Slashdot Mirror
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."
How can you forget Ada Lovelace?
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
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.
How can you forget Ada Lovelace?
Yeah, if it weren't for her, computing the ratio would always exit with division-by-zero. We owe her much.
My god, you people have no education in the history of computing. There are more. Right off the bat I think of Grace Hopper. She was the first to develop a compiler, for the UNIVAC system, and pioneered the entire notion of compiled high level languages in an age when everyone was basically still thinking in terms of programming the bare metal with 1's and 0's.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
How about Frances E. Allen ?
First female IBM Fellow and first woman to win the Turing Award, yet no one seems to have mentioned her. I think she qualifies!
Also, there's a wikipedia article about women in computing, which I didn't see linked here.