Today is the 2nd Ada-Lovelace-Day, an “international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science”. This initiative originating in the UK encourages people to write about tech women whom they admire, who impressed them and who are heroines to them. I also pledged myself to write something, because womens achievements are often overlooked, disregarded or even disrated and therefor its a duty to me to spread the word.

There are plenty of stories to tell, so it was not easy to choose which one to write about. There are for instance the girls I work with, who are inspiring, amusing and fun to work with every day. They earn my respect, but instead of glorifying my colleagues (you can meet them in this blog btw) I want to take my hat off to three of the great ladies out there, each one totally different from the other.

Barbara Liskov

Let q(x) be a property provable about objects x of type T. Then q(y) should be true for objects y of type S where S is a subtype of T.

She’s the one who the Liskov-Substitution-Principle (LSP) was named after, because she formulated it together with Jeannette Wing. As I’m not an educated computer scientist, I had to do some homework and read about it (a general introduction and an article on LSP and dynamic languages) Apart from LSP being one of the fundamentals of object orientated programming, Barbara Liskov worked on and published about data abstraction in general, developed CLU, an object orientated language, ARGUS, a distributed programming language and THOR, a distributed OO database system. She’s the institute professor of MIT’s Programming Methodology Group where she works since 1972, here current research topics are – guess what – distributed applications. For her work she received the Turing award and the Von-Neumann-Medal – a real heroine.

Kathy Sierra

And there you have it. I think ‘girl code’ is quite a compliment. Because caring about things like beauty makes us better programmers and engineers. We make better things.

Although she seems to be around for a decade now (founder of Java Ranch, editor and author of the O’Reilly Head First Series), I stumbled about her amazing blog some weeks ago only. Its a pitty that she had to discontinue her activity due to death threads and now even closed her twitter stream. Nevertheless “Creating passionate users” is worth the lecture and allthough the articles are some years old, they come up with refreshing views on usability, are sometimes provoking and always fun to read and to watch. Just to point out one: Code like a girl talks about clean code and the aesthetics of source code and turns the prejudice about girls caring more about beauty then boys from a negative to a positive connotation. If you call cool things “girl things” it doesn’t make that things bad, no – on the contrary it makes the girls cool. Other articles are called “T-shirt-first-developement” and “Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak”, but you should go and discover them yourself.

Hedy Lamarr

Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, after leaving Vienna and her first husband, an arms producer, during world war II, changed her name and became a glamourous Hollywood actress. She was admired for her beauty, which as she experienced at least in Hollywood doesn’t go very well with being noted as intelligent. Thats one of the reasons why it took a long time, until her invention was notified, appriciated and honoured (she received the EFF pioneer award in 1997). Together with George Antheil, anvantgarde composer and her neighbour, she invented a “Secret Communications System” based on piano rolls (patented in 1942), an early form of frequency hopping, which is a technique of switching the frequency for communication on the transmitter and receiver side simultanously. Similar methods are the base of our todays mobile communication systems.

Photos credits:
Mirko Raner (Barbara Liskov), James Duncan Davidson (Kathy Sierra), Movie trailer screenshot (Hedy Lamarr)