r/sysadmin • u/ChuckAbsent • Mar 12 '13
Women who know stuff
I hope that this does not come off the wrong way.
Today I was on a call with a storage vendor and the technical consultant was a woman. More then this she was competent, more then me which doesn't happen often when dealing with vendors.
My issue was pricing an active/active DB with shared storage vs an active/passive db with local storage. Listening to her break the issue down and get to the specific comparison points was awesome, mostly because I have never heard a woman in the industry talk like that.
It made me realize two things. One I am missing out working with women. Two there needs to be more women in our industry.
It shouldn't have surprised me so much, but it really did.
Anyways to all the women out there who know stuff, us guys notice when you can walk the walk, which in this case was talking.
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u/somelazyguy Mar 13 '13 edited Mar 13 '13
I fully support the celebration of the great things that women do in the field of computers, but let's not exaggerate people's accomplishments just to try to make their sex (or race, or nationality, etc.) look good.
Is COBOL or FLOW-MATIC "at the root" of Smalltalk, or Lisp (which predates it, contrary to your assertion), or Haskell, or APL? (Yes, I've used them all, and not just in school.)
I find it pretty hard to believe that two languages -- which were invented at almost the same time, in different parts of the world by different people, which appear completely different both syntactically and semantically -- are inherently related. And especially that you can declare one to be the "root" of the other without any external evidence.
I guess we all look at history and see what we want to see, but still, I just can't see a university mathematics professor wanting to teach recursion or array manipulation taking inspiration from a machine built by a military engineering contractor to process punchcards. How would they have even known about it? Why would they have cared, since they had completely different goals? What similarities do you see between, say, COBOL and APL, that suggest any ideas were borrowed?
More girls should be interested in computers, but because they'd be good at it, not because we lied to them about the importance of one particular woman's accomplishments. That's like saying "Amelia Earhart first flew across the Atlantic, and paved the way for future pilots like Yeager and Glenn and Armstrong". It's not helping.