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Becoming a Famous Programmer
An anonymous reader writes "GrokCode analyzes more than 200 famous programmers to determine what types of projects made them famous. Inventing a programming language, game, or OS ranked among the top projects likely to lead to fame. Most programmers became famous through their work on only one project. The article also shows that among famous programmers, the ratio of males to females is much larger than among normal programmers."
Which is sad, because I just realized that I can't think of any famous female programmers off the top of my head. Of course, the regular ratio isn't terribly different...
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
"The article also shows that among famous programmers, the ratio of males to females is much larger than among normal programmers."
Obviously it's the extra typing appendage that makes all the difference. It's a well known fact that famous programmers, like myself, type with their keyboards on their lap.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
For example, there's one guy credited with Microsoft Word. Now I'd bet my pension that he hasn't written every version single-handed. Likewise Larry Ellison as the creator of Oracle - no. There are thousands of people who create each version of Oracle, not simply one guy.
This list is too simplistic to have any value, and time spent analysing it is largely wasted.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
> The article also shows that among famous programmers, the ratio of
> males to females is much larger than among normal programmers
You know, I never thought about this before, but off the top of my head I'm having a hard time thinking of *any* famous female programmers, unless you count Audrey Tang (who isn't technically female, in the strictest biological sense, and wasn't even making pretensions of being female in any sense at all when he became a famous programmer) or Mitchell Baker, who, although she's famous in conjunction with a programming project, is not, as far as I'm aware, actually a programmer herself. I'm sure I'm probably missing someone, perhaps even someone really obvious, but, honestly, I'm racking my brain here, and I'm coming up blank. I know of several female programmers, but none of them are especially famous outside a specific application space. There are a couple who are well-known in the interactive fiction community, for instance, but nobody who doesn't follow IF knows about them. There's a female programmer or three who's fairly well-known in the Perl community, but nobody who doesn't use Perl has ever heard of them.
Wait, I've been thinking of *current* famous programmers. Wasn't one of the very early third-generation programming languages designed by a woman? I can't remember which language, though...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
you were rated troll.... must be too soon.
Okay so this is great a list of some very very smart guys that most of us will never directly work with. What we really need is the list of the top 1000 infamous programmers. The guys who destroy projects and create the biggest turd burger frameworks in existence. These are the people who you bitch and moan about in a bar at a conference somewhere and hear the words "you gave Hank X a job? But the guy is a complete idiot" from a few chairs down, a couple of hours later you have the Hank X depreciation society formed and it turns out that this gormless numpty has been screwing up projects since the day he was born.
A nice anonymous list somewhere that needs to include posted code to verify the stupidity level with a least 3 people from a project voting for the muppetry level.
Now that would be great so we could find out just how rubbish a person the HR person has hired and the PHB has approved.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Well here's an actual list
Damn, I just moderated so rather then post non-anon, I'll just post anon.
I think of that Carmack guy, who wrote Doom and Quake. I think of Billy G, who isn't famous for writing code exactly (or at least not only because of that).
Richard Stallman and Linus "rare Finnish/Swedish name" both come to mind.
I'm having trouble thinking of the name of the SAMBA dude, and what are the names of the two Google founders?
And that's about it. I've run out of ideas.
apathy maybe.
Making boatloads of money will make you (in)famous. And that is not even listed in that pie chart.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Missing from Wikipedia are at least a few pioneers who made significant contributions: Nan Shu - author of the first Fortran compiler (Watson Research Center c. 1954); John Kemeny & Tom Kurtz - creators of BASIC (Beginners Allpurpose Symbolic Instruction Code) at Dartmouth College c. 1964
Just because people know of them doesn't mean they really contributed to software development. One on the list that comes to mind is John Romero. My understanding is that he was primarily a level designer with Doom and Quake, and that he did some rudimentary coding, like menus and the like, whereas the real cutting edge stuff was of course all attributed to Carmack.
I bet everyone at Slashdot knows who John Romero is, but I bet few at Slashdot know of him because of anything he has coded.
Better known as 318230.
What a horrific visualization - first it's a pie chart and on top of that why put in a background to obscure the colors? Someone went overboard with their charting software
(Disclaimer: I don't give a **** if I'm on the list or not ;))
Perhaps the right question isn't 'how to become a famous programmer' but first let's focus on what a famous programmer is? The concept of being famous is that a lot of people know you.
Let me see some hands, who knows "David Bradley" and can name what he accomplished? No-one? Why is this person then branded as 'famous' ? Sure, he wrote a handler which is in almost every Bios, but aren't there millions of routines out there used by even more million people? I mean: the guy / girl who wrote the event handler for the 'Google Search' button has his/her piece of code executed a couple of million times a day as well... The people who know who wrote that routine is probably as big as the group of people who know the name "David Bradley" and associate that name with cntrl-alt-del.
So this 'famous programmer' list is IMHO more of a list of some editor who liked to have his (her?) personal favorites in a single list on Wikipedia.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Growing a beard seems to be important to becoming a famous programmer.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Just moderated, so posting anonymously. Dijkstra - 'nuff said. Peter Norton - made the PC accessible to small company programmers. Woz - invented the accessible home computer!! Dan Bricklin - spreadsheets.
There are more male criminals, murderers than female. The reasons are based on simply reproductive success rate differential between males and females. No matter how successful a woman is, she is very very unlikely to bear more than 10 children. A very successful man could easily leave behind dozens and in some cases hundreds of children. Two thirds of men who have ever live do not have any living descendants toady. Essentially men take more risks and bet it all and two thirds of them lost it all in the genetic race. Thus all living males today come from a lineage of high risk takers. That results in greater variation in every measure, be it with positive connotations or negative. More variation in height, weight, muscle mass, BMI and most importantly risk tolerance.
It is entirely possible that women might even have a higher mean when it comes to intellectual labor than men. But since men have more variation you will find more men in the outliers. If one is in the top 200 of any field, that person is an outlier.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sure you can design a great OS, Game, Programming Language or even _File System_... but if you really want to be famous just brutally murder a loved one.
Killing your wife? Not actually a project.
Well, okay, yeah, I mean, it takes some planning and the execution is, well, an execution, but it's not very open-source.
~ C.
Is Emily Short really famous? I knew of her but only because I follow Interactive Fiction.
And I'm sorry, just because Roberta Williams was part of a husband and wife team doesn't mean she counts as half a person. If you were counting _projects_ that might be valid, but then you'd have to divide all the other programmer's projects up too.
I thought it was common knowledge that men and women had very similar means in almost all intelegence fields, but men had a flatter distribution curve than women (so at the top and bottom there are far more men than women).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Only the greatest hacker of our time, duh.
http://xkcd.com/342/
I think the thing is that men are wired to be bigger risk takers and society rewards people who take big risks. Of course, with men, for every guy that hits it big, there's a dozen, if not a hundred, that completely flounder.
This is my sig.
Steps to Fame:
1. Get into game development position
2. Inject Goatse timebomb
3. PROFIT!
4. NO WAIT!. NO PROFIT.
5. SOME FAME
I record my sleeptalking
It's not like "Transsexual" is an endpoint - it seems more like a transition path.
Wouldn't it make more sense to simply add one point (or one-half, if you will) to both the Male and Female genders?
I think fame is overrated, the two I met I marked them as famous for programs they wrote in the 80s, not their current work. One was Brad Templeton, to me famous for Time Trek and Power/Power 64 utility for the Commodore PET & 64, though now he is probably best known for his work in the EFF. The second, Kermit Woodal, who wrote a while back a SIDplayer program for the Commodore 64, I met him at an Amiga conference, from my impression he is still best remembered for that SIDplayer program, which does not always help him in his current projects.
So I think becoming famous in the tech field can have a similar trap like it is to actors, through your fame, you may become typecast into some sort of programming role.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I am unfamiliar with this concept. Please explain.
Step2: Kill your wife
Thanks to miss hopper, I still have problems sleeping at night, I sometimes wake up screaming, thinking back about my COBOL classes in college.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Really? Seriously?
Is it still necessary to add the obligatory We Are Not Sexist bit to everything? In other news the ratio of males to females is higher among soldiers, firefighters, police officers, coal miners, and convicted felons.
Haven't we been over the sexist arguments to death by now? Is there ever going to come a time when we can talk about people without mentioning their gender, ethnicity, skin color, whatever? When we take it as a given that the median man/woman, black/white, Asian/Hispanic are equally as smart/dumb, and we don't have to hide behind PC language?
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
Yes, there's a fine measure of your success as a human being.
Programmers spend far too much time in front of a computer and far too little time in the real world, having real relationships and fixing real problems.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I would bet that 95% of Slashdot readers never heard of Alain Colmerauer, for example.
And the Bard's Tale author is included, but even though the game is well known, he (now she) is not. And there are many, many other well-known games with great programmers behind them who are not on the list.
I for one, welcome our new transexual, programming overlords.
This might sound a bit like flame bait -- but I am speaking from the experience of nearly a decade of software/algorithm development. I've known good programmers, great programmers, and bad programmers. Women just don't (usually) fall into that great category.
This may stem from many factors. For instance, women may not be drawn to computer programming as a hobby as men. Thinking of those that I classify as great -- the vast majority of them knew how to program well before they ever attended any formal setting.
I've known solid female programmers. But I can't come up with one whom I'd trust to write 10,000 lines of code in a week to come up with a working prototype -- Aren't that many men in that category, but there are a few.
#1 Always do research, analysis, and design before you start coding. If not, do it later so you know how to fix and debug your program.
#2 You do quality work.
#3 You give the users what they want and the managers what they want. Customer satisfaction is the key. Everyone effected by the program needs to be happy and that is hard to do sometimes.
#4 You learn from your mistakes and failures and you try to invent new ways to do things.
#5 You keep trying even if you fail, you read books you look at articles and forums on the Internet, you search knowledge bases and online documentation.
#6 If you cannot meet a schedule, you tell the customers that you will add in features later and you are running out of time and need more time but will try to get a quick release now with fewer features and try to get it stable first, and then add more features later.
#7 You make a gold release where you fix most of the bugs and don't add in extra features until you can get the program stable first. You can add in features later, but the user really wants a program that does not crash too often and needs to save his/her work if there is a crash, so you write crashproof error trapping that saves the session so it can be restored after a crash.
#8 Invent new ways of doing things.
#9 License technology and code if you cannot invent new things. Open source projects might have what you need, but you need to pay off the open source programmers for their work first, and then get a fork of their code and use it in your project as they agree to release it from the open source license to your license. That includes open source libraries if the license requires commercial code to buy a license to use in non-open source code. If not license commercial code and libraries instead.
#10 If all else fails, design a standard that the program or operating system should go by and hope someone else or another company or group can code to that standard. Then license their work and pay them off.
#11 If you are not using legacy software you can license them to retro computing companies who can use your old version for retro computing hobbyists in exchange for 10% of the profits from sales of the retro program or operating system. It is called OEMing the retro software like Serenity making OS/2 into eComStation or the AROS project turning AmigaOS 3.1 into a new open source OS. You can make money that way as well, always another group or company that will continue on legacy software and retro computing.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Granted, not all of Quake was written by John Carmack, but he is credited with quite a lot he's done by himself. He's got a shadowing trick named after himself, after all -- Carmack's Reverse.
So, given something like Word or Oracle, it's plausible that the first version, or even the first prototype, was written by exactly one guy. Take Linus Torvalds -- say what you will, but the original Linux was entirely his, complete with 386 support and a multithreaded filesystem (already giving it an edge over Minix).
Oh, and I doubt any actual paid publicists were used. Seriously, how would that actually work, and how would you justify the expense? I'm sure you were joking, but actually think about this -- for better or worse, these people are famous through word of mouth, among their peers. I'm guessing most have done something worth mentioning to earn that fame.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Let me guess, (s)he invented "she-mail".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Sophie Wilson ?
No, its more likely discrimination and not only the kind you are thinking about in the workplace. When a venture capitalist walks into a programming shop with his MBA that has taught him to stereotype people as much as possible to fit them into market segments the last thing he wants to see is a female programmer telling him how she is going to change the world. He wants more of the same and a woman doesn't fit into his understanding so he will balk, I have seen them do it repetitively to female engineers to the point of sending junior male colleagues to meet with these folks. VC is a man's game still and they do not like looking across the table at a woman who is more intelligent, has more education and is actually doing something with it while all he does is carry around sacks of money.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Famous?
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Wasn't one of the very early third-generation programming languages designed by a woman? I can't remember which language, though...
COBOL, Admiral Grace Hopper.
Acording to the description of the article, the sample was 200 progrmammers. In the article, 0.45% are transexuals, i.e. 0.9 subjects. I guess this includes the margin of error?
I'm missing rate how many famous programmers are/were killers/murderers ;-)
222 famous programmers
2.48% % women
-----
5.50 are women. I wonder if that is how they got the 1 person who is transsexual?
0.45% of famous programmers are transsexuals. Which 1% would be 2 out of 200 and .50% would be 1. So part of 1 programmer who is famous is transsexual.
Also I find it funny that it's Danielle Bunten Barry and she is known for the M.U.L.E. multiplayer video game written in 1983. A Mule being a sterile species (most of the time.)
If somebody is looking for a way to introduce a new programming language, the niche of relational languages is comparatively open. While there are thousands of "regular" languages, there are only a handful of known competitors to SQL. (I've proposed one myself, by the way, called SMEQL.) SQL has grown a bit long in the tooth and is due for competition.
Table-ized A.I.
is whether becoming a famous programmer will get you laid.
Table-ized A.I.
>You know, I never thought about this before, but off the top of my head I'm having a hard time thinking of *any* famous female programmers...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia_Perlman
TFA spends a lot of time talking about how few women there are on the list, without digging any deeper than that. I find that verging on morally reprehensible.
Looking into it myself, I see he used the list here as his starting basis, with only a few changes. The problem I have with that list is that it includes oodles of people who I've never heard of. Since I've been a professional software developer for 20 years, and an ameteur for 10 years before that, I think in my case "people with names I recognize" is a good filter for famous. Also lots of people are named who became famous more for starting companies than for their own programming. For example, Bill Gates and Paul Allen did write a Basic interpreter once upon a time, but its running Microsoft they are famous for. Talking about way less women starting software companies should be an entirely different discussion.
I think I can make a much shorter and better list. YMMV of course:
Just to avoid the argument thread, if there was a name on the list that I didn't include, its either because I didn't recognize the name without reading the description, or because I know them for their business activites (or in one case, for his *hardware* development), not their software development.
With my pared-down list, that's now 3.5 out of 35, or %10 female. There would probably be more if I made up the list entirely myself, but its tough for one person to judge "fame" all by himself.
Still this is much closer to what has been the actual historical percentage of participation of women in the industry, (and remember, "fame" would be a lagging indicator). So I don't think they are really fareing that badly in the fame department. Its getting them into the industry we are really having trouble with.
It doesn't even list Steven Falken.
Where is posting on slashdot in the list of activities that lead to fame?
Stop! Dremel time!
I was reading in Physics Today about a 19th century female astronmer at one of the New England observator who used to be a "computer" or clerk than measured telescopic photo plates. She discovered an asteroid, devrived a version of the Hersprung-Ressuel star evolution table, etc. Other "computers" derived the books of algorithms, ballistic trajectories, etc. These were used well into World War II and the early day of vacuum-tube computers. Then they wired the computer gates like telephone operators to implement calculations. Richard Feynman talks about a room of female computer clerks who tediously executed a finite differnce calculation to predict atom bomb effects.
And now we have a new disclaimer: IANAFP
After many minutes of intense Research, I have found the Equation of being a great programmer. (also, to use this list, you must pay me, for it is patented!)
1) Live at Parents House
2) Have at least one pet named 'Zelda'
3) Drink losts of Mountain Dew / Coffee
4) Dont have a girlfriend (of course everyone knows that programmers dont, but I figured I would include this one)
5) ????
6) Subscribe to Slashdot
7) Only eat food that comes in cellophane bags (i.e. Doritos)
8) Play lots of WoW
9) Dont play with yourself (no distractions)
10) Learn VBS
finally) PROFIT!
This worked for me, and many others.
Now it might take a few days, and even more bags of Doritos, But That dude from grandma's Boy WILL call and ask you to help on the next Eternal Death Slayer!
It just caint be that a chick be a coder. Theys not smart enuf. Take a walk on da wild side is da only ways !!
Everybody wants to be a 'Icon', not a hero
C'mon. Seriously. Great programmers know they are. They don't need to be on a wiki page. Besides fame doesnt equate to great. Putting together a list, if you don't mind the hypocrisy of the following list, is just pandering to
1) narcicists
2) sophists
3) egotists
4) braggarts
5) snake oil salesmen
6) shameless self promoters
7) groupies
Or does fame mean infamy, in which case I can see why a few of those names are on the list.
"Fame does not make one great." (In Yoda voice.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Haven't we been over the sexist arguments to death by now
Because mentioning sexism, drm, or evolution automatically gets your article 800+ comments.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
potentially reduced the number of female programmers by one. ended up with a divide-by-zero-brains error and is chained in the sandbox.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'm certain you're all wondering "is that the girl that had sex with that dog, and did all those hardcore oldy sex movies?"
Survey says...dog knot in the ass!
So... The easy way to be a famous programmer is to be a woman?
You don't get much more famous than this... at least for programming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
I'd like to cite the late Bob Long, one of the heroes of the second-generation computing world and an old friend of mine, a true utter geek and the guy who introduced me to computers at SDS back in the late 60's. Bob was a radio/hardware engineer who moved into computers. Among the things that made him famous (rather locally, I think -- we all knew of him in Los Angeles) was (0) the first infinite-precision arithmetic program that ran on a discrete-transistor machine (SDS 930) which ran in base 2 to base 32 without rounding errors, (1) the LGP-30 programmer who discovered you could save an instruction by throwing two digits at the Flexowriter simultaneously because they would add in the mechanical type box, (2) that if you put an AM radio and moved it to "5.4" and put it on top of the M register in a 930 you could hear the progress of your Fortran compile ("ah yes, it's sorting its symbol table now. I could write a better sort than that" (he subsequently did, and patched the compiler)), (3) who calculated - by hand - 9E81 so he could check his arithmetic program, and did it three times to check his calcs, and (4) that the mean distance a 1953 Buick Roadmaster can travel is 2.5 miles, tumbling, when launched off the steam catapult of the USN Carrier "Onslow" into the wind on an up wave. This post is without new line whitespace in his honour. Ok, maybe he wasn't famous. But I'm hoping he is, a little, now -- I'd be hard pressed to fill in all the [citation needed]'s if I tried to post him in Wikipedia.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Let the sexist distinction die, please. I'm a normal woman (not an exception to the rule) and I'm a programmer as good as any male programmer.
Female programmers are as capable as male programmers.
If you think differently, please evaluate why you think that way. Most likely, it's a stereotype you have in your head. That stereotype in thousands of heads (both male and female) is what caused the fewer number of women in the CS/IT field.
I've got a Rolls-Royce to sell you for only $50,000.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Even Garrison figured this out.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
But, most people don't know who he was, and a lot who could vaguely identify him as an inventor still think of him more as Rotwang in Fritz lang's Metropolis than as THE person who made things such as the New York power grid possible.
Unfortunately, Tesla was his own worst enemy. He gave control over his patents to Westinghouse who proceeded to screw him leaving him to eventually die in poverty.
Out of significant inventions that have changed human history, the only two that even come close to delivering electricity over a long distance are Guttenberg and the printing press and Hammurabi who invented modern society.
Truly it is sad that he is relatively unknown. Everybody knows Edison invented the light bulb, few know where the light comes from.