Project Enigma (historical background)

[qw23]

Haha, someone posts something about the history of computing, and bh immediately forks it as a separate topic.

@bh

one of the things Snap*!* users ask for periodically is that = should report True for two procedures that do the same thing

Not just users …

@bh

We should have a special = for streams that compares the two heads as usual, then for the tails, declare them equal if their two promises are the same expression.

@bh

@qw23

Remarkably, women were among the first computer programmers, such as Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper.

I want to take issue with the "remarkably."

There’s two reasons for my use of the word “remarkably”:

1. All those people credited with being the / a “father of computing”, and in some cases building an early hardware device, were men (hence no one is ever called “mother of computing”, or “parent”), whereas among programming pioneers women were almost dominant.
2. Information Technology is often regarded as a masculine field of work (for no substantial reason, I agree).