The power of role models
software
women
feminism
role-models
gender-balance
egalitarianism
astronomy
computing
rob-pike
february 2017 by jm
At dinner I asked some of the women to speak to me about this, how astronomy became so (relatively) egalitarian. And one topic became clear: role models. Astronomy has a long history of women active in the field, going all the way back to Caroline Herschel in the early 19th century. Women have made huge contributions to the field. Dava Sobel just wrote a book about the women who laid the foundations for the discovery of the expansion of the universe. Just a couple of weeks ago, papers ran obituaries of Vera Rubin, the remarkable observational astronomer who discovered the evidence for dark matter. I could mention Jocelyn Bell, whose discovery of pulsars got her advisor a Nobel (sic). The most famous astronomer I met growing up was Helen Hogg, the (adopted) Canadian astronomer at David Dunlap Observatory outside Toronto, who also did a fair bit of what we now call outreach.
The women at the meeting spoke of this, a history of women contributing, of role models to look up to, of proof that women can make major contributions to the field.
What can computing learn from this? It seems we're doing it wrong. The best way to improve the representation of women in the field is not to recruit them, important though that is, but to promote them. To create role models. To push them into positions of influence.
february 2017 by jm
Regexp Disaster
july 2016 by jm
Course notes from Gerald Jay Sussman's "Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming" class at MIT. Hard to argue with this:
(via Rob Pike's twitter: https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/755856685923639296)
regex
regexps
regular-expressions
functional
combinators
gjs
rob-pike
coding
languages
The syntax of the regular-expression language is awful. There are various incompatable forms of the language and the quotation conventions are baroquen [sic]. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of useful software, for example grep, that uses regular expressions to specify the desired behavior.
Although regular-expression systems are derived from a perfectly good mathematical formalism, the particular choices made by implementers to expand the formalism into useful software systems are often
disastrous: the quotation conventions adopted are highly irregular; the egregious misuse of parentheses, both for grouping and for backward reference, is a miracle to behold. In addition, attempts to
increase the expressive power and address shortcomings of earlier designs have led to a proliferation of incompatible derivative languages.
(via Rob Pike's twitter: https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/755856685923639296)
july 2016 by jm
Rob Pike's 5 rules of optimization
april 2015 by jm
these are great. I've run into rule #3 ("fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small") several times...
twitter
rob-pike
via:igrigorik
coding
rules
laws
optimization
performance
algorithms
data-structures
aphorisms
april 2015 by jm
Excellent Rob Pike quote about algorithmic complexity
Been there, bought the t-shirt ;)
rob-pike
quotes
algorithms
big-o
complexity
coding
september 2013 by jm
'Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small.' -- Rob Pike
Been there, bought the t-shirt ;)
september 2013 by jm
Structural Regular Expressions
november 2009 by jm
'The current UNIX text processing tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line. There is a simple notation that can describe the `shape' of files when the typical array-of-lines picture is inadequate. That notation is regular expressions. Using regular expressions to describe the structure in addition to the contents of files has interesting applications, and yields elegant methods for dealing with some problems the current tools handle clumsily. When operations using these expressions are composed, the result is reminiscent of shell pipelines.' Paper by Rob Pike, via adulau. intriguing
sregex
via:adulau
regexp
rob-pike
regex
library
text
structural
parsing
from delicious
november 2009 by jm
related tags
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