Google Doodle Remembers Computing Pioneer Grace Hopper 157
A reader writes "Monday's Google Doodle honors computing genius Grace Hopper (remembered as a great pioneer in computing, as well as in women's achievements in science and engineering), on what would have been her 107th birthday, doodling her right where she spent much of her time – at the helm of one of the world's first computers."
Grace Hopper Park (Score:4, Interesting)
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There wasn't room due to all the THIS DIVISION and THAT DIVISION and 77 REDEFINES 01-WS-MY-BUTT stuff which, as far as I'm aware, does absolutely bugger all.
Re:Grace Hopper Park (Score:5, Informative)
Her Commodore/Admiral rank was only honorary.
No, it was not merely honorary. [navy.mil] However, 40 of her degrees were (see same link).
She was a computer prophet (Score:5, Informative)
Chips Ahoy: Do you think the current popularity of micros is just a fad?
Hopper: No, the big mainframes are going to disappear. In fact, I intend to scuttle them. They have to go. They’ll be too slow. We’ll build systems of computers. It will be a whole bunch of micros, and they’ll all call each other up and talk. If you use a big mainframe, first you have to do inventory and then you do payroll and so on. You might just as well have a micro doing each of those jobs all working in parallel. That’s the way you get the speed. The big pressure is going to be on faster answers. There never was a good reason for putting inventory and payroll on the same machine. The only reason you did it was because you could only afford to own one computer. That’s no longer true. The micros are as big [in terms of processing capacity] as mainframes were only 10 or 12 years ago. Back then a big mainframe had 64K. That’s smaller than today’s micros by a long shot.
Chips Ahoy: Is there a limit of what micros can do for us?
Hopper: They’ll only be limited if our imaginations are limited. It’s all up to us. Remember, there were people who said the airplane couldn’t fly.
http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm#limits [navy.mil]
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Though she missed the issue of reliability. There's a reason certain mission critical setups don't run simple micros.
Yes, they run clusters.
And supercomputers that use Xeon and suchlike are more than just micros in how they link things together
Yes, they are micros with very fancy network cards.
But apart from those situations, yes, she was right
Your ego has run away with you, sort of like your need for antiquated affectations evinced by your need to make people read your comment in monospace. She was right, and you're wrong, and shut up.
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Uh, no it wasn't. Because of her rank there was actually problems promoting fleet operations people to Admiral positions. There's only so many "Admiral Chairs" and she occupied one and she wasn't in fleet operations.. This was one of the main reasons that she was retired by the Navy which she understood when she received the Rear Admiral rank in 1985 and she subsequently retired in 1986.
COBOL (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:COBOL (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew somebody would bring that up. In defense of COBOL, 1. Look when it was invented. 2. Look how much staying power it has. 3. Look at the train wrecks caused by later efforts to make easier, more readable programming languages.
COBOL looks pretty good when you consider all that.
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Noone [wikipedia.org] would appreciate it if you don't tell other people what he does or doesn't like.
FTFY, kid.
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I think we can blame all the faults of COBOL on the fact that she wanted it to be human readable by business managers. What would your programming language look like if the Pointy-Haired Boss had to be able to understand it?
Let us not even broach the sins of PL/1
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PL/I pioneered the free-form syntax used by C, C++, PHP, Java, C# and most other modern languages.
What other sins has it committed?
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PL/I pioneered the free-form syntax used by C, C++, PHP, Java, C# and most other modern languages.
What other sins has it committed?
PL/1 incorporated all manner of ugly ways of doing things, borrowing some I/O from COBOL or having something else hacked into it. Inexplicably I had to go back to using PL/1 on one system implementation because the I/O library could hack large I/O buffers, where most other compiler libraries were incapable and was reminded what a sloppy mess of a language it was. You could do just about anything, but it didn't do much of it elegantly. Unless you documented heavily it was difficult to come back to and fig
Re:COBOL (Score:4, Insightful)
At the time you had... Fortran... and Assembler. COBOL was a godsend to the business community. Because of it companies actually invested in computer equipment to do things... that investment reduced the cost and increased its capabilities. Eventually allowing the creation of that smart phone in your pocket. If it wasn't for COBOL it is doubtful that companies would have made the investments.
Having programed in both COBOL and Fortran... I'll take COBOL for anything business related.
Yes, it's verbose. But, it was a product of it's time. And quite the amazing language if you know what you are doing with it.
Re:COBOL (Score:5, Insightful)
At the time you had... Fortran... and Assembler. COBOL was a godsend to the business community. Because of it companies actually invested in computer equipment to do things... that investment reduced the cost and increased its capabilities. Eventually allowing the creation of that smart phone in your pocket. If it wasn't for COBOL it is doubtful that companies would have made the investments.
Having programed in both COBOL and Fortran... I'll take COBOL for anything business related.
Yes, it's verbose. But, it was a product of it's time. And quite the amazing language if you know what you are doing with it.
Anyone who has actually been suffered to write business applications in FORTRAN IV* would rather be disemboweled by a pack of rabid were-weasels than have to do that again and COBOL would appear to be a gift from Heaven.
I began my education with, what I considered being taught a load of dead or dying languages, while Object Oriented languages were just on the horizon and Pascal and c were gaining degrees of acceptance. c is still around, but I haven't heard from Pascal in ages - it was fiddly, like Modula2 and seemed to embrace the wordiness of COBOL over the conciseness of c. I've converted systems written in COBOL and at least they were readable - what the coder was doing. FORTRAN business apps are nearly unintelligible.
* note: use of all caps
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Anyone who has actually been suffered to write business applications in FORTRAN IV* would rather be disemboweled by a pack of rabid were-weasels than have to do that again and COBOL would appear to be a gift from Heaven.
Ah, but a Real FORTRAN programmer can write FORTRAN in any language. You ain't see nothing until you've seen a payroll system written in FORTRAN... using COBOL.
107?? (Score:2)
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You, sir, are confused as you know not of what you speak.
There is 'The Assembler', and 'Assembler'. The 'The' (definite article) in 'The Assembler' is the thing (program) that assembles Assembler (language) into object code. That is then merged with the linker to a run-time to become an executable. Modern Assembler languages, and by extension 'Their Assemblers', contain macro capabilities - very similar in nature to #include in C (and other such languages). But, back in the 50's, when COBOL was written,
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Sigh yourself. The 'assembler' tool does not magically read your mind and spit out code. You must actually provide input to the assembler. And this input is in, wait for it, Assembler Language! Shocking, I know!
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Ruby and Cucumber (at least for your test code)?
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Ruby and Cucumber (at least for your test code)?
How about something from at least the 1960's or 70's? I can still hear those card punching machines - tick-tick-tack-tick-tick...
Re:COBOL (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we can blame all the faults of COBOL on the fact that she wanted it to be human readable by business managers. What would your programming language look like if the Pointy-Haired Boss had to be able to understand it?
Thank you for that.
You see, Ms. Hopper, being ahead of her time in MANY respects, knew that programming should be easily done in a human readable fashion.
Programming computers should be easy. Having difficult to learn languages defeats the purpose of these machines. Being able to program these things should be easy to everyone and the fact that it STILL isn't shows the ineptitude of the computer science world - or arrogance (dude, computers SHOULD be hard to program because it's for smart people or some such nonsense).
Computers are a tool, The fact that computer languages haven't evolved much since the 1960s is pretty sad.
..
Please oh please post a flame that languages have evolved so that I can spank you hardily - 50 years and we're still typing esoteric computer code?! Seriously?
If you think that is the way it is, then YOU have NO imagination.
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Programming a computer to do simple things IS easy. You want a program to add up a list of numbers, or compute the value of pi, and I can show you how to do that in a handful of lines of code.
The trouble is, people want programs that do complicated things like manage a large company's payroll system or model a 3D fantasy world. Even things that sound pretty simple,
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Computers are hard to program because computers are stupid. That's why the most deadly words ever spoken in the industry are "All You Have To Do Is..." It's hard enough to get other humans to do things right when you tell them what to do, much less computers.
Some programming languages look more or less like English such as COBOL. Some look more or less like mathematical notation, such as FORTRAN or APL. Some are basically mathematical/symbolic notations on drugs. Each has its advantages, but none of them -
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I've always found COBOL quite readable. Math, especially, always looked clean.
SUBTRACT 10 FROM WS-A GIVING WS-B
DIVIDE WS-A INTO WS-B GIVING WS-C REMAINEDER WS-D
And I think this stolen example of conditional code is also pretty clear to read...
IF WS-AMT IS NUMERIC
ADD WS-AMT TO WS-BANLANCE
ELSE
MOVE ZEROS TO WS-AMT
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To a non-programmer, what exactly about that 'for' statement implies 'loop'? It could just as easily mean 'if i is between 1 and 100 do work here'. On the other hand, the COBOL example seems pretty unambiguous.
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Try writing the COBOL version over and over everyday and you'll get tired of it pretty quickly.
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Nobody ever claimed COBOL was intended to make life easy for developers. COBOL was designed so the people who actually bear responsibility for the business (and who are certainly not the developers) can verify that their business processes are implemented to their liking. These people include not only bosses, but also financial people, lawyers, auditors, etc.
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That's just it though -- business people don't read code! You're making the developers lives harder in order to cater to a situation that never happens.
Re:COBOL (Score:4)
What would your programming language look like if the Pointy-Haired Boss had to be able to understand it?
Lots of comments, very little actual code.
When I was in school, we had to have over 50% comments or the TA wouldn't even try to grade your program. The habit was a good one, and although I don't always get to the 50% I still put a lot of comments in my code.
Come to think of it, making your code understandable by the PHB is not a bad goal. If the PHB can understand what you are doing, the next poor programmer (which might be you a few months after you have forgotten the project) will have an easier job fixing something.
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We are assuming that the code actually does what the comment says.
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True, but I would assume that's a given in most cases.. Not all, just most..
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True, but I would assume that's a given in most cases.. Not all, just most..
I take it you don't work in the business, then.
I think one of the "Murphy" laws covers what happens to code once you document it.
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I was commenting on MY comments and those of whom I work with. In general, our comments are related to the code they document, by design, by policy and by routinely checking them in code reviews. Do they always match 100%? No, but that is the exception and not the rule, at least where I work. I fully get that my current experience is *NOT* the norm. Out of the 9 places I've worked as a programmer, my current employer is certainly at the top of the list for producing quality code. Only a few have rivaled
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"Having a conversation with the sketchbook" is a notion in visual design like architecture or construction. For little scripting tasks, I find talking to the comments an exercise in clarifying what I am trying to do and why. The intention, the way it fits the bigger picture. The code is the reality, the comments are the mental intention. Unless it is a very well understood area where to be a programmer you really have to know the domain and the problems very well, so the code is immediately obvious to the t
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What would your programming language look like if the Pointy-Haired Boss had to be able to understand it?
Lots of comments, very little actual code.
When I was in school, we had to have over 50% comments or the TA wouldn't even try to grade your program. The habit was a good one, and although I don't always get to the 50% I still put a lot of comments in my code.
That's a very bad habit, and one that you should break. Comments are evil. They are occasionally -- very occasionally -- a necessary evil, but still evil. I'll explain below.
Come to think of it, making your code understandable by the PHB is not a bad goal. If the PHB can understand what you are doing, the next poor programmer (which might be you a few months after you have forgotten the project) will have an easier job fixing something.
Absolutely, you want your code to be extremely easy to understand. In fact, that's the #1 goal, even ahead of doing the correct thing, because bugs are more likely to get fixed than unreadability, and in the long run they cost less. Comments are one way of achieving readability, but they're a crutch. Worse, they're a crutch with a bui
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I don't disagree but I'm reading someone's code at the moment, some routines in R, and the word "training" is in the name of a routine, but it doesn't explain in which sense of the word "training". So now I have to try to figure out the meaning of the result. I'm sure it was obvious to the author. Maybe fine grained comments are bad, but an overall story explaining in ordinary words the overall intent and picture would be nice. Anyway, IANAP.
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The WTF blog once featured a tale of woe by a contributor about his interview with a headhunter:
-Why do you want to change jobs?
-My employer wants me to become a COBOL programmer.
-So, you don't like to learn new things?
// to do: UML joke goes here (Score:2)
It'd have a lot more pictures in it.
Say, isn't it drag/drop/drool/click programming's turn at the top of the hype heap again?
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...human readable by business managers...
Ah!!! That explains a lot.
Um... except why anything needed by business managers needed to be HUMAN readable.
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Necessary evils. (Score:2)
I think we can blame all the faults of COBOL on the fact that she wanted it to be human readable by business managers. What would your programming language look like if the Pointy-Haired Boss had to be able to understand it?
How many programmers of that era were expert in modern corporate accounting, law, banking, business practices and procedures, as they had evolved over the past three or four centuries --- and not merely knowledgeable, but credentialed, as a C.P.A., for example?
In turn, how many accountants could have read and validated FORTRAN code for accounts receivable?
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What would your programming language look like if the Pointy-Haired Boss had to be able to understand it?
What would it look like? Each line must have a key in the first column:
or it will fail to compile.
v.2 will have the compiler generate a histogram of keys for a given source file, and the make tool would actually generate graphs. I'm sure a real programming language designer can improve on the design.
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If you're not up on your computer history. (Score:3)
Women in IT (Score:4, Funny)
You know why there aren't a lot of women in IT now, right? It's because after Grace Hopper unleashed COBOL, we're been leery about letting them in.
(It's a joke! Claim down.)
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>(It's a joke! Claim down.)
I claim up. It's higher.
COBOL was an arrow in the pioneer's back (Score:5, Insightful)
You may scoff at COBOL, but she pioneered the idea of using a more human-friendly notation instead of machine language and its cousin, assembler. Her experiments were the precursor to Algol, which shaped all the imperative block-oriented languages we use today, including C, Java, VB, Pascal, etc.
And it made software more vendor-independent as the languages were not tied to a specific machine architecture, unlike machine code and assembler.
Before that, many scoffed at the idea of "dumbing down" programming with English-like syntax, fearing it would waste resources and invite poorly educated riff-raff into the field. (Well, maybe it did :-)
Perhaps Grace didn't get it quite right on the first try, but she helped spark a computer language revolution that led to better tools down the road. She tested waters others feared.
Forgiveness (Score:3)
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FWIW, the Daily Mirror* does attribute the quote to her. Not sure where they got that from:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/grace-hopper-top-10-facts-2907958 [mirror.co.uk]
* Yeah, yeah, I know.
Oblig. SMBC (Score:5, Funny)
met her 30 years ago. (Score:2, Interesting)
I got to MEET her. I was a faculty brat at Syracuse where she was a graduation speaker, and through a lot of begging, my dad got me a seat at the speakers table, and she held forth, drinking straight scotch, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls and swearing for two hours. One of the best moments in my life. I'll never forget it, and she's been an inspiration through my career.
And I have a nanosecond.
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So she was a sailor, then? :)
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Jay Elliot described Grace Hopper as appearing to be "'all Navy', but when you reach inside, you find a 'Pirate' dying to be released". [wikipedia.org]
Fond memories of a grand lady... (Score:3)
At the time, the System 360 was all the rage, and had blue cabinets. She brought an 8080 to the presentation in a small, blue plastic case, commenting that she'd heard computers came in blue boxes. She also commented (again about the 360) that it couldn't be much of a machine, since it spent half of its time talking to itself, a reference to the operating system overhead.
I've often wondered what she'd think of computers and operating systems today, particularly Windows and Linux.
R.I.P. Grace Hopper. You're a hard lady to forget!
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Hell, I wonder what she'd think about that other 360 [wikipedia.org].
Comment removed (Score:4)
Grace used CamelCase? I think not! (Score:2)
Back in the day, COBOL names were UPPERCASE and used hyphens. So, Grace would have used CURRENT-YEAR, not CurrentYear, as the Google Doodle does. :-)
Congratulations on your 7th birthday! (Score:5, Funny)
Only allowed two digit ages and forgot to handle the overflow flag.
Some fun Grace Hopper info (Score:4, Informative)
"If it's good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission." --Grace Hopper
* credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches
* Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) is named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.
* at the age of seven she decided to determine how an alarm clock worked, and dismantled seven...
* bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics
* wrote her own compiler in 1952.. "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."
More here of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper [wikipedia.org]
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* credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches
You left out the story of why it's called debugging! From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system.
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And beat managers over the head with a cluebat, stating "the most damaging phrase in the English language is `We've always done it this way.'"
I know of a few dozen or so managers to this day that needs that cluebat applied to...
And then some.
Google's first try got the age algorithm wrong (!) (Score:3)
The first version of this Doodle [google.com] got the algorithm to compute age wrong (!). The original version of the Doodle used the COBOL expression
SUBTRACT CurrentYear FROM BirthYear GIVING Age
which actually computes the negative of the age (for most people born after Christ, anyway).
I wondered whether this might be a nod to her pioneering work in software debugging, as also referenced in the flying moth at the end of the animation, but since Google has since corrected the bug [google.com], it seems even the mighty Google still sometimes commits the simplest of programming errors. (Right on their main page and logo, too. Oooops. I suppose there's also the view that the code was wrong because it was a woman doing the coding. You misogynist Google bastards.)
Whatever the reason, happy birthday and many thanks to Amazing Grace.
(full disclosure: I submitted this as a story overnight [slashdot.org], but since it didn't get picked up, it seemed too funny to let it completely slip into the ether.)
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Did you submit this to reddit?
https://pay.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1sg049/the_single_line_of_cobol_code_in_todays_google/ [reddit.com]
Look at the top-rated comment.
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Nope, stopped reading reddit long ago after discovering the mods' penchant for silently censoring comments and entire story threads they didn't like.
That the original Doodle might have accurately depicted poor-but-industry-accepted COBOL coding practices (i.e., approving and committing code where the program logic is wrong but the result of the calculation may still appear correct if an invisible dependency on a separate section of the program happens to work out in the programmer's favor) is either deeply
Hmm... (Score:2)
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is much of the modern computing world.
Without her Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. would not be where they are today.
* this is in no way to diminish the other pioneers in the field - Touring, von Newman, von Lovelace, etc...
We stand upon the shoulders of giants - paraphrased from Bernard of Chartres
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"We stand upon the shoulders of giants - paraphrased from Bernard of Chartres"
I thought it was Sir Isaac Newton that said that
Re:Upon her shoulders*... (Score:5, Funny)
I suspect Jobs *would* be where he is today, since she wasn't researching cures for pancreatic cancer.
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I suspect Jobs *would* be where he is today, since she wasn't researching cures for pancreatic cancer.
Wouldn't matter, if it's true that Jobs had the treatable kind, since he ignored that route and went all New Age on it instead. Might as well have just loaded up on Laetrile.
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You mean Jobs would be still be alive and Bezos would have hair?
A pox on you, Admiral Hopper!
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The fact that you didn't manage to spell any of them right diminishes something.
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this is in no way to diminish the other pioneers in the field - Touring, von Newman, von Lovelace, etc...
Not to forget Tsu Se [wikipedia.org], Arbol de Trigo [wikipedia.org], and l'Oison [wikipedia.org].
[hint: Turing, von Neumann, Lovelace-without-von (although an optional "of")]
Re:Anybody who doesn't know ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody on Slashdot who doesn't know who she is ... get the fuck out, because you're on the wrong website.
You might try wrapping your head around this: obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com].
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My kingdom for mod points.
DEAL!
Please send the deed for "Anonymous Coward's Kingdom" by way of African Swallow to neverland.
No takesies-backsies
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Once you know, you're always looking for it. He tended to keep it out of the way.
Modesty, apparently: he didn't want to be thought of as thinking he was a hero.
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You're a fuckwit.
Irony so thick you can cut it with a knife.
Re:Anybody who doesn't know ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anybody on Slashdot who doesn't know who she is ... get the fuck out, because you're on the wrong website.
No shame in being a newbie as long as one is *trying* to be a self teacher and tries to not be a newbie forever. In this case, the shame is on the one trying to run newbies off.. You are going to die a lonely death.
Anybody who doesn't *bother to* know ... (Score:3)
There's nothing wrong with not knowing something important; the sin is not lifting a finger to find the fact out -- e.g. people seemingly incapable of typing a name into wikipedia and reading the first paragraph (and then whining about it in the comments instead in hopes someone will spoon-feed it to them). Those are the people who need to get lost.
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Or even easier: Just click on the &/&%" doodle!
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Really? I never see the Google "home page" anymore, I just type something into the address bar, if it's not a URL then it sends it as a search to Google and gives me the results
Yes, the Google logo on the left is a bit different than usual but not enough to tell me what it was about.
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Well, see, the first woman to publish in mathematics was stripped naked and dragged to death behind a wagon, and it's been an uphill swim ever since...
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Yes.
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Interesting)
The realm of women is whatever they want it to be. There is substantial cultural inertia, especially in places like the Southeast US, that impedes young women from trying to "do computers and tech stuff", and so the lampshading of legitimate achievements made by folks like Hopper is no bad thing. Yes, were she male she wouldn't get quite as many accolades, but so? She was a pioneer, and there is no shame in pointing out to today's young women "want to become a computer scientist? You're in good company."
I have as much distaste for postmodern cultural wankery as you, but informing women that they are welcome in the scientific community ain't that.
I taught computational physics for a couple of years as a grad student. Of the students that I considered absolutely top-notch, about 60% were women (where the difference from 50% is statistical noise). As far as physics went, they were basically the same as the men.
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There is a documentary about this, which I saw on Netflix (I don't remember if it was streaming or DVD) called "Top Secret Rosies." I knew about that history from my physics and math background, but my wife was amazed to hear it. Anyway, the film is worth watching.
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I had the pleasure of speaking with one of the Rosies some years back. I was trying to line her up as a speaker at my workplace's "Women's Issues" month, but she lived too far away and the company wouldn't buy the plane ticket.
They have an association, naturally...they call their daughters Rosettes and their sons Rivets.
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I wondered if this carried an academic stigma (Score:2)
I wondered if the procrastination was due to the "taint" of programming being a trade-school craft and not a real scientific discipline. And that in turn due to its early female participation.
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Not really. Both before and after WWII “computers” was a female dominated field, like nurses or teachers.
After WWII, well, I am not sure displaced is the right word. We are talking about a rapidly evolving field. Most of the jobs that men took in the computer field just did not exist at the start of the war. Virgin ground so to say. Not so much as displacing but rather being left behind.
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Hmmm... when I go to bing.com today I see an 1800s difference engine. No mention of Admiral Hopper. [imgur.com]
Ooh! I found it! If you mouse over the difference engine, there's a box on the left that, when you mouse over it, says that today is the birthday of... shoot--I have to click the link.
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Yes, one light foot.