[HN Gopher] Frances Allen has died
___________________________________________________________________
Frances Allen has died
Author : ntumlin
Score : 691 points
Date : 2020-08-05 23:46 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ibm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ibm.com)
| brian_herman__ wrote:
| I'm glad we got a black bar for her.
| jzig wrote:
| Why doesn't the black bar link to the related submission?
| RankingMember wrote:
| That's a great idea
| tus88 wrote:
| That's too Web 2.0 for HN XD
| filereaper wrote:
| @dang can we get a black bar in her honor?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| signed.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I'd recommend reading her interview in Coders At Work. I never
| realized that compilers were already a flourishing field by the
| time C came around, and that C actually ended up having some
| negative effects in compiler dev.
| wglb wrote:
| It was more that C hindered optimization research. The
| interview was awesome as you said.
| sitkack wrote:
| C and Unix hindered a whole lot. It was the PHP of its day.
| martinlaz wrote:
| Nice analogy. Although it's very unlikely that PHP will
| ever be as highly regarded as are C and Unix today.
| tomsmeding wrote:
| I wanted to say that C is not really very highly regarded
| nowadays, but that only adds extra php-directed snark to
| your post, which is not wholly a bad thing.
| wglb wrote:
| I am struggling to understand your analogy here?
| gavreh wrote:
| Looks like a great book, will read - thanks for the
| recommendation.
| nthomas wrote:
| Fran gave a talk when I interned at TJ Watson one summer. Her
| stories of the early days of compilers were beyond fascinating
| and made it clear how much we all now were just building on ideas
| they established decades ago.
|
| Later, my wife was the first to receive the IBM PhD fellowship
| established in Fran's honor. Fran awarded it to her at a
| conference (Grace Hopper I think) and of course was gracious,
| offering to help as your career moved forward. Thankful for that
| investment in our future.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Going on a tangent, I think most of us missed Bill English's
| passing a few days ago since I think because people only noticed
| it on the weekend when there are less HN users active.
| dang wrote:
| It was mentioned in this article:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059231, but not in an
| obvious way.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Frances Allen wrote "A Catalogue of Optimizing Transformations"
| in 1971. 50 years(!!!) later, they are still the backbone of
| optimizing compilers. I think the only major thing missing is
| autovectorization.
|
| She was in her 30s when she wrote it.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I think you should read it if you work on compilers, even now.
| But the reason is a bit different.
|
| It was the survey of the state of the art at the time, but
| obviously it is not the state of the art now. Then why should
| you read it? Because it is written in two layers.
|
| The first layer goes, we tried many optimization ideas, but
| only these were effective in practice: inlining, register
| allocation, etc. Others were not. Surprisingly, this layer is
| still mostly true today! This is both happy and sad depending
| on your view. Personally I think it testifies that compiler is
| a mature field, and it matured by 1970. (And that Frances Allen
| did lion's share of work maturing it.)
|
| The second layer is, so here is how you should do inlining,
| register allocation, etc. While this layer is also full of
| gems, it is necessarily badly outdated. The paper predates
| graph coloring register allocation, for example. On the other
| hand, ironically, the state of the art 1970s algorithms are
| often a good choice today when you want an algorithm that is
| fast and low memory. (Ironic, because they were slow and high
| memory at the time!) This doesn't apply when there is an
| important new concern, for example cache locality, but happily
| it mostly doesn't affect compiler.
|
| I think there should be a project to write the-state-of-the-
| art-in-1970s compiler. It would be a great simple and minimal
| alternative to GCC and LLVM, and it would also work great as a
| JIT code generator. We probably should name it Fran.
| titzer wrote:
| I agree with most of your comment but I don't agree that
| compilers was a mature field by 1970. That was before SSA,
| graph coloring register allocation, and even linear scan, all
| three of which were pretty revolutionary.
|
| I saw her 2007 Turing Award speech. I have tremendous respect
| for Fran and like your idea to name a codegen after her :-)
| mpweiher wrote:
| Maybe I should call the backend for Objective-S Fran :-)
|
| > graph coloring register allocation
|
| I knew some people working on linear optimization, at the
| time one of the most performance-intensive applications
| around (with real money/competitiveness in many industries
| riding on it). The compiler that produced the best code, by
| quite a bit, was the IBM FORTRAN compiler (3090 was the
| preferred target at the time), which also didn't do graph
| coloring. It just allocated the registers by loops from
| innermost to outermost.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-\
|
| For a simple compiler, we should also look at Wirth's works,
| and Wirth's rule: an optimization has to pay for itself, that
| is, the compiler compiling itself with the optimization both
| in the executable and in the source code has to be faster
| than without it in both places.
| sitkack wrote:
| > On the other hand, ironically, the state of the art 1970s
| algorithms are often a good choice today when you want an
| algorithm that is fast and low memory.
|
| Simple things can run at higher speeds than complex things.
| Simplicity should be an architectural element, not a quality,
| but a feature.
|
| Your idea for the Fran compiler is excellent. Throw in METAII
| from Dewey Schorre and it can be language agnostic.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Did the concept of SIMD even exist in 1971?
| p_l wrote:
| Flynn's taxonomy was codified in 1966
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Vector processors date from 1960s, but the neceesary
| techniques for loop analysis (using Fourier-Motzkin method)
| was not found till 1990s.
| tjalfi wrote:
| I think you are mistaken about this.
|
| Vectorizing compilers have been around since at least the
| late 1970s; the Cray 1[0] had a vectorizing compiler in
| 1978.
|
| Lamport's Parallel Execution of DO Loops[1] was published
| in 1974.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Software
|
| [1] http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/do-loops.pdf
| amw-zero wrote:
| I can't think of any noteworthy idea in computing that didn't
| exist in 1971.
| tjalfi wrote:
| VLIWs[0] and trace scheduling[1] were both from the early
| 1980s.
|
| Dependence analysis, automatic vectorization, and automatic
| parallelization were invented after 1971.
|
| Fast algorithms for computing dominators[2] were late-70s.
|
| Graph coloring register allocators were introduced in the
| early 1980s.
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_long_instruction_word
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_scheduling
|
| [2]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominator_(graph_theory)
| sli wrote:
| I definitely do not have the chops for this, but I would
| love to see some sort of visualization that traces major,
| seemingly-modern computing ideas to their roots.
| derefr wrote:
| The Single Static Assignment form was only created in 1988,
| which is apparently so late that compilers are still
| discovering it (and the optimizations it enables) as some
| novelty today.
|
| (Never even mind the Single Static Information form.)
|
| I wonder if part of the reason SSA is not implemented from
| the start by many compilers, is precisely because it came
| too late to be included in seminal works like _A Catalogue
| of Optimizing Transformations_ ; so people that rely on
| those works as a canon of "classes of optimization
| techniques that work" won't even be aware of it.
|
| -----
|
| More snarky: the earliest dataflow analysis paper I can
| find is from 1972. :)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think SSA is not implemented from the start by many
| compilers is because many compilers are 30+ years old.
|
| More seriously, my recollection (having been about 20
| years since I last took a compilers course) is that it
| took a while for even researchers to be convinced of the
| advantages of SSA, as the transformation causes a
| quadratic blowup in code size for the worst case (but it
| turns out to be less in real-world cases).
|
| Also Sussman & Steele proposed CPS in 1975 which is
| closely related to SSA.
| derefr wrote:
| A 30-year-old compiler would still have come out in 1990,
| well after SSA-based optimizations were discovered. But
| maybe I'm expecting too much in thinking that the author
| of a flagship optimizing compiler should be up-to-date on
| CS research in compiler optimization, before deciding the
| architecture of their compiler.
|
| (Also, plenty of the compilers and/or JITs that I'm
| talking about are far newer. The first attempt to get a
| JVM to use SSA optimization during JIT -- within SafeTSA
| -- only occurred in 2000. Such an approach was copied by
| pretty much every JVM implementation by 2005, suggesting
| that a legacy of incompatible architecture was never the
| problem, but rather that JVM implementors just didn't
| think it was a worthwhile technique until they saw it
| demonstrated for their particular workloads.)
|
| CPS is closely _theoretically_ related to SSA (it carries
| equivalent information across lexical boundaries) but CPS
| isn 't a basis for optimization transforms in the same
| way that SSA is. You can't hoist loop invariants using
| CPS... as far as I know, at least.
| titzer wrote:
| > But maybe I'm expecting too much in thinking that the
| author of a flagship optimizing compiler should be up-to-
| date on CS research in compiler optimization, before
| deciding the architecture of their compiler.
|
| In 1990 I don't think SSA was broadly considered to be
| the basis of a good optimizing compiler the way it is
| today. So the "author of a flagship optimizing compiler"
| would be gambling on an unknown that looked good in a
| couple new papers. The Cytron paper on how to efficiently
| compute it came out in 1991. So SSA was still a WIP.
|
| It wasn't really until the late 1990s IMO, that SSA
| became widespread and into the 2000s when it became the
| standard.
| dboreham wrote:
| Agree. I worked on MIMD systems in the 1980s that seemed
| cutting edge at the time. Then in 2001 I toured the
| Concrete, ND phased array radar facility where I saw a
| 16-cpu machine built by Western Electric in 1969 that had
| essentially the same architecture.
| rudedogg wrote:
| Link to the paper:
| https://www.clear.rice.edu/comp512/Lectures/Papers/1971-alle...
| sitkack wrote:
| :(
|
| Optimizing Compilers for Parallel Computers, lecture by Frances
| E. Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv-wXcUxrmE
|
| Frances Allen, 2006, ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture, "Compiling
| for Performance: A Personal Tour"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjoU-MjCws4
| musicale wrote:
| She also spoke at the acm turing100 symposium in 2012.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLTUvFboveM
| tombert wrote:
| This is absolutely worthy of a black bar.
|
| I read one of Frances' papers on compiler optimization, and while
| some of it went over my head, it was still valuable information;
| the world is a sadder place without her.
| abegnoche wrote:
| My brain read the title as "France Had Aliens" which I was really
| curious to read. Thanks brain.
| jolux wrote:
| Wish we could get the black bar up.
| relaunched wrote:
| I'd love to see a black banner / bar in her honor.
| fb03 wrote:
| I am rooting for this also.
| ixtli wrote:
| I'd agree. I read an optimization paper by her in college.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Agreed. Any Turing Award laureate, let alone the first female
| Turing Award laureate, deserves a black banner
| scott31 wrote:
| > Any Turing Award laureate deserves a black banner
|
| Except for Tim Berners-Lee, who tries to make the web a
| proprietary platform
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Don 't introduce flamewar topics
| unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid
| unrelated controversies and generic tangents._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| kitd wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite.
|
| Why?
| scott31 wrote:
| I don't know why he is doing that, probably money
| kitd wrote:
| I meant why do you think he's trying to make the web
| proprietary.
|
| AFAICS he's doing the exact opposite:
|
| https://contractfortheweb.org/
| scott31 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720591
| kitd wrote:
| So no black banner because you can't torrent someone
| else's hard work.
| anotherevan wrote:
| As an aside, when there is a black bar, I would also love it to
| link to the reason it is there.
| yardshop wrote:
| Even just a "title" attribute with the name of the person
| being honored would help sometimes.
| paublyrne wrote:
| That's a nice idea, like how Google doodles link to some
| background information.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| First female IBM fellow.
|
| First female winner of the Turing Award.
|
| Lots of other notable stuff.
|
| Sadly, this is the first I've heard of her. Hopefully all that
| means is I'm not a real programmer.
|
| Edit: To be clear, I really meant "I hope other people here are
| familiar with her work, even though I am not because I'm not a
| real programmer." I'm happy to see that some people are, in fact,
| familiar with her and her work.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Interesting. If you search for "died" on HN in the last month,
| say, you'll find many examples. Most have 0 or 1 comments, many
| have around the same as this has now, but none are about it
| being sad to not have heard about that person. Any idea why
| this one in particular made you feel that way?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Many years ago, I had a good friend named Frances who
| lamented the fact that people generally could not keep it
| straight that Frances is a girl's name and Francis is a boy's
| name. Rembering that friend, I clicked on the link to check
| the gender because people don't always follow the rules about
| such things and because I was short of sleep and wondering if
| I was even remembering that correctly.
|
| Given my reason for clicking the link, I believe it's the
| first time I've seen her mentioned on HN. I likely would have
| clicked on any article with the name _Frances_ in the title
| and remembered the name if I had ever seen it before.
|
| Because I'm a woman, I actively keep my eye out for female
| role models. I have a fairly strong math background (for the
| world at large -- not for the HN crowd) and spent some time
| looking up info on Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female Fields
| Medalist, and even blogged about it at the time.
|
| Given my interest in female role models and my personal
| association with the name Frances, I think I would have known
| the name had I ever seen it before. It would have likely
| stuck with me.
|
| I've been here eleven years. It seems I've never seen her
| name before. And, in fact, if you search for it, it comes up
| (in the titles section, as part of a description, not really
| a title) only once ten years ago (until the past 24 hours).
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=frances+allen
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| She has been mentioned in comments before. Mostly in the
| context of compiler optimization, programming models, the
| history of C vs. other programming languages as systems
| programming language, and so on. Mostly an excerpt from a
| book where she said in an interview something along the
| lines of "We had such good things, and then came C..."
| (implying we lost the good things(with C))
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Yes, I'm aware. But it's a really large forum with a lot
| of traffic and I'm not a programmer, so those comments
| are less likely to be read by me than titles.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Maybe it's also because for most in the industry it
| amounts to sacrilege.
|
| edit: Nothing to speak about, hush, hush, otherwise the
| emperors new clothes ...
| kbenson wrote:
| > the fact that people generally could not keep it straight
| that Frances is a girl's name and Francis is a boy's name.
|
| I literally just looked it up, because I wasn't sure. The
| simple rule presented is that if it's Franc _e_ s with an e
| like in "her", then it's the name historically used for
| women, and if it's Franc _i_ s with an i like in "him" then
| it's the name historically used for men.
|
| It truly is a shame that the farther you go back in
| computer science, the more likely names whose traditional
| gendering is somewhat ambiguous are to refer to women, and
| how now that luminaries of the field are passing away, how
| much more even the field was between the sexes in the past.
|
| We often talk about how we need to bring more women into
| the field of Computer Science, but I think it's important
| to note we're trying to bring them _back_ into the field,
| because they were here from the beginning and it wouldn 't
| be the same without their contributions.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| They've now added the black bar and substantive comments
| about her work are finally at the top of the discussion
| (instead of my relatively vacuous remark). I'm happy to
| see her getting a proper send off appropriate to her
| level of contributions to the field.
|
| I think this isn't really the time or place to get into
| gender issues and the field of Computer Science,
| especially not for me. I see things very different from
| most other people here and that makes communication
| challenging.
|
| In this case, that would amount to a terrible derail from
| the focus on honoring the work and life of Frances Allen.
| kbenson wrote:
| > I think this isn't really the time or place to get into
| gender issues and the field of Computer Science
|
| It's worth noting that, according to the article, Frances
| Allen actually spent some time focusing on exactly that.
|
| _As important as distinguishing her work in the world of
| computing and programming, Fran was also committed to her
| team by embracing their ideas and synergies and, in
| particular, supporting women. She spent many years as a
| mentor through IBM's mentor program._
|
| ...and later...
|
| _"Professionally, Fran spent a lifetime working to
| advance the field of computing and pioneer new
| breakthroughs. Personally, she was equally focused on
| inspiring and motivating young people - especially women
| - to do the same," said Fran's nephew, Ryan McKee, on the
| IEEE honor._
|
| So I imagine she would be quite happy to have the topic
| brought up (at least in a positive manner) in discussion
| of her life and career.
|
| That said, I brought that up to highlight her
| achievements and character, not to bring you into that
| conversation if you don't want to be in it, which is your
| choice, and I can see avoiding that topic as a useful
| strategy if you think it can't or won't be handled
| appropriately by the people involved. As such, don't feel
| compelled to respond about any of that if you don't want
| to. :)
|
| Edit: It occurs to me now you might have been referring
| to something entirely different than I thought, in which
| case I wasn't trying to bring anything of that into the
| discussion at all, and my wording was purely an attempt
| to avoid that type of discussion as well.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The elephant in the room is that I'm probably the highest
| ranked woman on HN. This is likely a large part of why my
| relatively vacuous remark was the top comment for some
| hours. I know from past public remarks and private emails
| that some people here look to me for guidance on gender
| issues.
|
| I've given my guidance for this issue today: We are here
| to honor the life and work of Frances Allen. Everyone
| please, kindly, focus on that and don't be offended that
| I'm trying to step away from the discussion at this
| point.
| rvz wrote:
| > you'll find many examples
|
| For example: [0]
|
| > Any idea why this one in particular made you feel that way?
|
| Perhaps there's something to do with the fame of the person?
|
| It's difficult to say but it appears that the implicit HN
| 'criteria' for this is in computer science is to at least be
| famous enough to be an ACM Turing Award winner. Maybe this is
| why the reception to the death of another fellow computer
| scientist and engineer was low. [0]
|
| Nevertheless, they are both worthy of the HN black bar to
| recognise their achievements to computer science. But I would
| expect to see a black bar for Frances Allen's passing but
| unfortunately not for Bill English.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24032820
| CarbyAu wrote:
| And it doesn't mean even that.
|
| Many worthwhile people in the world. Not all of them are famous
| to the people who would love to know them.
|
| At least we can both get to know her more starting now.
| grappler wrote:
| That sounds like black bar level stuff
| belorn wrote:
| I create programs professionally and I know very few winner of
| the Turing Award by name. If someone said "who was the first
| native-English speaking Turing Award winner" I would not be
| able to answer unless I went through each winner and manually
| checked. I suspect quite few programmers in the world (and
| people on HN) are familiar enough with Turing Award winners
| that they can answer questions like that.
|
| I would guess that people who work on building compilers and
| compiler optimization are more likely to know her name than
| programmers.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| > Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer.
|
| Sadly, no, it's not just that. Most my immediate colleagues,
| for example, don't know of her or her work, either. It's one
| heck of a field.
|
| She had expressed some dismay, in interviews, at being the
| first woman to win the Turing Award. Not the Turing Award part,
| of course, the "first woman" part. She was far from being the
| first deserving candidate who didn't happen to be a dude. So I
| hope she wouldn't mind linking this here, even today:
| https://www.hillelwayne.com/important-women-in-cs/
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Yeah. If anything, I would say it means they're not a "real
| computer scientist," whatever that means.
|
| Just to put the second part of your comment in perspective,
| there have only been 3 female winners of the Turing award,
| total, by my count.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> a "real computer scientist," whatever that means_
|
| At university we would say that computer science was the
| art, where programming was the craft[1]. It is probably
| fairer to state that programming is an application of the
| science.
|
| [1] Though with less of a sneery tone than used when people
| said "mathematics is the art where computer science is the
| craft"
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I think that this might be exploring the analogy's
| breaking point.
|
| It can be quite easy to draw a clean line between
| theoreticians and implementors in other fields.
| Biologists and veterinarians, physicists and engineers,
| etc. But who was the last major computer science
| theoretician who wasn't also a skilled programmer or
| system architect (or both)? Alonzo Church?
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| After looking through all the Turing Award winners, my
| answer is Stephen Cook - a CS mathematician who did
| nothing on engineering, discovered the concept of NP-
| completeness.
| [deleted]
| formerly_proven wrote:
| There's a weird gap in that lineup in that practically every
| person on that list is pretty old (born in the 30s-40s) and
| their achievements usually date from around the 70s.
|
| Is this just because achievements are usually recognized in
| retrospect, or is this because the 50s to 70s were the most
| influential portion of computer science (since all
| groundbreaking things were discovered in the beginning), or
| is this because women were pushed out more and more by the
| 70s?
| graycat wrote:
| Fran and I were on the same floor at IBM's Watson lab. I was in
| an AI project doing applied math, e.g., some optimization, and
| mathematical statistics (for the AI work we were doing, system
| monitoring, i.e., anomaly detection, better than our AI work!).
| She was regarded as a major expert in compiling and numerical
| codes for scientific computing.
|
| I heard that she was working on a software product that among
| many other things would do fast matrix multiplication using some
| parallelism.
|
| So, just for the heck of it, I wrote and ran a little routine in
| PL/I that used PL/I's feature of multi-tasking to get some
| parallelism and showed my code to her. She was a little surprised
| I'd written the code, had a smile, and explained why her work
| closer to some hardware features (I don't recall the details)
| would be faster!
|
| I wasn't surprised or disappointed that my little PL/I tasking
| code would be slower than what she was doing, but at least I got
| her to explain the hardware she was using and how she was
| exploiting it!
|
| As I recall, she was married to Jack Schwartz at Courant
| Institute of NYU and as in
|
| Nelson Dunford and Jacob T. Schwartz, _Linear Operators_.
| jameshart wrote:
| I'm sure you are just trying to share a memory of interacting
| with an illustrious colleague here - and my sympathies go to
| you as it's always a shock to learn of the passing of someone
| you worked with.
|
| But I think you maybe need to work on how you present this
| anecdote - as it is, it reads like you tried to mansplain her
| own research to a Turing Award winner. I hope you approached
| with more humility than this telling suggests?
|
| Also, you should be aware that contextualizing professional
| women in terms of who their husband is or what his credentials
| are has long been used to underplay women's individual
| achievements. Again, I don't think that's your intent, but you
| could consider whether, in the case of talking about Jacob
| Schwartz, you would have been moved to drop in the detail of
| who he was married to?
| tkeeler wrote:
| Why is there an assumption that graycat is male? Was there an
| indication of gender?
| LukeShu wrote:
| Not who you're responding to, but: My assumption was that
| the user is _the_ greycat, which is the well-known alias of
| the programmer Greg Wooledge.
|
| Now that you call it out, I realize that it's probably a
| mistaken assumption, because Greg spells it "greycat" not
| "graycat". But it wasn't an unreasonable assumption for HN.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| He has discussed his wife as well as being a male in
| graduate school in the past.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| graycat's comment contains several details that go against
| your interpretation. For example the fact that Fran "had a
| smile" and patiently explained to him why his "little PL/I
| routine" would be slower than her state-of-the-art
| optimization work is clearly intended to depict the narrator
| as naive, and Fran as the expert. The mention of PL/I means
| that this anecdote likely took place fifty years ago, decades
| before she became a Turing Award winner. And the story makes
| it perfectly clear who ended up being the explainer and who
| the explainee. Indeed, that seems to be its main point.
|
| As for the marriage bit, the strongest plausible
| interpretation is simply that it's interesting. Anyone
| familiar with computer science history would be interested to
| find out that the two of them had been married, and certainly
| that goes both ways: an anecdote about Schwartz would be
| enhanced by mentioning his marriage to a famous compiler
| optimization researcher. Indeed, it's not hard to find web
| pages about Schwartz that do this.
|
| I don't think your points are entirely ungrounded, but they
| weren't the most plausible or good-faith reading of the
| comment. The cost of introducing an ideological scolding into
| a discussion like this is non-zero, so there needs to be a
| bar to clear. That's one reason why we have that guideline,
| which has proven to work well in situations like this: it
| leads to scolding for egregious cases, forgiveness for
| borderline cases, and open-mindedness in unclear ones.
| morelisp wrote:
| While I suppose it's possible someone was writing PL/I quite
| recently, the more probable option is that this story is from
| the late 60s.
| samatman wrote:
| Imagine you were at Frances Allen's funeral, and you walked
| up to graycat, after he told this anecdote about his esteemed
| friend and colleague, and said these words to him.
|
| Imagine the frozen look of disgust on everyone's face.
| Imagine the flush of shame coming to your cheeks.
|
| That's what you did. You should apologize for that.
| dang wrote:
| Hey, I understand the feeling, but responding like this is
| also a move in the online shaming game / callout culture,
| and that's what we're trying to avoid here (https://hn.algo
| lia.com/?query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang&s...).
|
| The irony is that your and jameshart's motivations are
| likely similar. You're both reacting to a perceived slight
| and standing up for someone who you believe deserved to be
| treated better. That's a positive motivation, but we need
| to learn to take the shame bit out. Otherwise it just
| escalates, and where do we end up?
| nothal wrote:
| Thank you for being equal-handed and fair.
| jecel wrote:
| > Again, I don't think that's your intent, but you could
| consider whether, in the case of talking about Jacob
| Schwartz, you would have been moved to drop in the detail of
| who he was married to?
|
| That is actually very common in my experience when people
| talk to me about some guy and they think I might have heard
| of his wife.
| corford wrote:
| >I hope you approached with more humility than this telling
| suggests?
|
| Why the question mark at the end? Are you expecting the
| poster to reply for your own benefit or is it that you'd
| enjoy seeing him/her apologise publicly for sharing a
| personal (and presumably happy, at least to them) memory of a
| former work colleague who has just died. A memory that you
| have just tortuously construed into a supposed sexist
| encouter with literally zero insight, context or knowledge ?
|
| Perhaps you might wish to consider your own humility.
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