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Frances Allen has died
- sitkack 6y ago:( Optimizing Compilers for Parallel Computers, lecture by Frances E. Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv-wXcUxrmE 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjoU-MjCws4
- musicale 6y agoShe also spoke at the acm turing100 symposium in 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLTUvFboveM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLTUvFboveM
- relaunched 6y agoI'd love to see a black banner / bar in her honor.
- fb03 6y agoI am rooting for this also.
- ixtli 6y agoI’d agree. I read an optimization paper by her in college.
- hardwaregeek 6y agoAgreed. Any Turing Award laureate, let alone the first female Turing Award laureate, deserves a black banner
- scott31 6y ago> Any Turing Award laureate deserves a black banner Except for Tim Berners-Lee, who tries to make the web a proprietary platform
- kitd 6y agoOk, I'll bite. Why?
- dang 6y ago"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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- anotherevan 6y agoAs an aside, when there is a black bar, I would also love it to link to the reason it is there.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoFirst 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.
- CarbyAu 6y agoAnd 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.
- mumblemumble 6y ago> 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/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/important-women-in-cs/
- pmiller2 6y agoYeah. 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 6y ago> 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"
- hardwaregeek 6y agoI'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 6y agoIt was more that C hindered optimization research. The interview was awesome as you said.
- sitkack 6y agoC and Unix hindered a whole lot. It was the PHP of its day.
- martinlaz 6y agoNice analogy. Although it's very unlikely that PHP will ever be as highly regarded as are C and Unix today.
- tomsmeding 6y agoI 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.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y agoHave you used modern PHP? Its a great language these days.
- wglb 6y agoI am struggling to understand your analogy here?
- anitil 6y agoOrdered the book, but would you be willing to go in to the issues around C while I wait for it to arrive?
- sanxiyn 6y agoFrances 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 6y agoI 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.
- sitkack 6y ago> 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.
- mpweiher 6y ago
- filereaper 6y ago@dang can we get a black bar in her honor?
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agosigned.
- graycat 6y agoFran 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 6y agoI’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?
- morelisp 6y agoWhile 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.
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- tombert 6y agoThis 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.
- jolux 6y agoWish we could get the black bar up.
- abegnoche 6y agoMy brain read the title as "France Had Aliens" which I was really curious to read. Thanks brain.
- nthomas 6y agoFran 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 6y agoGoing 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 6y agoIt was mentioned in this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059231, but not in an obvious way.
- jzig 6y agoWhy doesn't the black bar link to the related submission?
- RankingMember 6y agoThat's a great idea
- tus88 6y agoThat's too Web 2.0 for HN XD
- brian_herman__ 6y agoI'm glad we got a black bar for her.
- MarkCC 6y agoI worked at IBM research from 1997 until 2007, after finishing my PhD in compilers and programming languages. About two weeks after I started working there, she showed up in my office, and introduced herself. She'd heard about a new PL person joining, and she'd gone and gotten my dissertation and read it, so that she could come talk to me about it. Not that my dissertation was anything special: that's just the way that Fran was. She was an amazing person. Brilliant, and kind, and generous. The world needs more people like her.
- vaxman 6y agoMy dad should have married her. Same story except Spartans instead of Wolverines and he went into Defense instead of IBM, and he’s older and still rockin’ Siri on his AppleWatch.
- finphil 6y agoRIP