Important Women in CS Who Aren't Grace Hopper (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Important Women in CS Who Aren't Grace Hopper (2018)

hillelwayne.com

34 pointsseverine18 comments

No, Latanya Sweeney has absolutely nothing to do with Differential Privacy. The author seems to have confused her with Cynthia Dwork.

I cannot cite 12 men who technically inflenced the history of computer science.

Top of mind, I have Alan Turing, Dennis Richie, Bjarne Sroustrup, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvald.

And yes, for the women, I have the three that the author does not want to hear about.

Maybe it's time to stop being paranoid.

Needs more Adele Goldberg.

Discussed 5 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304603 (232 points/61 comments)

"Sophie Wilson - Designed the ARM instruction set"

This is disingenuous. Sophie Wilson was Roger Wilson and unquestionably a man in the early eighties when that work was done.

> Sophie Wilson was Roger Wilson and unquestionably a man in the early eighties when that work was done.

That someone had not yet gone public with a transgender identity does not support this description.

Also missing Éva Tardos, former dean of CS at Cornell who wrote Algorithm Design and did significant research on propagation in social networks.

Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco systems. (for memo)

No Ada Lovelace? For shame. Or is this contemporary women? Seems like a major oversight.

> Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is widely regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of computers and one of the first computer programmers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

No Margaret Hamilton either. Rude.

The very first sentance of the post is: "I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace."

Well I’m not tired of it. She deserved a bullet point, and so did Grace Hopper. You don’t have to exclude potentially the most influential people in the entire field, man or woman, just to prove a point that other women also are majorly changing the world in other ways or disciplines. It’s two more bullet points. Come on.

Feels like an excuse for a clickbait headline. The post is good! Good content doesn’t always speak loudly enough, unfortunately, so clickbait titles are the metric becoming a target.

The whole point is that the reader is presumably already familiar with those figures.

The extent of Ada Lovelace's contribution is unclear. There is a strong bias towards embellishing a nice story ("the first programmer was female"). There's evidence that many of "her" programs were actually written by Babbage.

I never said she was the first, but I don’t disagree. She was still in the room when it happened, and she published her findings. Kind of a big deal for a woman of her time.

> According to what Lovelace’s biographer Betty Alexandra Toole, author of Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: Poetical Science (Strawberry Press, 1998) explained to OpenMind, “she saw what Babbage did not see: the machine might work on other things beside numbers, e.g. symbols.” For Swade, Lovelace was “remarkably visionary” and “saw the reach of computers extending beyond mathematics into life and science.” Woolley recalls the fact that Lovelace noticed how the punch card system of Babbage’s machine was similar to that of the complex looms of the time.” When she observed that ‘the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves’, she showed what imagination could reveal that mathematics alone could not.”

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/technology/visionaries/ada-l...

Well she was an extremely privileged woman. Same with Grace Hopper. They both had unique access to one-of-a-kind equipment at the time. So you're really not saying much more than she was in a unique position in history. Being important to computer science and just "being along for the ride" are two different things. The difference with Grace Hopper is that she very clearly made contributions that still affect us to this day. It's not so clear when it comes to Lovelace.

Line 1 of the article: "I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com