I'd love to see a black banner / bar in her honor.
As an aside, when there is a black bar, I would also love it to link to the reason it is there.
Frances Allen has died
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Re: Frances Allen has died
#12First female IBM fellow. First female winner of the Turing Award. Lots of other notable stuff. Sadly, this is the first I've heard of her. Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer. Edit: To be clear, I really meant "I hope other people here are familiar with her work, even though I am not because I'm not a real programmer." I'm happy to see that some people are, in fact, familiar with her and her work.
And it doesn't mean even that.
Many worthwhile people in the world. Not all of them are famous to the people who would love to know them.
At least we can both get to know her more starting now.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#13I'd recommend reading her interview in Coders At Work. I never realized that compilers were already a flourishing field by the time C came around, and that C actually ended up having some negative effects in compiler dev.
It was more that C hindered optimization research. The interview was awesome as you said.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#14I'd recommend reading her interview in Coders At Work. I never realized that compilers were already a flourishing field by the time C came around, and that C actually ended up having some negative effects in compiler dev.
It was more that C hindered optimization research. The interview was awesome as you said.
C and Unix hindered a whole lot. It was the PHP of its day.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#15Frances Allen wrote "A Catalogue of Optimizing Transformations" in 1971. 50 years(!!!) later, they are still the backbone of optimizing compilers. I think the only major thing missing is autovectorization. She was in her 30s when she wrote it.
I think you should read it if you work on compilers, even now. But the reason is a bit different.
It was the survey of the state of the art at the time, but obviously it is not the state of the art now. Then why should you read it? Because it is written in two layers.
The first layer goes, we tried many optimization ideas, but only these were effective in practice: inlining, register allocation, etc. Others were not. Surprisingly, this layer is still mostly true today! This is both happy and sad depending on your view. Personally I think it testifies that compiler is a mature field, and it matured by 1970. (And that Frances Allen did lion's share of work maturing it.)
The second layer is, so here is how you should do inlining, register allocation, etc. While this layer is also full of gems, it is necessarily badly outdated. The paper predates graph coloring register allocation, for example. On the other hand, ironically, the state of the art 1970s algorithms are often a good choice today when you want an algorithm that is fast and low memory. (Ironic, because they were slow and high memory at the time!) This doesn't apply when there is an important new concern, for example cache locality, but happily it mostly doesn't affect compiler.
I think there should be a project to write the-state-of-the-art-in-1970s compiler. It would be a great simple and minimal alternative to GCC and LLVM, and it would also work great as a JIT code generator. We probably should name it Fran.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#16@dang can we get a black bar in her honor?
Re: Frances Allen has died
#17Frances Allen wrote "A Catalogue of Optimizing Transformations" in 1971. 50 years(!!!) later, they are still the backbone of optimizing compilers. I think the only major thing missing is autovectorization. She was in her 30s when she wrote it.
Link to the paper: https://www.clear.rice.edu/comp512/Lectures/Papers/1971-alle...
Re: Frances Allen has died
#18I'd love to see a black banner / bar in her honor.
Agreed. Any Turing Award laureate, let alone the first female Turing Award laureate, deserves a black banner
> Any Turing Award laureate deserves a black banner
Except for Tim Berners-Lee, who tries to make the web a proprietary platform
Re: Frances Allen has died
#19First female IBM fellow. First female winner of the Turing Award. Lots of other notable stuff. Sadly, this is the first I've heard of her. Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer. Edit: To be clear, I really meant "I hope other people here are familiar with her work, even though I am not because I'm not a real programmer." I'm happy to see that some people are, in fact, familiar with her and her work.
> Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer.
Sadly, no, it's not just that. Most my immediate colleagues, for example, don't know of her or her work, either. It's one heck of a field.
She had expressed some dismay, in interviews, at being the first woman to win the Turing Award. Not the Turing Award part, of course, the "first woman" part. She was far from being the first deserving candidate who didn't happen to be a dude. So I hope she wouldn't mind linking this here, even today: https://www.hillelwayne.com/important-women-in-cs/
Re: Frances Allen has died
#20First female IBM fellow. First female winner of the Turing Award. Lots of other notable stuff. Sadly, this is the first I've heard of her. Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer. Edit: To be clear, I really meant "I hope other people here are familiar with her work, even though I am not because I'm not a real programmer." I'm happy to see that some people are, in fact, familiar with her and her work.
> Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer. Sadly, no, it's not just that. Most my immediate colleagues, for example, don't know of her or her work, either. It's one heck of a field. She had expressed some dismay, in interviews, at being the first woman to win the Turing Award. Not the Turing Award part, of course, the "first woman" part. She was far from being the first deserving candidate who didn't ha…
Yeah. If anything, I would say it means they're not a "real computer scientist," whatever that means.
Just to put the second part of your comment in perspective, there have only been 3 female winners of the Turing award, total, by my count.