I’d like to start today by drawing your attention to what promises to be the APL Array Language Family event of the year – The J Community/Conference 2012 right here in Toronto, this July 23 & 24, 2012. If you want to rub shoulders with Array Language Rock Stars, this is the conference to attend.
J Conference planning w/ Eric Iverson 2012
Further, 2012 is a special year because it is the 5oth anniversary of the publication of Dr. Kenneth Iverson’s seminal text A Programming Language which ultimately lead to his Turing Award, the “nobel prize of Computing”. In honour of this important milestone, Eric Iverson and Liz Giddens, the J conference organizer, have asked that I let you know that you are specially invited attend the The J Conference Banquet to celebrate the larger legacy of Ken and his colleagues, even if you choose not to attend the conference. (Note: the early bird ticket price is up now, so I encourage you to get your ticket, while there are still tickets available).
What’s else is happening?
2011 dished out a little more than I could handle but that’s to be expected. This is, however, why we’ve been so quiet this year on the blog. We’re in the back room, pushing things along quietly… For example, the interview with Dr. Fred Brooks has been transcribed and the transcriptions are now under review by our subject matter experts.
I also applied for a fellowship grant from the ACM. I didn’t win the fellowship, however the application process connected me with the ACM History group. And in spite of my extremely awkward and painful debut where I made the biggest public email faux pas I have ever made, the group is warm and welcoming. Nathan Ensmenger, as one example, is generously sharing some of his articles with me. He has developed an interesting analysis of how computer programming transformed into a male dominated profession, when it didn’t start out this way. I am writing about this documentary in the context of my own programming career for the ACM-W newsletter which is why I am looking at the research on gender in computing.
As a side note, working on this article is making me miss programming, which is a bit of a surprise.
Nathan Ensmenger also has an interest in film and contributed to Tops Secret Rosies, a documentary film about the women who did the ballistics calculations during WWI and were recruited to program the ENIAC – the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer in the 1940’2. This experience gives him a special appreciation of the challenge set before us here with this documentary – how does one visualize an abstract construct like a computer programming language?
This is just a taste of what’s going on behind the scenes. Keep the faith. I hope to see everyone in July, if not sooner.
In October of 2011, Dr Fred Brooks agreed to talk to me about when he and Dr Kenneth E Iverson, the father of APL, shared an office at Harvard University in the 1950s. So, I went to Chapel Hill in North Carolina, USA to speak with him.
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