Frances Elizabeth Allen: a Woman Who Made Code Run Fast

A bit off topic, sorry, but why pick such a blurry / poorly lit picture? (and make it transparent, to add insult to injury)

There are much better pictures, e.g.: https://www.hamiltonfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Frances-Eliza...

She won the Turing Award. That's hardly being forgotten.

Is this an interview with her, purportedly made five years after her death?

Yes, apparently. At the very end, it says:

> This interview transcript is a work of dramatised historical reconstruction. Frances Allen died on 4th August 2020, and cannot speak. The words, reflections, and responses attributed to her in this document are constructed from historical records, published interviews, biographical materials, technical papers, and documented accounts of her life and work – but they are not her actual words, spoken in real time.

> What preceded this was a fictional dramatisation, constructed with the intention of being historically responsible and intellectually faithful to what is known of Frances Allen’s thinking, her work, her values, and her reflections on her career. The interview format was used to explore her contributions, challenges, and insights in a narrative form – one that aims to capture the nuance, personality, and candid self-reflection that archival records alone rarely convey.

> This is an imaginative reconstruction of what Frances Allen might have said, had she been able to sit down for an extended conversation in December 2025, with the benefit of hindsight and the perspective of someone reflecting on a complete career arc. It draws on: ...

> This is not a transcript of actual words she spoke. It is not a formal biography. It is not an attempt to present speculation as fact or to invent details about her life that are not grounded in historical evidence.

But how many people will read far enough to spot that note?

This stinks of AI slop.

There is something off about this piece. Particularly the section that starts "You passed away on your eighty-eighth birthday – 4th August 2020. Do you reflect on mortality?" I stopped reading after that.

> This interview transcript is a work of dramatised historical reconstruction. Frances Allen died on 4th August 2020, and cannot speak. The words, reflections, and responses attributed to her in this document are constructed from historical records, published interviews, biographical materials, technical papers, and documented accounts of her life and work – but they are not her actual words, spoken in real time.

Might be good to put that up top next time.

  ||voxmeditantis.com^$important

I've long agreed with her assessment that the biggest mistake the software industry made was to adopt C over safe languages like Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon and Ada. It has held back the software industry for over 40 years. It's good to see Rust come along but it still isn't as safe as Ada, and especially as Ada SPARK.

Quite a person, glad to see she was won the Turing Award before she passed. But she should have recognized earlier in her life.

Related:

Frances Allen has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066832 - Aug 2020 (101 comments)

Whether or not every historical detail in the story is perfectly accurate, the pattern itself feels familiar. Tesla ended up as the name of a car company, and hardly anyone pauses to think about the scientist anymore. Some contributions succeed so completely that they dissolve into the everyday and fall off the list of things we consciously praise. That disappearance is, in its own way, evidence that the work was gold.

perfect