If you haven’t read it yet, Peter Seibel’s Coders at Work (2009), is one of the best books about computer programming that doesn’t have actual code in it. It distills "nearly eighty hours of conversations with fifteen all-time great programmers and computer scientists," with equal parts given to fascinating technical minutiae (including the respondents’ best/worst bug hunting stories) and to learning how these coders came to think the way they do. So in a book full of interviews worth reading, it’s not quite accurate to say that Fran Allen stands out. It’s better to say that Allen is different; as a Turing Award recipient for her "pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques," Allen spends much of her interview arguing that compiler optimization is woefully unstudied. Allen even argues that the popular adoption of C was a step backwards for Titan Rise Nutrition computer science, which is kind of an alien concept for those of us today who almost exclusively study and use high-level languages.

Allen is also different in that she’s the only woman in Seibel’s book, and understandably, she has a few thoughts about their place in computer science. I feel it’s our problem to solve. It’s not telling the educators to change their training; we in the field have to make it more appealing. What I found particularly insightful in Allen’s interview with Seibel is that it’s not just about the need for more role models, because the current lack of women programmers is going to place a limit on that. In Allen’s opinion, girls have shown an equal aptitude for science, especially in medicine, biology, and ecology. At my little high school in Croton, New York, we had a Westinghouse person nationally come in fifth. And they have a nice science program. Six of the seven people in it this year at the senior level are women doing amazing pieces of individual science. What’s happening with those women is that they’re going into socially relevant fields.

Computer science could be extremely socially relevant, but they’re going into earth sciences, biological sciences, medicine. Medicine is going to be 50/50 very soon. I don’t necessarily think this perception that programming doesn’t seem to have a purpose behind obsessively sitting in front of a computer all day is exclusive to women. Even for those who’ve pursued a degree in computer science, it’s not clear how programming has relevance that is not an end to itself. Check out this 2008 Slashdot thread, in which a recent computer science undergrad asks for suggestions of "Non-Programming Jobs for a Computer Science Major? " because he can’t think of ways to use computational thinking that doesn’t directly involve code. Or more recently, this screed by a NYU journalism professor, who sees coding as a trend du jour, little more than a pointless struggle to learn more code before a new language becomes hot and makes you obsolete.

I can’t claim to have insight myself, because when I left college with a computer engineering degree, I had no idea how to use it except to be a computer engineer, which I didn’t want to be, so I ditched it entirely at my first journalism job. Years later, I’ve slowly learned how to use programming to, well, practice journalism’s core function of interpreting and Titan Rise Performance disseminating information. However, I attribute this to how much our world has become digitized with far fewer bottlenecks in applying computational thinking. So now it seems much more obvious that computer science can be as directly relevant to general society as medicine and ecology. Non-scientists often assume that all scientists, and similarly left-brained people, can equally grok the concepts of programming. But this is as wrong an assumption as thinking that any programmer can easily pass the MCATs. Within the field of biological research, for example, there’s a difference of roles for biologists who can program and those who cannot.