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Frances Allen has died

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Re: Frances Allen has died

#31

Post by DoreenMichele »

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?

Many years ago, I had a good friend named Frances who lamented the fact that people generally could not keep it straight that Frances is a girl's name and Francis is a boy's name. Rembering that friend, I clicked on the link to check the gender because people don't always follow the rules about such things and because I was short of sleep and wondering if I was even remembering that correctly.

Given my reason for clicking the link, I believe it's the first time I've seen her mentioned on HN. I likely would have clicked on any article with the name Frances in the title and remembered the name if I had ever seen it before.

Because I'm a woman, I actively keep my eye out for female role models. I have a fairly strong math background (for the world at large -- not for the HN crowd) and spent some time looking up info on Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female Fields Medalist, and even blogged about it at the time.

Given my interest in female role models and my personal association with the name Frances, I think I would have known the name had I ever seen it before. It would have likely stuck with me.

I've been here eleven years. It seems I've never seen her name before. And, in fact, if you search for it, it comes up (in the titles section, as part of a description, not really a title) only once ten years ago (until the past 24 hours).

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=frances+allen

Re: Frances Allen has died

#32

Post by martinlaz »

sitkack wrote: post #14
wglb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice analogy. Although it's very unlikely that PHP will ever be as highly regarded as are C and Unix today.

Re: Frances Allen has died

#33

Post by belorn »

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.

I create programs professionally and I know very few winner of the Turing Award by name. If someone said "who was the first native-English speaking Turing Award winner" I would not be able to answer unless I went through each winner and manually checked. I suspect quite few programmers in the world (and people on HN) are familiar enough with Turing Award winners that they can answer questions like that.

I would guess that people who work on building compilers and compiler optimization are more likely to know her name than programmers.

Re: Frances Allen has died

#35

Post by amw-zero »

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?

I can’t think of any noteworthy idea in computing that didn’t exist in 1971.

Re: Frances Allen has died

#36

Post by yardshop »

anotherevan wrote: post #11
relaunched wrote: post #3

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.

Even just a "title" attribute with the name of the person being honored would help sometimes.

Re: Frances Allen has died

#37

Post by tombert »

This is absolutely worthy of a black bar.

I read one of Frances’ papers on compiler optimization, and while some of it went over my head, it was still valuable information; the world is a sadder place without her.

Re: Frances Allen has died

#39

Post by mumblemumble »

dspillett wrote: post #22
pmiller2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I think that this might be exploring the analogy's breaking point.

It can be quite easy to draw a clean line between theoreticians and implementors in other fields. Biologists and veterinarians, physicists and engineers, etc. But who was the last major computer science theoretician who wasn't also a skilled programmer or system architect (or both)? Alonzo Church?

Re: Frances Allen has died

#40

Post by jameshart »

graycat wrote: post #29

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…

I’m sure you are just trying to share a memory of interacting with an illustrious colleague here - and my sympathies go to you as it’s always a shock to learn of the passing of someone you worked with.

But I think you maybe need to work on how you present this anecdote - as it is, it reads like you tried to mansplain her own research to a Turing Award winner. I hope you approached with more humility than this telling suggests?

Also, you should be aware that contextualizing professional women in terms of who their husband is or what his credentials are has long been used to underplay women’s individual achievements. Again, I don’t think that’s your intent, but you could consider whether, in the case of talking about Jacob Schwartz, you would have been moved to drop in the detail of who he was married to?

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