
Yale will rename Calhoun College to honor Grace Hopper - daegloe
http://www.nhregister.com/20170211/yale-will-rename-calhoun-college-to-honor-trailblazing-alum-grace-murray-hopper
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vowelless
A great choice! Grace Murray Hopper is an amazing inspiration not only for
women but computer scientists in general.

~~~
Semiapies
I do continue to shake my head how people push Ada Lovelace, someone who wrote
a paper almost 200 years ago, as the symbol of women-working-with-computers,
when the _actual field_ has figures like Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton.

~~~
denzil_correa
> how people push Ada Lovelace, someone who wrote a paper almost 200 years
> ago, as the symbol of women-working-with-computers

I've rarely seen anyone champion Ada as a symbol of "Women working with
computers".

~~~
justin66
I'm pretty sure there's a poster of her at my local Microcenter, alongside the
likes of Dan Bricklin.

~~~
Semiapies
Yes. She's the single aspirational figure people push, most of the time, and
it's a bit ridiculous.

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Haven_Monahan
In fairness to JCC, I'm sure he'd look at the sort of things that go on at
Yale these days, and insist that all mention of his name be removed from
anything on campus.

The South, the South...God knows what shall become of her.

~~~
panic
_the sort of things that go on at Yale these days_

What do you mean by this?

~~~
jonwachob91
Probably referencing the students that act like spoiled children b/c not
everyone has the same opinions as them...

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-
new...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-
intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/)

~~~
jtedward
Well it's more effective then griping on the internet. The spoiled child
approach has done wonders for Trump and the Republicans.

~~~
toehead2000
This can be interpreted two, opposing ways. Very clever

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bpodgursky
In a hundred years, there will be campaigns to rename any buildings named
after non-vegetarians.

There won't be a lot of names left if you take only the purest of the pure as
names. Naming a building means celebrating the good things that a person did,
not condoning the bad. People are complicated and it's a disservice to college
students to suggest otherwise.

~~~
erispoe
Context matters. It matters to be on the morally wrong side when society is at
a decision point. By and large, we don't judge romans because they practiced
slavery. We judge people who have chosen to defend slavery when it was not a
moral consensus anymore and on the verge of abolition. Plenty of slave owners
have their names on university buildings, but they never went to war to defend
it.

~~~
azakai
There is a strong argument to be made that we _are_ at a decision point on
vegetarianism. Of course we'll only know for sure in retrospect, but

* Vegans and vegetarians are growing groups, especially among the young.

* Food technology is improving and making it easier and easier to not eat meat. There are a few startups in this area, such as Impossible Foods, that may revolutionize how we eat.

* The world is becoming increasingly aware of the risk of climate change, and that consuming animal products is a significant factor.

* We have plenty of solid scientific evidence showing people can live healthy lives without eating meat, removing the "we need it to survive" argument. (There is also some evidence that eating less meat is good for you, but there is a lot to debate there.)

* Legislation is moving more and more towards protecting animal rights, even if we have a lot left to do.

So yes, I think the top comment is right. People eating meat today will be
judged poorly in a few generations' time.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Sorry, but no.

Only about 3% of Americans are self-proclaimed vegetarians (less than 1% are
vegans), and there's good evidence that the majority of those eat meat, fish,
or poultry on a regular basis [1].

Of course, future generations may be 100% vegan and look back on us with
horror at the way that we treated animals, our planet, our bodies, etc. But
that's distinct from looking back on individuals who didn't choose a
particular niche lifestyle and having it tarnish their memory.

Your points seem more about why you think that individual non-vegetarians
_should_ be judged harshly by history, but I see little reason to think that a
lifestyle that less than 1% of the population strictly adheres to is going to
become a source of individualized historical shame.

1\. [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals-and-
us/201109/w...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals-and-
us/201109/why-are-there-so-few-vegetarians)

~~~
azakai
I believe your data is out of date, here is Wikipedia's summary:

> In 1971, 1 percent of U.S. citizens described themselves as
> vegetarians.[104] In 2008 Harris Interactive found that 3.2% are vegetarian
> and 0.5% vegan,[105] while a 2013 Public Policy Polling survey of 500
> respondents found that 13% of Americans are either vegetarian or vegan—6%
> vegetarian and 7% vegan.[106] U.S. vegetarian food sales (meat replacements
> such as soy milk and textured vegetable protein) doubled between 1998 and
> 2003, reaching $1.6 billion in 2003.[107]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Unite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#United_States)

There is a strong trend here, as shown both by that data, and by the other
factors I mentioned (startups in the meat-free space, etc.).

Of course, a trend has no guarantee it will continue. But it is plausible that
it will.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
So in five years, veganism rose 14x while vegetarianism doubled? Color me
skeptical. You also didn't address the issue that most of those people
probably aren't even very strict in their diets.

Harris poll in 2016 says about 3%:
[http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/Polls/2016_adults_veg.htm](http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/Polls/2016_adults_veg.htm)

And given previous results, I highly suspect many of those have eaten meat or
fish in the last year.

And so my point stands: even if strict vegetarian / vegan lifestyles become
the majority view in the future, it'll be many decades from now, and
individuals in our era won't be widely shamed for not adopting such a
lifestyle, given that only a tiny fraction of the population does.

~~~
azakai
Oh, I don't think strictness is the issue here. Sure, very possibly most
vegans/vegetarians eat animal products now and then. It's hard to be 100%
perfect, given how society is set up right now.

I agree this is a process that will take decades.

I disagree about the criticism. I think those future generations will be
horrified at how we so casually accept the eating of animal products, factory
farming, and so forth. (And they might feel some unease at the
vegans/vegetarians that are just 99% perfect, too.)

The fact it's only a growing fraction right now doesn't mean the future won't
be shocked at the majority today. There are plenty of examples where we are
shocked by the majority in the past.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Yes, but that's not what we're discussing. We're discussing individualized
shame in the future. And for that metric, strictness absolutely matters.

So in 200 years, will they remove the name of someone from our era from
monuments or buildings because they weren't vegetarian? Especially considering
almost no one was, and the people who claimed to be were mostly lying?

Probably not.

------
redthrowaway
Elihu Yale was a slave trader, might as well rename the whole damned school.

Or we could stop freaking out that historical figures didn't have 21st century
values, but that proposition is clearly too radical.

~~~
Haven_Monahan
Sorry, we will have only binary & atom-thick appraisals of historic figures in
the US today. John Calhoun == Bad; Grace Hopper == Good. And that's all you
need to know.

The ones doing the renaming have no independent convictions of their own. Or
for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of
others, let alone others from different times or places.

What they _do_ have instead is a hyperactive self-righteousness gland, which
is easily tickled to orgasm by the thought of them being on the _right_ side,
the side of the angels, in any conflict. It is what passes for their
conscience. This explains the drive to cast all historic conflicts in the most
reductive & simplistic way possible. So much the easier to spooge over how
progressive they are for hating on the _wrong_ side

John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early 19th
century America would be incomplete. Yet, he can be dismissed with infantile
invective ("human sewer"), as though he, like all antebellum Southerners was a
monodimensional cartoon villain, like Decepticons who had an abiding interest
in...cotton.

I am cheered by the fact that more and more normal citizens are seeing this
performative outrage pantomime for the chauvinism-of-viewpoint that it is.

~~~
AnOscelot
> John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early
> 19th century America would be incomplete.

No one's stripping him out of the history books. Why does he deserve the honor
of having a college named for him?

> Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views
> of others, let alone others from different times or places.

I guess I can't pass up the irony of this statement. I grew up in the South.
I'm old enough to remember a time when Confederates were seen as noble. Old
enough to have people tell me quite sincerely that "those people had it good
as slaves."

Attitudes have changed since then and in part because enough white people
attempted to learn about and gained sympathy for a group of people very
different than themselves: the enslaved black Americans of the 19th Century.
Without the understanding and empathy which crossed cultural and racial
boundaries, there would never have come a time when Calhoun's name was
considered a negative by the majority.

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theparanoid
Cracked me up - "remain concerned that we don’t do things that erase history"
Salovey said.

~~~
mulmen
Not sure why that's funny? It's a legitimate concern.

------
wtbob
One wonders how long before Yale changes its name altogether: Elihu Yale was a
slave trader.

~~~
Haven_Monahan
Brown as well. You really can't talk about the slave trade in colonial RI w/o
mentioning John & Nick Brown.

Of course, the brand names of these colleges are too valuable to dump.

~~~
bbanyc
Nicholas Brown Jr., for whom the university was named, was an abolitionist.

~~~
Haven_Monahan
...who got his money from his parents and uncles. Moe Brown was also a quaker
&& robustly antislavery, but that did not stop him from bailing out his
brothers during the war. Trying to extricate the triangle-trade money from the
Brown family is like trying to wring the pink from a sunrise.

------
pjc50
Grace Hopper on nanoseconds:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8)
(excellently presented use of a visual aid to scale)

As for the renaming, when people are honoured by having things named after
them, from time to time it's appropriate to see whether the things they did
would still be considered honourable. Otherwise we'd still be referring to
Stalingrad and Leningrad.

~~~
Shubley
Stalingrad and Leningrad are not good examples. They both had other names
before the Soviets did exactly what you're advocating and swept away history
to make way for _their_ new era of equality.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Kaliningrad still needs fixed -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Königsberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Königsberg)

~~~
jhbadger
It should rebuild the seven bridges to get all the graph theory tourism money.

~~~
leoc
In the meantime Broom Bridge
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broom_Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broom_Bridge)
is still standing and easily reached from the centre of Dublin ... just
saying!

~~~
zump
Quaternions didn't change much.

------
tyteen4a03
> She was on the team that developed the first computer language, “compiler,”
> in 1952

Yup, journalists at it again.

~~~
CalChris
_The Education of a Computer_ , Grace Murray Hopper.

[http://xover.mud.at/~marty/iug2/p243-hopper.pdf](http://xover.mud.at/~marty/iug2/p243-hopper.pdf)

I'm not sure what your objection is but she wrote this in 1952 and
specifically used the words _compiling routine_.

~~~
skissane
The actual name of the programming language I believe was A-0 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System)

If you look at that paper, she gives an example of the language on figure 9 of
page 248:

0 b0i I(1,2,3,4,5) 1,2,3,10,6

1 apn 1,10 4

2 x-e 4 5

3 amc 6,1 7

4 ts0 7 8

5 am0 5,8 9

6 yrs 1,9 0(1,2)

7 aaL 1,2,3 1 8,1

8 ust

(I hope I copied the above correctly, the table is a bit hard to interpret.)

It looks rather like assembly language. Except that the mnemonics in column 2
aren't actually assembly opcodes, they identify subroutines written in machine
code. Variables are represented by numbers. The third column is used for input
arguments, the fourth for output arguments, the fifth for control flow.

It was a "compiler" in the sense that it read the program and wrote out
machine code for each instruction to (a) move input arguments from the
variables according to the calling convention (b) make the subroutine call (c)
move the output arguments back to the memory locations for the variables.

Very primitive, but I don't think anyone else in 1952 was doing any better.
(Other 1950s languages look far more modern – such as LISP and FORTRAN – but
they were developed 4-5 years later.)

~~~
astrodust
Thirty years later they added some curly braces and called it C!

Mostly kidding, but this is an important step. Assembly, as it came to be
known, was one of the first "high level" languages because you could multiply
two numbers without having to know the exact opcode for multiplying.

------
throwawaycc424
Ah, yes. Another example of 'progressive' historical erasure.

When will the book burning start?

~~~
dang
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, especially not political troll
comments.

Also, please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts; that's not a legit
use of throwaways, and we ban them.

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boona
I'm glad. It would be a shame to challenge students with the realities of our
past. College isn't about challenging students, it's about creating a safe
space to ensure that upper middle class pathological narcissism is fostered
and that students never mature into adulthood.

------
gargarplex
I'm doing an Instagram series (#GodsOfProgramming –
[https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/godsofprogramming/](https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/godsofprogramming/)).
CoIncidentally, we posted about Grace Hoppper today. :)

