage attached to the way the word "female" has been used in other contexts. In other words: grammatically, you're absolutely right, but it turns out it's not _really_ just a grammatical question.

[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/02/when-you-should-use...

It's the issue of equality vs. equity.

Equality means everyone has a fair chance from start. Equity means those who didn't achieve should be benefited until they do. This is justified by saying it's the achiever's fault that the unachieving parties failed.

Currently our PC culture wants to throw money and attention at those who aren't achieving.

Because someone decided that "female" is offensive, regardless of the lack of a better alternative, and everyone joined the train.

My earlier comment about the inanity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539361

Lack of a better alternative? We have a perfectly good term for an adult female human: "woman". (Plural: "women".) See, e.g., the headline. If we need to stretch the grammar a bit to make this work, well, why not do that.

Context usually negates the need to talk about the adultness or humanness of certain subjects. If the whole population of America saw the headline "Two female programmers played a pivotal role...", absolutely zero people would be shocked to find out that the females were adults and not 5 year olds, or humans and not dolphins.

Indeed, which makes me wonder why everybody is so surprised to see the term "women".

Because 'women' is only a noun, and it is used as an adjective in the title.

You can gramatically say 'Two women played a pivotal role in the..." or you can say 'Two programmers played a pivotal role in the...", but you can't, at least to my ears, cleanly say 'Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the...'.

What sounds more correct to you?

"I saw two men teachers at the ceremony", or "I saw two male teachers at the ceremony"

I'm sure we can just use the former language to the point where people recognize both as equally correct, but as it stands currently, most English speakers would far prefer the latter over the former.

What makes it better? (Or either of them anything other than neutral, mundane words?)

What makes it better? Well, "man" and "woman" are Anglo-Saxon terms, not Roman, so there's that...

But, in the main, it's just my experience that anybody insisting on using the terms "male(s)" or "female(s)", when it comes to people, is up to no good.

"female" and "male" are very clinical, scientific terms. They also lack humanity - there are male and female dogs, cats and birds, but that's not the case for "men" or "women".

No, none of this is backed up by a dispassionate reading of a dictionary but that's language for you. It's emotive, for better or worse.

"Female" sounds like something police, Ferengi and incels say, so "woman" just sounds more pleasant.

That’s not an alternative when you want to leave age unspecified. Read the link and the clumsy “women and girls” construction, which the rabble rousers have scared everyone into using, even in medical contexts!

For context, there are ugly groups on the internet that refer to women as "females" in a way that's intended to be derogatory. (The noun form, not the adjective.) Think of how impersonal it is to say "I sat next to a male/female" vs "I sat next to a man/woman" to understand why they do this. Now people are avoiding the word "female" to distance themselves from these groups even though it's just fine as an adjective and there isn't a good alternative.

I don't think "women programmers" is the best way to phrase it, but writers haven't just randomly decided to be offended by the word "female" for no reason.

You’re making my point for me: “female” is valid as an adjective, and “woman/man” programmer make no sense, but you feel intimidated into rejecting all uses of “female” because of outrage over an unrelated phenomenon.

That’s exactly what I mean when I talk about someone deciding something and everyone joining the bandwagon without really thinking about it.

And I didn’t say I was random; it’s deliberate, but deeply confused.

I agree with your first point. It sounds absolutely bizarre to say "I saw two men programmers working in the cafe today", but apparently "I saw two women programmers working in the cafe today" works.

I don't understand what the fear of using 'female' is. Too clinical? Somehow not inclusive for transgender people?

Yes, it would be strange to say "I saw two men programmers working in the cafe today". And for me, "...two women" as well. Just like it'd be strange to say "I saw a black guy programming at the cafe today" unless you (or the person you're addressing) found that to be a sight worth noting.

"I saw a black guy programming..." is syntatically correct though, because black is an adjective modifying guy. My problem with the '(wo)men programmers' is that it is grammatically incorrect, not that it is shocking that women are programming.

It matters that they were women because women’s contributions in that past era were consistently overlooked or outright stolen. Fran Allen, the first woman to win the Turing Award, said in her “Coders at Work” interview that she knew of several women whose work in computation was stolen by men.

i think the author probably wanted to draw attention to their gender, not their sex. hence female is off the table.

Without commenting on whether its effective or not, the theory being ascribed to in the headline is clear. It has been suggested that one of the reasons why there is a strong gender imbalance in computing is the lack of role models for young women considering entering the field. Those who see this as a real problem and wish to solve it then go ahead and trumpet successful women in programming so that such role models are more prevalent.

Is this kind of thing effective? Does it make any meaningful difference to actual young women considering the field? Is the premise flawed anyway? I honestly have no idea, it's not something I've ever looked at in any depth to know if such questions are even answerable with anything other than one's own prejudice - maybe they are and it all is? If so, studies with data would be interesting and worth my time to read.

I'm a bit surprised that people around here are driven to comment in this headline and need this pointed out. Disagree with the theory all you like to whatever end you feel is a good one, by all means. Being aggressively ignorant seems to be rarely productive for anything useful.

Beyond this, clicks are where you get paid and we're talking about this and posting it here which seems worth mentioning in passing...

Chaos theory was the 90s machine learning.

For me it really was. I think it was Mondo 2000 that first pointed me to James Gleick's excellent Chaos book. After reading that I was looking for anything else like it. Eventually I found books on artificial life and genetic programming and these talked about neural nets and other machine learning systems.

Those were exciting times. I was just thinking about Mondo 2000 and recurring stories about smart drugs (nootropics?). I always wanted to try some of it but never had the guts. I'd be curious to know if there were any long term consequences for those who used them.

Edit: I just did some searching and found that R.U. Sirius did a followup article:

https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/03/09/smart-drugs-nutrients-1...

Monocle drops

Women programmers? You don’t you say!

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