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."
Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:2, Funny)
Which is sad, because I just realized that I can't think of any famous female programmers off the top of my head. Of course, the regular ratio isn't terribly different...
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:5, Funny)
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.
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.
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Wow. And an admiral, to boot.
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First recorded use of the term "bug" (in the sense of a program fault), but from the context the term must have already existed. So we actually don't know who came up with the term.
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Funny)
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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...
While we're hunting for wild name occurrences, if you combine her maiden and married initials, she's a GBMH, which is only a typo away from GmbH. Which considering her Navy valor in WWII she *also* helped establish. Amazing Grace indeed!
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There are not many famous women engineers either. I suspect women simply don't have as much interest in "gadgets" as we men do. Likewise we men don't have much interest in shopping sprees for the latest clothing & shoe styles.
BACK TO LIST:
Where are the programmers from Atari, Commodore, and Activision? They *definitely* deserve to be there since they created the first arcade game (Pong), first home videogames (Atari 2600 cartridges), and first third-party development company (David Crane, Larry Kapl
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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who other than us knows who Hoare is?
Your mom, right? Everyone knows that.
(Come on, it was right there, someone had to go for it)
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This is part of a broader spectrum of ignorance. There are easily 20 times as many people who know who Paris Hilton is than who Buckminster Fuller was. Ask somebody what else the Lear who built Learjets invented first. What did Tesla do that actually got built and worked? What branch of the US government did Learned Hand work for? Who was Armand Hammer? Milton Canniff? Leon Trotsky? Ludwig Mies van der Rohe? George Adamski? Alvin York? All of these died less than a century ago, which should make it a bit ea
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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).
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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. :)
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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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.
Because I keep confusing her with her cousin Linda.
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I think you missed the fact that the post you're quoting was a joke.
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Funny)
That's true. I forgot because after being forced to program in Ada, I permanently purged Ada and anything Ada related from my memory.
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Actually, Ada is included in the list.
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Funny)
Danielle Berry [wikipedia.org]
Audrey Tang [wikipedia.org]
Rebecca Heineman [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score:4, Funny)
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Sorry gals, women just ain't that great at it. (Score:2, Insightful)
This might sound a bit like flame bait -- but I am speaking from the experience of nearly a decade of software/algorithm development. I've known good programmers, great programmers, and bad programmers. Women just don't (usually) fall into that great category.
This may stem from many factors. For instance, women may not be drawn to computer programming as a hobby as men. Thinking of those that I classify as great -- the vast majority of them knew how to program well before they ever attended any for
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.
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I think most people who become famous have that possibility in the back of their head the whole time, and it guides their decisions. C'mon, girls, toss your upbringing aside and work on those egomaniacal fantasies!
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the word "computer" once meant female programmer (Score:4, Informative)
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She's mentioned in the arti -- oh, right. Slashdot.
It's the... (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
Re:It's the... (Score:5, Funny)
clever dick!
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Discrimination alive and well in... (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
While a pile o' poo-poo. This is wrong on multiple levels.
First, how much V.C. money did Torvalds take? RMS? ESR? Pike? Ritchie? Kernighan? Hell, how about Gates? Generally speaking, legendary programmers become legendary by *programming*, not
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RMS, ESR and Gates are definetly not famous because of their achievements in programming.
ESR, I will grant, though he has written some useful tools. RMS, on the other hand, first became famous because of EMACS and GCC. He became *more* famous later on for his "other" activities, but he was originally a programmer. Bill Gates was certainly famous early on because of programming -- he personally wrote the Microsoft BASIC interpreter that was ported to many personal computers of the time (e.g., the TRS-80).
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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]
Rule #1, get a good publicist (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Rule #1, get a good publicist (Score:4, Interesting)
C'mon. Oracle was created by Ellison and two other guys, not by the person who fixed some bugs in 2004. The distinction between the two is the entire freaking point.
Re:Rule #1, get a good publicist (Score:4, Interesting)
Since I known 30+ people in the list I would have to say you are very wrong. While I don't know the author of Word, it would not surprise me if the 1st few versions weren't 90% the work of one person and I've used word on a unix based 3b2.
Carmack? Torvalds? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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.
Infamous programmers (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Infamous programmers (Score:5, Funny)
Here is not a comprehensive list of those programmers, but at least a comprehensive list of their collective works:
http://thedailywtf.com/ [thedailywtf.com]
Re:Infamous programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
include posted code to verify the stupidity level
But the people who really kill projects aren't those who write the code. They're the ones who prevaricate about designs, choose inappropriate languages, tools and development schemes. The people who build-in limitations as they don't have the skill (or vision) to appreciate the implications of what they're designing or make things so hopelessly complicated - in the name of flexibility - that no super-coder could ever implement the design.
Bad code can be rewritten, but lousy design is here forever
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And I'm sure that such a list wouldn't attract even the remotest bit of litigation in a country like the US.
Who are the people *you* think of? (Score:2, Insightful)
Damn, I just moderated so rather then post non-anon, I'll just post anon.
I think of that Carmack guy, who wrote Doom and Quake. I think of Billy G, who isn't famous for writing code exactly (or at least not only because of that).
Richard Stallman and Linus "rare Finnish/Swedish name" both come to mind.
I'm having trouble thinking of the name of the SAMBA dude, and what are the names of the two Google founders?
And that's about it. I've run out of ideas.
apathy maybe [revleft.com].
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Bill Gates, of course -- a programmer from the start.
Hans Reiser. He didn't make the list, but IMO ReiserFS should have put him on the list before he gained lasting infamy.
Linus Torvalds
Brian Kernighan & Dennis M. Ritchie
Bill Atkinson
Ada Lovelace
Grace Hopper
Steve Wozniak (though I think of him more as an engineer)
Some of the other names I think of as famous, but not so much as programmers -- Wirth, Backus, and Dijkstra I think of as computer scientists, for instance.
Make money (Score:2)
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.
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Of course not. He was the guy in that play. "O Romero, Romero, wherefore art thou Romero?"
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He made me his bitch.
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I thought we all knew who Romero was because he dated Stevie Case [google.com].
Poor visualization (Score:3, Insightful)
What a horrific visualization - first it's a pie chart and on top of that why put in a background to obscure the colors? Someone went overboard with their charting software
'Famous' is subjective here to say the least (Score:3, Insightful)
(Disclaimer: I don't give a **** if I'm on the list or not ;))
Perhaps the right question isn't 'how to become a famous programmer' but first let's focus on what a famous programmer is? The concept of being famous is that a lot of people know you.
Let me see some hands, who knows "David Bradley" and can name what he accomplished? No-one? Why is this person then branded as 'famous' ? Sure, he wrote a handler which is in almost every Bios, but aren't there millions of routines out there used by even more million people? I mean: the guy / girl who wrote the event handler for the 'Google Search' button has his/her piece of code executed a couple of million times a day as well... The people who know who wrote that routine is probably as big as the group of people who know the name "David Bradley" and associate that name with cntrl-alt-del.
So this 'famous programmer' list is IMHO more of a list of some editor who liked to have his (her?) personal favorites in a single list on Wikipedia.
Article is missing a beard length pie chart (Score:4, Funny)
Growing a beard [codethinked.com] seems to be important to becoming a famous programmer.
Men would always be overrepresented in all ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The real way (Score:5, Funny)
Protip: (Score:2)
Killing your wife? Not actually a project.
Well, okay, yeah, I mean, it takes some planning and the execution is, well, an execution, but it's not very open-source.
Re:Protip: (Score:4, Funny)
Famous female programmers (Score:3, Insightful)
Is Emily Short really famous? I knew of her but only because I follow Interactive Fiction.
And I'm sorry, just because Roberta Williams was part of a husband and wife team doesn't mean she counts as half a person. If you were counting _projects_ that might be valid, but then you'd have to divide all the other programmer's projects up too.
da da da... (Score:2)
Re:da da da... (Score:4, Funny)
Dude...
Elaine Roberts (Score:5, Funny)
Only the greatest hacker of our time, duh.
http://xkcd.com/342/ [xkcd.com]
Men bigger risk takers? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the thing is that men are wired to be bigger risk takers and society rewards people who take big risks. Of course, with men, for every guy that hits it big, there's a dozen, if not a hundred, that completely flounder.
Re:Men bigger risk takers? (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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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! :-)
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That's not what Alan Fishman [wikipedia.org] says.
Why bother with those strategies (Score:3, Funny)
1. Get into game development position
2. Inject Goatse timebomb
3. PROFIT!
4. NO WAIT!. NO PROFIT.
5. SOME FAME
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The Gaping Coffee scandal!
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Why a separate "Transsexuals" Category? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not like "Transsexual" is an endpoint - it seems more like a transition path.
Wouldn't it make more sense to simply add one point (or one-half, if you will) to both the Male and Female genders?
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Probably because there is a 5:1 ratio of women to transsexuals?
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Wouldn't it make more sense to simply add one point (or one-half, if you will) to both the Male and Female genders?
Except that would make the numbers (and definitely of gender) utterly meaningless if people could simply choose what to call themselves. The premise of the whole point is that there are fewer famous biological females. Who cares what psychological issues they're carrying around? Genetic gender is the only reasonable definition to use.
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Maybe you should have spent five minutes with Google before shooting your mouth off about something you're obviously clueless about. Putting aside the sheer stupidity of claiming that subjective states such as hunger or gender dysphoria don't exist because you can't directly observe them, it just isn't true that you're speaking of a subjective state with no independently observable correlates:
Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus [endojournals.org]
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No, you just dismissed the identities lived experiences of hundreds of thousands of people because you, for reasons that are rather unclear, wish to insist that chromosomes trump all else regardless of evidence. If a person has an unusual gender identity for their karyotype, that is prima facie evidence that at least some elements of this person's neurology, the ones which influence subjectively perceived gender identity, did not develop in a very typical way for their chromosomes, and there is no particul
I met a couple (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I met a lot of famous people when I worked at Disney, and I completely agree with you. I understand why people would want to be rich (who wouldn't?) but I have no idea why anybody would want to be famous.
Some of them, like the late Buddy Hackett, are really nice guys who you would never know was a rich famous person. But a lot of them are utter assholes who are in love with themselves and don't give a rat's ass about anybody else.
I met Eddie Money the day before he became famous, when his name was still Dua
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...you may become typecast into some sort of programming role.
student my_job = "studying";
(programming_role) my_job;
printf("%s\n", my_job);
Nope, it didn't seem to work.
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The only famous one on the list that I have met would be Bill Gates. We had a very short chat, he seemed rather quiet/shy, more so than I would have expected given how frequently he's in the public eye. He seemed genuinely nice and was far more down-to-Earth (if such can be gathered in just a few minutes of chatting) than I would have expected as well.
Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really? Seriously?
Is it still necessary to add the obligatory We Are Not Sexist bit to everything? In other news the ratio of males to females is higher among soldiers, firefighters, police officers, coal miners, and convicted felons.
Haven't we been over the sexist arguments to death by now? Is there ever going to come a time when we can talk about people without mentioning the
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No. There is a vocal minority in almost every group who will not stop until they feel that they are in control. It is no longer okay to be a white, straight, male, with a religion, a firearm, and an SUV. They preach equality but the real goal is superiority.
Fame (Score:2)
Yes, there's a fine measure of your success as a human being.
Programmers spend far too much time in front of a computer and far too little time in the real world, having real relationships and fixing real problems.
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Programmers spend far too much time in front of a computer and far too little time in the real world, having real relationships and fixing real problems.
So, it's not a "real problem" when someone's life is destroyed by poorly-written software? All right, then.
To be blunt, you're the one not living in the real world if you think that problems involving computing aren't "real problems".
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Let me guess, you're one of the people who call it "playing on the computer"?
Maybe even one of the people who think that technology is the problem and having some vision of a fantastical world of old where people enjoyed a leisurely way of life with little or no worries?
If any of this is true I'm really surprised that you bother with slashdot.
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I don't think that I'm a rarity when I say that I have a wife, children, an ex-wife, a disparate group of friends and family that I socialize with on a regular basis, frequent various societal functions, and most generally don't write code for no reason at all but actually code typically because there is a real-world problem.
It's an arbitrary list (Score:3, Interesting)
I would bet that 95% of Slashdot readers never heard of Alain Colmerauer, for example.
And the Bard's Tale author is included, but even though the game is well known, he (now she) is not. And there are many, many other well-known games with great programmers behind them who are not on the list.
To be a great programmer (Score:2)
#1 Always do research, analysis, and design before you start coding. If not, do it later so you know how to fix and debug your program.
#2 You do quality work.
#3 You give the users what they want and the managers what they want. Customer satisfaction is the key. Everyone effected by the program needs to be happy and that is hard to do sometimes.
#4 You learn from your mistakes and failures and you try to invent new ways to do things.
#5 You keep trying even if you fail, you read books you look at articles and
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Famous? You keep using that word... (Score:3, Insightful)
Famous?
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Relational languages (Score:2)
If somebody is looking for a way to introduce a new programming language, the niche of relational languages is comparatively open. While there are thousands of "regular" languages, there are only a handful of known competitors to SQL. (I've proposed one myself, by the way, called SMEQL.) SQL has grown a bit long in the tooth and is due for competition.
Horrible (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
IANAFP (Score:3, Funny)
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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:Who are the famous programmers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Interestingly, the wikipedia article only mentions Kernighan for AWK and ditroff. It doesn't even mention that other language that he's known for.
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Wasn't one of the very early third-generation programming languages designed by a woman? I can't remember which language, though...
COBOL, Admiral Grace Hopper.