Great Works in Programming Languages (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Great Works in Programming Languages (2004)

cis.upenn.edu

67 pointsmirceasoaica9 comments

A very impressive list. I wondered how accessable these articles are and searched for the first one. My first hit was a retrospective written by C.A.R. Hoare in 2009. It too is a very interesting read. Haven't found the original though...

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1562764.1562779

http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~worboys/processes/hoare%20axio...

The title + filetype:pdf seems to find them all.

Awesome, thanks! I hadn't looked too hard but now that you point out how easy it is you just gave me something to do this weekend.

Benjamin Pierce was my CS advisor freshman year, it's great to see him on the front page of HN. I'm definitely going to try to get through the papers in the "greatest of the great" section

Not a single woman, unless I am mistaken. (Am I?) Not sure what that says.

I don't think it says anything. The vast majority of the seminal papers were written in the 60's and 70's, when few women were even in academia in the first place. A good number are from the 80's, during which you can argue very little emphasis was placed on women in engineering at all. By the nineties we were trying harder to equalize the gap, but it was not yet a priority in the field of CS. The last papers on here are from 2000. Basically, if you know the history of women in academia, the lack of women on this list is absolutely no surprise.

What do you expect people to do, pretend that there was a surplus of female researchers when the really widely applicable research was happening? That's simply not true, and it wouldn't be true in any field.

Perhaps include an apology and treatise on historical sexism? Maybe go hunting for a handful of papers by women from that era, and include them in the interests of inclusion?

The former would be irrelevant at best, and the latter is usually called tokenism, but both are options. If that's actually the goal. Personally, I suspect neither is helpful.

Probably not much - there are certainly papers out there - but as with most things - its the popular hits that get remembered. However it would have been nice to see at least Grace Hopper's compiler papers mentioned e,g:

G.M. Hopper, "Compiling Routines," Computers and Automation, Edmund C. Berkeley and Associates, vol. 2, no. 4, May 1953, pp. 1-5.

though given age of those papers - it may not be familiar to those surveyed.

It says at least a little bit about the sexual politics of the industry. In two ways: For one, there just haven't been very many women in the field, for a variety of reasons that I should hope I don't need to enumerate here.

Second, what few there have been still have a tendency to get overlooked. I'd hope to have at least seen Liskov & Wing's 1994 paper in this list.

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