Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

Often in the minds of people who are not involved in an area, that area become epitomized by a person. For science it is Albert Einstein. In the US Civil Rights movement it is Martin Luther King. In computers it is becoming Turing.

Turing is pretty good, I think.

View on HN

I'm okay with Turing occupying that position.

And I'm not OK with ONLY Turing occupying this position.

Von Neumann, Curry, Kholmogorov, McCartey, Armstrong, Norvig, many others (yes, I'm mixing alive and dead) - are they really not standing near Turing?

You want to make the same list for civil rights?

If you want to evangelize computer science to the masses, then by all means. I applaud that. But I'm not going to do it, and I can't ask someone else to. Turing is not bad enough to be disqualified, so if there's only one and the chips have fallen such that it's him, I'm okay with that.

But Einstein is sufficient to represent science? He's not even sufficient to represent physics.

BTW, who is McCartey? Did you mean John McCarthy?

You think anyone not involved in computing knows who Alan Turing was? Maybe in the UK he's more of a household name than the US... (?)

Generally speaking, the layperson's understanding of computers is that Bill Gates made Windows and Office, Steve Jobs made the iPhone, and artificial intelligence tries to pass the Turing Test.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, though; but using these as paths to entry, there are a wealth of rewards for the curious who begin their learning through searching Wikipedia for this Turing guy.

Most people who are aware of WW2 history know who turing is. In the UK anyway.

As a 30 year-old American with a mild interest in WWII history, I had never heard of Alan Turing until I became interested in computer science. While I hadn't heard of him, I did learn about the Enigma machine in high school.

Also, I have only run into one or two people who recognized his name that weren't into computers.

Sadly, there are lots of great men and women who don't get the recognition they deserve. For example, Thomas Paine, a man who played a significant part in America's decision to declare independence. When he published "The Age of Reason" after the war, America responded by pretending he never existed for a couple hundred years.

Yes.

I suspect that in XXII computer industry will be epitomized by Jobbs. "Jobbs did computer industry".

Laughable, but surely possible

Reply on news.ycombinator.com