Award

[flexibeast]

First woman honored with Turing Award:

One of the most prestigious prizes in computing, the $100,000 Turing Award, went to a woman Wednesday for the first time in the award's 40-year history.

Frances E. Allen, 75, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques for optimizing the performance of compilers, the programs that translate one computer language into another. This process is required to turn programming code into the binary zeros and ones actually read by a computer's colossal array of minuscule switches.

Apart from "Yay! About time!", two other things occur to me:

• i wonder if the significant contributions to computing made by Lynn Conway will ever be recognised with some sort of award? Or will her transsexuality make that politically untenable?


• i wonder whether this news will make it to reddit, and if so, how high it will end up being ranked?

 

Comments

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

Not sure where i found it; but i don't think it was reddit, since the link i can *blush* now see on the reddit front page - how did i miss it when i checked that page just before i posted this entry? - is the non-print version of the link i provided. Anyway, thanks for pointing out my error.

[penguinpusher.livejournal.com]

Incidentally the highest honours comp-sci mark ever achieved at La Trobe (which has been rated in the top 10 in the world twice in the last 10 years by the journal of systems and software) was achieved by a woman, and there are plenty of female staff, students and tutors- or there were up til I left. In my experience geeks aren't really sexist, so it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that this made the reddit front page. Hasn't made slashdot, but slashdot is normally a day or two behind reddit.

Even in the games industry it's mostly not the geeks who are the sexist pigs, it's management, which is far worse of course :(

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

In my experience geeks aren't really sexist

Unfortunately, that's not been my experience; it's because i've encountered so much alpha-male boofery not only in general, but in IT in particular, that it's such a 'hot-button' issue for me. i've also observed a tendency in which the more actually competent a tech person is, the less sexist they are. But they're just my experiences; i realise that they may not be representative at all.

Hasn't made slashdot

No, but if and when it does, i'm sure there'll be the usual bleatings from the peanut gallery, involving stupid comments which demonstrate a lack of understanding about why at least some women often don't find the male culture in IT particular comfortable . . . .