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
Here is not a comprehensive list of those programmers, but at least a comprehensive list of their collective works:
http://thedailywtf.com/
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.
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
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...
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!
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.
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."