Becoming a Famous Programmer 347
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."
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Informative)
How can you forget Ada Lovelace?
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:1, Informative)
Dani Bunten [wikipedia.org] is the only one that I can think of. Though to be honest, she was a man when she did the work that made her famous.
Fame != influential (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re:Who are the people *you* think of? (Score:1, Informative)
Your moderations will still be lost even if you post anonymous ya doofus.
Re:Who are the famous programmers? (Score:3, Informative)
If you had RTFA you'd have seen that the Wikipedia article is exactly where they drew the list from in the first place.
And for that you get +5 Informative?
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:2, Informative)
She's mentioned in the arti -- oh, right. Slashdot.
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org], which I didn't see linked here.
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:3, Informative)
hey *definitely* deserve to be there since they created the first arcade game (Pong), first home videogames (Atari 2600 cartridges)
Pong wasn't the first arcade game (Galaxy Game was, or Computer Space if you're only counting commercial releases), and the Atari 2600 not only wasn't the first home console (the Magnavox Odyssey was), it wasn't Atari's first home console (Pong was).
the word "computer" once meant female programmer (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's the... (Score:3, Informative)
Mary Tsingou is an example of a woman who should have been famous for her programming, but she didn't get the credit for her work.
A pdf of the Physics Today article about her and what she did: http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/thierry.dauxois/PAPERS/pt61_55.2008.pdf [ens-lyon.fr]