Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: https://contractfortheweb.org/
Frances Allen has died
51–60 of 110 posts
Re: Frances Allen has died
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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))
Yes, I'm aware. But it's a really large forum with a lot of traffic and I'm not a programmer, so those comments are less likely to be read by me than titles.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
After looking through all the Turing Award winners, my answer is Stephen Cook - a CS mathematician who did nothing on engineering, discovered the concept of NP-completeness.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#54Fran 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…
>I hope you approached with more humility than this telling suggests?
Why the question mark at the end? Are you expecting the poster to reply for your own benefit or is it that you'd enjoy seeing him/her apologise publicly for sharing a personal (and presumably happy, at least to them) memory of a former work colleague who has just died. A memory that you have just tortuously construed into a supposed sexist encouter with literally zero insight, context or knowledge ?
Perhaps you might wish to consider your own humility.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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))
Yes, I'm aware. But it's a really large forum with a lot of traffic and I'm not a programmer, so those comments are less likely to be read by me than titles.
Maybe it's also because for most in the industry it amounts to sacrilege.
edit: Nothing to speak about, hush, hush, otherwise the emperors new clothes ...
Re: Frances Allen has died
#56Fran 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…
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
graycat's comment contains several details that go against your interpretation. For example the fact that Fran "had a smile" and patiently explained to him why his "little PL/I routine" would be slower than her state-of-the-art optimization work is clearly intended to depict the narrator as naive, and Fran as the expert. The mention of PL/I means that this anecdote likely took place fifty years ago, decades before she Turing Award winner. And the story makes it perfectly clear who ended up being the explainer and who the explainee. Indeed, that seems to be its main point.
As for the marriage bit, the strongest plausible interpretation is simply that it's interesting. Anyone familiar with computer science history would be interested to find out that the two of them had been married, and certainly that goes both ways: an anecdote about Schwartz would be enhanced by mentioning his marriage to a famous compiler optimization researcher. Indeed, it's not hard to find web pages about Schwartz that do this.
I don't think your points are entirely ungrounded, but they weren't the most plausible or good-faith reading of the comment. The cost of introducing an ideological scolding into a discussion like this is non-zero, so there needs to be a bar to clear. That's one reason why we have that guideline, which has proven to work well in situations like this: it basically leads to scolding for egregious cases, forgiveness for borderline cases, and open-mindedness in unclear ones.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant why do you think he's trying to make the web proprietary. AFAICS he's doing the exact opposite: https://contractfortheweb.org/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720591
So no black banner because you can't torrent someone else's hard work.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#58Going on a tangent, I think most of us missed Bill English's passing a few days ago since I think because people only noticed it on the weekend when there are less HN users active.
Re: Frances Allen has died
#59Earlier 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
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Re: Frances Allen has died
#60Going on a tangent, I think most of us missed Bill English's passing a few days ago since I think because people only noticed it on the weekend when there are less HN users active.
It was mentioned in this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059231, but not in an obvious way.