Wish we could get the black bar up.
Frances Allen has died
41–50 of 110 posts
Re: Frances Allen has died
#42I'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.
Looks like a great book, will read - thanks for the recommendation.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#43Fran 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…
While I suppose it's possible someone was writing PL/I quite recently, the more probable option is that this story is from the late 60s.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#44My brain read the title as "France Had Aliens" which I was really curious to read. Thanks brain.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cli…
She has been mentioned in comments before. Mostly in the context of compiler optimization, programming models, the history of C vs. other programming languages as systems programming language, and so on. Mostly an excerpt from a book where she said in an interview something along the lines of "We had such good things, and then came C..." (implying we lost the good things(with C))
Re: Frances Allen has died
#46@dang can we get a black bar in her honor?
signed.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#47Fran 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…
> 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?
That is actually very common in my experience when people talk to me about some guy and they think I might have heard of his wife.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, I'll bite. Why?
I don't know why he is doing that, probably money
I meant why do you think he's trying to make the web proprietary.
AFAICS he's doing the exact opposite:
Re: Frances Allen has died
#49First 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.
That sounds like black bar level stuff
Re: Frances Allen has died
#50Fran gave a talk when I interned at TJ Watson one summer. Her stories of the early days of compilers were beyond fascinating and made it clear how much we all now were just building on ideas they established decades ago.
Later, my wife was the first to receive the IBM PhD fellowship established in Fran's honor. Fran awarded it to her at a conference (Grace Hopper I think) and of course was gracious, offering to help as your career moved forward. Thankful for that investment in our future.