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
"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.
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.
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
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
How about:
Danielle Berry
Audrey Tang
Rebecca Heineman
If they do not prove that women can be great programmers then what else does?
Actually the only ones that came to me were Admineral Hooper and Roberta Williams.
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.
Well they certainly prove something about famous programmers...
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.
Oops, I misread your quote. I thought you were saying that computing itself would be a divide by zero without her. Now I see you were making a joke. Carry on and ignore my post. :)
Read the spec halfway through and hack away. You have proven yourself to be a real programmer. Salute!
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.
If you needed any further convincing of the fact that Computer Science is a sausagefest, here it is.
Even most of the famous women programmers had/did have penises.
So her name is "Grace Hopper", and she made the term "computer bug" popular (see her entry in Wikipedia)? This can't be a coincidence...
Only the greatest hacker of our time, duh.
http://xkcd.com/342/
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
Seems like killing your wife is a feature of the software you write: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=220529437#Features
LOL how the fuck did this get modded informative. For everyone that doesn't get it all of those are transexuals.
Dude...
True but incomplete. Society rewards people who take big risks and succeed. Those that take risks and don't succeed get a Darwin-award or a bankruptcy.
(source: homeless guy living near the subway station)
That's true. I forgot because after being forced to program in Ada, I permanently purged Ada and anything Ada related from my memory.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Stay right there, I just called you a Wahbulance. It'll be right over.
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.
True but incomplete. Society rewards people who take big risks and succeed. Those that take risks and don't succeed get a Darwin-award or a bankruptcy.
Unless you own a bank! :-)
This is my sig.
Interestingly, the wikipedia article only mentions Kernighan for AWK and ditroff. It doesn't even mention that other language that he's known for.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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!
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
In reading your post I was sort of struck with an odd thought so, well, I'll share.
There really aren't that many famous programmers. There aren't any at all other than perhaps Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and they may not be considered programmers by the masses. They are famous to you, to me, and to the /. crowd but we're such a minority in the grand scheme of things that they are only famous to a very small subset of the population.
If you ask anyone who George W. Bush is they will know. They will know who Paris Hilton is. They will probably know Madonna, Brad Pitt, and more. If we go outside of our social circle they are unlikely to know anyone on that list.
Mirriam-Webster defines fame as widely known. The second definition is honored for achievement but being on Wikipedia isn't really an honor I don't think. Gates and Hoare were knighted, I suppose they might be considered famous but, then again, who other than us knows who Hoare is?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
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.