"Angilion" <angilion at ypical.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3d331c6c.12993472 at news.freeserve.net...
> On Mon, 15 Jul 2002 07:46:11 -0400, "Parse Tree" <parsetree at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>> [..]
>> >If Grace Murray Hopper really did invent the compiler, then her impact
has
> >been far beyond that of Marie Curie, and most Nobel Laureates in general.
> >http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/hopper.html>> It appears that she did invent the compiler, but there does seem to be
> some uncertainty. There is a tendency to exaggerate the achievements
> of any woman who becomes famous in a field, and the exaggerations
> become assumed as fact without the checking that would usually
> occur. For example, I have often read that Grace Hopper invented
> COBOL, which is not true.
>> "In 1949 Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a Senior
> Mathematician and there she worked with John Eckert and John Mauchly on
> the UNIVAC computer. She designed an improved compiler while working for
> the company and was part of the team which developed Flow-Matic, the first
> English-language data-processing compiler."
>
If feminazis didn't always dredge up Marie Curie from a century ago as an
example of female intelligence, then this story about Hopper "inventing"
[read: IMPROVING, in the English language, as noted above] MAY be credible.
But when they keep insisting that the wife of the recipient of half a Nobel
Prize was the *inventor* of x-rays, all such stories must be taken with a
grain of salt.
On top of that, Hopper's alleged accomplishment occurred during the era of
affirmative action, which will taint ALL such claims.
But the drop dead problem is the almost complete lack of overlap between the
sexes in the quantitative skills necessary for such inventiveness, as
illustrated by the GRE quantitative scores http://christianparty.net/gre.htm
The cream of the crop in female intellect are the 12,000 women physical
science majors who take the GRE each year whose average GRE score is only
638. This is 59 points lower than the 32,000 men engineering majors, and 45
points lower than the 20,000 men physical science majors, and 6 points lower
than the 21,000 men who major in "other" subjects. This is 6 TIMES as many
men who have much higher quantitative skills, so what happened to them?
Are they not inventing compilers? Anybody who's ever done any serious
programming can claim that they "invented" a compiler of some sort, so the
big question is what happened to these 6 TIMES as many men with average GRE
scores which are 40 points higher.
Could there be even ONE woman who outperformed all of these 73,000 men in
compiler development? I really don't think so.
John Knight
