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Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

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Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#81

Post by peanutcrisis »

lccerina wrote: post #80

Not a single woman? No Barbara Liskov - Programming with abstract data types? No Grace Hopper - The education of a computer? No Frances Allen - Program optimization?

Should the work of women be on that list for the sole reason that they are women? There are many more men who have written papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned yet they didn't make the list. If you believe in equality, then you have to believe that the work of people who happen to be women can compete on their own merit. The absence of women in that list isn't necessarily evidence of bias as implied in your remark.

Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#82

Post by Clubber »

ahartmetz wrote: post #73

Especially the Codd paper (what if Codd had died in World War 2?) makes me wonder: What are the non-obvious (kind of arbitrary even) yet extremely helpful concepts that no one has thought of or that didn't find the resonance that they should have?

Binary search and efficient sorting algorithms is pretty important.

Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#83

Post by vitus »

generationP wrote: post #35
Upvoter33 wrote: post #13

Love this, agree w/ all. Probably just needs to be a bigger list. Unix paper. Hinton on deep learning (pick one). Map Reduce + GFS from Google. Paxos from dist systems. PGP paper; RSA paper

Does anyone actually use Paxos in real life? And let me ask the same question for all other academic distributed algorithms right away. I recall seeing a study some 10 years ago checking the major cloud providers for Byzantine fault tolerance and finding none of them to exhibit the qualities that the known algorithms would guarantee; apparently they would just rely on timing and hoping things don't get too twisted.

> Does anyone actually use Paxos in real life?

Yes, it's very widely used at Google through Chubby, which underpins many core pieces of infrastructure, including name resolution. (It used to be common practice to depend more directly on Chubby for synchronization of state via shared global files, but that fell out of favor about 6 years ago due to reliability risks associated with just blasting out changes globally without any canarying.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)#Produ... lists a bunch of other use cases (notably, Google's Spanner and Amazon's DynamoDB).

> And let me ask the same question for all other academic distributed algorithms right away.

Raft (designed as a more understandable alternative to Paxos) is more commonly used, as I understand it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm)#Production_us...

> I recall seeing a study some 10 years ago checking the major cloud providers for Byzantine fault tolerance and finding none of them to exhibit the qualities that the known algorithms would guarantee.

I'm curious which study you're referring to. I could believe that while Paxos might be used as a building block, it might not be used in a consistent manner throughout.

Also, note that not all of the variations of Paxos handle Byzantine faults.

Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#84

Post by EdwardCoffin »

peanutcrisis wrote: post #81
lccerina wrote: post #80

Not a single woman? No Barbara Liskov - Programming with abstract data types? No Grace Hopper - The education of a computer? No Frances Allen - Program optimization?

Should the work of women be on that list for the sole reason that they are women? There are many more men who have written papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned yet they didn't make the list. If you believe in equality, then you have to believe that the work of people who happen to be women can compete on their own merit. The absence of women in that list isn't necessarily evidence of bias as implied…

> papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned

Citation needed

Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#85

Post by peanutcrisis »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #84
peanutcrisis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the work of women be on that list for the sole reason that they are women? There are many more men who have written papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned yet they didn't make the list. If you believe in equality, then you have to believe that the work of people who happen to be women can compete on their own merit. The absence of women in that list isn't necessarily evidence of bias as implied…

> papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned Citation needed

Don't act in bad faith, the entirety of this thread is filled with examples.

Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#86

Post by EdwardCoffin »

peanutcrisis wrote: post #85
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned Citation needed

Don't act in bad faith, the entirety of this thread is filled with examples.

I'd put Liskov's Programming with abstract data types up against any of them. Fran Allen's work was so fundamental it's hard to find compiler stuff that doesn't build on her work.

> Don't act in bad faith

This sounds like projection to me

Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#87

Post by peanutcrisis »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #86
peanutcrisis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't act in bad faith, the entirety of this thread is filled with examples.

I'd put Liskov's Programming with abstract data types up against any of them. Fran Allen's work was so fundamental it's hard to find compiler stuff that doesn't build on her work. > Don't act in bad faith This sounds like projection to me

You asked for "citations", the thread is literally filled with references to them. How is it not bad faith to have to prove to you things that you can easily check for yourself?

Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#89

Post by lvl155 »

lccerina wrote: post #80

Not a single woman? No Barbara Liskov - Programming with abstract data types? No Grace Hopper - The education of a computer? No Frances Allen - Program optimization?

I don’t think representation needs to be a thing for a personal list on a blog. Government? Absolutely. Corporate? maybe. That said, of course there have been many critical female contributions in the field. However, it’s also a numbers game since CS academia has been very gender/sex lopsided to this day. So production would represent that (sad) reality.

Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

#90

Post by EdwardCoffin »

peanutcrisis wrote: post #87
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd put Liskov's Programming with abstract data types up against any of them. Fran Allen's work was so fundamental it's hard to find compiler stuff that doesn't build on her work. > Don't act in bad faith This sounds like projection to me

You asked for "citations", the thread is literally filled with references to them. How is it not bad faith to have to prove to you things that you can easily check for yourself?

You misunderstood the request. Your original comment was claiming that there were many papers far more influential than any of the papers named that were by women. I was requesting evidence of this influence. In response you say that what, all of the references filling this thread are more influential than say Liskov or Allen? If not all, which ones?

The original comment you were responding to was pointing out that none of the papers listed were by women, and suggested several that were that are undeniably influential. Perhaps you think they aren't because you haven't read them, or presumably even heard of them?

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