Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Frances Allen has died

ibm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 110 posts

Re: Frances Allen has died

#21

Post by [deleted] »

mumblemumble wrote: post #19
DoreenMichele wrote: post #4

First 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…

[deleted]

Re: Frances Allen has died

#22

Post by dspillett »

pmiller2 wrote: post #20
mumblemumble wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> a "real computer scientist," whatever that means

At university we would say that computer science was the art, where programming was the craft[1]. It is probably fairer to state that programming is an application of the science.

[1] Though with less of a sneery tone than used when people said "mathematics is the art where computer science is the craft"

Re: Frances Allen has died

#23

Post by globular-toast »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #4

First 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.

Interesting. If you search for "died" on HN in the last month, say, you'll find many examples. Most have 0 or 1 comments, many have around the same as this has now, but none are about it being sad to not have heard about that person. Any idea why this one in particular made you feel that way?

Re: Frances Allen has died

#24

Post by raverbashing »

sanxiyn wrote: post #10

Frances 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.

Did the concept of SIMD even exist in 1971?

Re: Frances Allen has died

#25

Post by p_l »

raverbashing wrote: post #24
sanxiyn wrote: post #10

Frances 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.

Did the concept of SIMD even exist in 1971?

Flynn's taxonomy was codified in 1966

Re: Frances Allen has died

#26

Post by sitkack »

sanxiyn wrote: post #15
sanxiyn wrote: post #10

Frances 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.…

> 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.

Simple things can run at higher speeds than complex things. Simplicity should be an architectural element, not a quality, but a feature.

Your idea for the Fran compiler is excellent. Throw in METAII from Dewey Schorre and it can be language agnostic.

Re: Frances Allen has died

#27

Post by rvz »

globular-toast wrote: post #23
DoreenMichele wrote: post #4

First 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.

Interesting. If you search for "died" on HN in the last month, say, you'll find many examples. Most have 0 or 1 comments, many have around the same as this has now, but none are about it being sad to not have heard about that person. Any idea why this one in particular made you feel that way?

> you'll find many examples

For example: [0]

> Any idea why this one in particular made you feel that way?

Perhaps there's something to do with the fame of the person?

It's difficult to say but it appears that the implicit HN 'criteria' for this is in computer science is to at least be famous enough to be an ACM Turing Award winner. Maybe this is why the reception to the death of another fellow computer scientist and engineer was low. [0]

Nevertheless, they are both worthy of the HN black bar to recognise their achievements to computer science. But I would expect to see a black bar for Frances Allen's passing but unfortunately not for Bill English.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24032820

Re: Frances Allen has died

#28

Post by kitd »

scott31 wrote: post #18
hardwaregeek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ok, I'll bite.

Why?

Re: Frances Allen has died

#29

Post by graycat »

Fran and I were on the same floor at IBM's Watson lab. I was in an AI project doing applied math, e.g., some optimization, and mathematical statistics (for the AI work we were doing, system monitoring, i.e., anomaly detection, better than our AI work!). She was regarded as a major expert in compiling and numerical codes for scientific computing.

I heard that she was working on a software product that among many other things would do fast matrix multiplication using some parallelism.

So, just for the heck of it, I wrote and ran a little routine in PL/I that used PL/I's feature of multi-tasking to get some parallelism and showed my code to her. She was a little surprised I'd written the code, had a smile, and explained why her work closer to some hardware features (I don't recall the details) would be faster!

I wasn't surprised or disappointed that my little PL/I tasking code would be slower than what she was doing, but at least I got her to explain the hardware she was using and how she was exploiting it!

As I recall, she was married to Jack Schwartz at Courant Institute of NYU and as in

Nelson Dunford and Jacob T. Schwartz, Linear Operators.

Re: Frances Allen has died

#30

Post by sanxiyn »

raverbashing wrote: post #24
sanxiyn wrote: post #10

Frances 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.

Did the concept of SIMD even exist in 1971?

Vector processors date from 1960s, but the neceesary techniques for loop analysis (using Fourier-Motzkin method) was not found till 1990s.
Post reply on HN