https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/08/remembering-frances-allen/
3 replies (most recent on top)
What a cool lady. Groundbreaking. Shameful that Arvind didn’t acknowledge personally in his most recent employee broadcast. No company wide emails. Just an announcement on the website. Sign of the times.
Let’s hope Jim acknowledges during his next employee broadcast.
Frances Allen wrote "A Catalogue of Optimizing Transformations" in 1971. 50 years(!!!) later, they are still the backbone of optimizing compilers. I think the only major thing missing is autovectorization.
She was in her 30s when she wrote it.
I worked at IBM research from 1997 until 2007, after finishing my PhD in compilers and programming languages.
About two weeks after I started working there, she showed up in my office, and introduced herself. She'd heard about a new PL person joining, and she'd gone and gotten my dissertation and read it, so that she could come talk to me about it. Not that my dissertation was anything special: that's just the way that Fran was.
She was an amazing person. Brilliant, and kind, and generous. The world needs more people like her.