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Notes -
Kathleen Booth, early British computer scientist, died one month ago on Sept 29 at the age of 100. The Register published an obituary for her titled "RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language."
One month later, yesterday, a link to the obituary was the top (I think) post 1, 2 on both Hacker News and Reddit's programming subreddit
Many of the commenters lamented that they had never heard of this highly influential person, and other commenters suggested that the reason most people hadn't heard of her is because she was a woman.
Ironically, I would contend, the only reason we are hearing about her is because she was a woman.
Calling her the inventor of assembly language may be a stretch. One HN comment points out that the IEEE has already given a computer pioneer award to David Wheeler for inventing the first assembly language in 1949.
You can read her 1947 paper and decide if the table at the end counts as the first assembly language. It is a numbered list of 25 operations, a symbolic description of their action, and in a few cases an English description of their operation. It is, at least superficially, similar to the list of 30 operations Wheeler created for the EDSAC.
Ran out of time to delve into:
Grace Hopper falsely being credited for inventing COBOL
If Ada Lovelace invented programming, and if she did but no one knew about it and it didn't influence anyone else, should we credit her?
Booth's credit being recently discovered/promoted in 2018 Hackaday article
Margaret Hamilton being the only programmer popularly known for Apollo work, despite leading a small team of 3 people.
Hamilton and Booth both marrying their bosses.
All of these women being impressive in their own right, and exaggerating their contributions for Girl Power is a disservice to them.
It is so tiring. And then combined with people saying things like "women dominated early programming and computer science". Agh. I'm sure there were a number of important and talented women in computer science. I'm also pretty sure, from what I know of history, interests by sex, and the breakdown by sex over the 30 years I've been in the field, that it's pretty likely there were more men than women. (Yes, I know much of the original 'programming' work, which was like connecting cables in a telephone switchboard was mainly done by women, as were many of the clerical calculations. That's something different).
The Lovelace one is particularly annoying, since it appears both Babbage and someone else had made algorithms (a word from Arabic from waaay back) before her. But sure, all of the credit is hers, and men have just been stealing the idea from her.
Grace Hopper seems to have been pretty kick-ass. Ada Lovelace too. We don't need to make up shit so that they are even more kick-ass. It's deceptive and sad.
Still, though, (I'm terribly sorry) whenever I hear her name, I can't help but think something like "secret identity of superheroine The Locust."
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'Lovelace invented algorithms' is obviously incorrect, but she did appear to have insight into the applications of the analytical engine that it's designer didn't. I think it's fair to characterize her as the first person to look at the capabilities of a general purpose computer and realize the limitless possibilities.
In meme form:
Babbage:
Lovelace:
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