Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

If you're trying to imply it about her being a woman, the article itself isn't helping your point:

“Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing” (2016), “she remains a relatively unknown and underappreciated figure, with nowhere near the stature of other women who played significant roles in computer science and the computer industry and have since been recognized by historians.”

That is, even amongst women of significance, she never achieved any real recognition.




It doesn't explain why here, today, as more informed people, her achievements didn't seem to resonate with the HN community.


Gender isn't really sufficiently explaining anything, really. At least not in this case.

The more precise question including gender is: Why does HN (and programmers in general) care about Ada but not Evelyn?

At least one possible, and better, answer might be: she didn't actually create things programmers cared about (Word vs Vim? Vim is by far the fan-favorite tool, for people who care about such things), and the only people who would care about who created what software, outside of historians.. is (hobbyist/hacker) programmers. And airplane reservation systems.. not only is that not something you'd expect the HN to like, it's something you could expect them to hate dealing with (and more particularly, writing).

Ada on the other hand computed in general, and we already know that programmers like computing.

The interest in one producer versus another seems far better explained by, well, the subject of their production; regardless of its notability.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: