Seibel Peter. Coders at Work
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Fran Allen
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Seibel: In your Turning Award lecture you said something along the lines
of, “We’re at a crossroads here and we might miss it. We might go down
the wrong path and then be going down it for quite a while.”
Allen: Yeah.
Seibel: So the right path, in your view, is getting back to that kind of work
in automatic parallelization?
Allen: Right, but it has to be done against a higher-level language than we
have now.
Seibel: And the wrong path is finding better ways for people to express
parallelism explicitly?
Allen: Well, I think we would eventually realize that we’ve created more of
a mess than we had. But we do need higher-level languages and there
certainly are domain-specific languages, and ways of developing things, which
are really quite wonderful.
But we have to be willing to try and take advantage of that, but also take
advantage of the integration of systems and the fact that data’s coming from
everywhere. It’s no longer encapsulated with the program, the code. We’re
seeing now, I think, vast amounts of data, which is accessible. And it’s
numeric data as well as the informational kinds of data, and will be stored all
over the globe, especially if you’re working in some of the bioinformatics
kind of stuff. And we have to be able to create a platform, probably
composed of a lot of parts, which is going to enable those things to come
together—computational capability that is probably quite different than we
have now. And we also need to, sooner or later, address usability and
integrity of these systems.
Seibel: Usability from the point of the programmer, or usability for the end
users of these systems?
Allen: Of the end users of these systems. It’s a resource, a giant resource.
And the integrity of the correctness of the systems. I worked on project for
the NSA on risk management, quite a few years ago, and it suddenly dawned
on me that we often, in high-performance computing, do not need to
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compute to the accuracy that we have. We do not need all the data to be
able to make progress on a solution. And so there’s some nice work going
on in the data side, I think, with accommodating good enough answers. I see
these multicores—they’re a wonderful opportunity—to go back and to take
another look at lots of things.
Seibel: Do you think of yourself as a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a
craftsman?
Allen: I think of myself as a computer scientist. I was involved in my corner
of the field in helping it develop. And those were interesting times—the
emergence of computer science—because there was a lot of question
about, “Is this a science? Anything that has to have science in its name isn’t a
science.” And it was certainly unclear to me what it meant.
But compilers were a very old field—older than operating systems. Some
day want I to really look it up. The word compiler comes actually from the
embedding of little snippets of instructions to execute. Like an add would be
spelled out in very primitive terms for the machine. If you want to do an
add, then it would go to its library that defined that and expand it.
But assemblers were also using symbolics. I’m not sure this is accurate, but I
used to believe that the first early use of symbolics for names of variables
came from a man named Nat Rochester, on a very early IBM machine, the
701 around 1951. He was in charge of testing it and they wrote programs to
test the machine. In the process of doing that, they introduced symbolic
variables. Now, I’ve seen some other things since that make me believe that
there were earlier ways of representing information symbolically. It
emerged in the early ’50s, I think, or maybe even in the ’40s. One would
have to go back and see exactly how things were expressed in the ENIAC,
for one thing.
Seibel: So somewhere along the line, you realized you had become a
computer scientist, developing theories about compiler optimization and so
forth. But you started out as a programmer, hired to write code. By the
time of the PTRAN project you were managing a team of people who were
actually writing the software. Why did you make that switch?
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Allen: Well, probably two reasons—one, I wasn’t a very good programmer.
I tended to make quite a few mistakes—unlike the conventional wisdom at
the time that said that women make good programmers because they pay
attention to details. I didn’t fit that category. So I tended to be kind of
disinterested in getting all the details right and I was much more interested
in the way systems work.
My interest in mathematics was very abstract. If I had had enough money to
go on to get a PhD, I would have become a geometer. I loved the rigor of
that process. That’s what I really most enjoy, puzzling through systems—
puzzling through the engineering kinds of things without necessarily knowing
the details of what one would need to know to be an engineer, which is
quite a different area.
Seibel: The way you contributed technically to the PTRAN project, it
sounds like you had the big architectural picture of how the whole thing was
going to work and could point out the bits that it wasn’t clear how they
were going to work.
Allen: Right.
Seibel: Do you think that ability was something that you had early on, or
did that develop over time?
Allen: I think it came partially out of growing up on a farm. If one looks at a
lot of the interesting engineering things that happened in our field—in this
era or a little earlier—an awful lot of them come from farm kids. I stumbled
on this from some of the people that I worked with in the National
Academy of Engineering—a whole bunch of these older men came from
Midwestern farms. And they got very involved with designing rockets and
other very engineering and systemy and hands-on kinds of things. I think
that being involved with farms and nature, I had a great interest in, how
does one fix things and how do things work?
Seibel: And a farm is a big system of inputs and outputs.
Allen: Right. And since it’s very close to nature, it has its own cycles, its
own system that you can do nothing about. So one finds a place in it, and it’s
a very comfortable one.
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Seibel: You mentioned earlier that when you were working on the Stretch
compiler, that three of the four people leading the compiler effort were
women. Can you talk about how that came about?
Allen: This was in ’59, something like that. Women were playing a big role
at that time as programmers. And IBM has always been a great, great
company on that. I saw some history recently, that IBM’s diversity policies
go back to 1899, just consistently, all through these periods when there
wasn’t much attention being paid to that—very explicit policies.
Seibel: Do you think the number of women on that project was due to
explicit management policies—that they were saying IBM should hire more
women?
Allen: I don’t think they said, “We must hire more women.” They just
hired whoever was qualified, and it wasn’t just women. These were really
hard times for African-Americans, and IBM really stepped out. One story
that’s not very well known is there was segregated housing in Poughkeepsie
at that time, regarding blacks, and IBM got it changed.
Seibel: You told a story in an interview once about one time you arrived at
a conference. And they looked at you and said, “Fran Allen?”
Allen: “You’re a woman.”
Seibel: “We have you rooming with Gene Amdahl.”
Allen: Oh, yes, that one. This was an IBM conference, when we were
moving the System Y project that was going on here to the West Coast into
product development and had renamed it ACS. We had a big conference at
the Harriman Estate across the river. It was all, with one or two exceptions,
IBM people. There was a person from the West Coast who was charged
with organizing it and he didn’t know any of us. He’d done it alphabetically.
Seibel: So they sorted you out and found you a room by yourself?
Allen: Yeah, a maid’s room up in the garret.
Seibel: Did you publish papers under Fran or Frances?
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Allen: F.E. Allen. And I don’t recall why I did that. I think it was fairly
common, at the time at least, to just use first initials.
Seibel: You also mentioned before that when you started, people thought
women would be good programmers because women were thought to be
detail-oriented. These days the conventional wisdom is that it’s men who
have a bizarre ability to focus on things, usually to the detriment of
everything else, and that’s why most programmers are men.
Allen: Right.
Seibel: You must have observed many shifts in attitudes along those lines.
Allen: Well, today they wouldn’t say great programmers, but they’re great
on teams because they like to collaborate. It shifted to women collaborate
and they work together well. So that’s today’s analog of that earlier
assumption that women were quite detail-oriented.
Seibel: Despite the number of women in that Stretch compiler group, you
must have also have had times in your career when you were working
almost entirely with men. Was it a different kind of experience working in a
group with lots of women?
Allen: Yes. I think it was, but it was not only lots of women—a lot of my
peers were truly peers in the sense that they were mostly all the same age
because of this big hiring that was going on at the point I was hired. We
were pretty much all the same age and pretty much of the same
background. So it was a very collegial group. And also, the whole area was
so new—so much was unknown. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, but
it wasn’t as if there were a lot of people around us that had years of
experience or knew a whole lot more.
Seibel: So what happened? The field is not full of women anymore; when
did that change?
Allen: It took me quite a few years to identify the cause. It happened in the
late ’60s, at least in the environments that I was in. I had left Research to be
involved with the ACS project and went to California. Then I came back to
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the Research division and found it a very, very different environment than
the one I had left essentially eight years earlier.
There was a significant glass ceiling. There were processes in place, lines of
management. And the management structures had changed and decision-
making had become much more formal, particularly about what projects to
do and how to do them. And the number of women had changed and the
position of women in the organization had significantly changed, and not for
the good. And I was not happy about it, obviously.
In 1970, ’71, ’72, I was 19 years or 18 years into a career that was just full of
fun and opportunity. I never saw myself as advancing, but I felt I had the
freedom to do what I felt was right and to work on interesting things in
roles that I would enjoy. And I came back and found out that wasn’t the
case.
Seibel: Do you think that glass ceiling had, in fact, been there before and
you hadn’t bumped up against it yet? Or had something changed?
Allen: It really hadn’t been there previously. Recently I realized what was
probably the root cause of this: computer science had emerged between
1960 and 1970. And it mostly came out of the engineering schools; some of
it came from mathematics.
And the engineering schools were mostly all men in that period. And the
people IBM was hiring had to meet certain requirements: have certain
degrees and have taken certain courses in computer science. And so they
were almost all men because they were the ones that satisfied the
requirements—because it was a discipline now. The other thing that
seemed to have happened is that it was a profession—there were a lot of
processes in place and chains of management that implemented the
processes and kept everything running smoothly. So it was a very different
place.
Seibel: I’m pretty sure sexism in society at large was pretty rampant in the
’50s and ’60s. Yet in that period you were working in groups that had lots of
women in them. Why was it so open to women then?
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Allen: Software was the newest-of-the-new stuff that was going on. And it’s
also probably still to this day considered a soft part of the science. And
that’s where women gravitated. Early on they were programmers on ENIAC
and at Bletchley Park. Women were the computers—that was their name.
But in engineering and physics and the harder, older sciences there weren’t
as many women. It was just divided that way, early on.
Then women started to come out of the engineering schools. Now the
undergraduate percentage of women in engineering is somewhere around
20 percent. Carnegie Mellon would be much higher than that—they have
made a special effort. But in computer science, it’s essentially 8 percent.
There’s no domain that is as bad as computer science for women right now
in terms of numbers. “Bad” is the wrong word—it’s low.
Seibel: To play devil’s advocate, why does it matter whether we achieve,
say, Anita Borg’s goal of “50/50 by 2020,” meaning 50 percent women in
computer science by the year 2020? Why does it matter whether this one
particular field be representative of the population at large?
Allen: It’s such a transformative field for society as a whole. And without
the involvement of a diverse group of people, the results of what we do are
not going to be appealing or useful to all aspects of our society. A piece of
our challenge is to make computing, and all that it enables, accessible to
everyone. That’s an ideal. But it’s really where it’s going—the work at MIT
on the $100 computer and the way we’re trying to enable commerce at a
very low level through computing in the remote areas of underdeveloped
countries.
Seibel: So clearly the closer you get to the end user, the easier it is to
imagine that people with diverse experiences are going to bring different
ideas about how those users might like to interact with a computer. Again
playing devil’s advocate, what do you say to someone who says, “That’s all
well and good when we’re talking about designing applications, but when
you’re designing compiler optimizations, who cares about a diversity of
point of view?” Is it still valuable to have a diverse staff even when you’re
working on extremely technical aspects of software, like optimizing
compilers?
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Allen: Yes. In fact, that was one of the keys to the PTRAN group. A lot of
women were attracted to the group, partly because there were other
women there already. But it also made the group a very congenial group.
And it was because of the mix—it wasn’t because there were women there,
but because of the mix. These people came from other organizations here,
but also other educational backgrounds.
I had people that came in from NYU—the Courant Institute—who had
their own way of thinking about doing things because they’d come through
the same graduate school. And then I had a couple people from MIT. One in
particular—a woman—was on the very theoretical side and a very
wonderful thinker in a different way. The Illinois people had some different
characteristics. So even taking out the gender differences or other cultural
differences, the fact that they came from these different places provided, in
and of itself, a much stronger group.
Seibel: I suppose if we get to the point where undergraduate computer
science is split 50/50 by gender we could actually lose some of that
experiential diversity, if everyone is going through the same sort of CS
degree.
Allen: What makes some of the new graduates very appealing to, say, IBM,
is that they’re not staying in one discipline. They move from one discipline
to another. And they can be deeply technical but very diverse disciplines.
Often it’s done purposefully—a person decides that they want to connect
some big fields. I’ve talked to some people like that—they see a connection
between working in linguistics and working in computing. They’re very
appealing as an employee.
Seibel: So how are you feeling about the “50/50 by 2020” project?
Allen: Pretty discouraged about it.
Seibel: What are the steps that should be taken to get to that goal? Do you
need to change math education in junior high school? As I understand it,
that’s where a lot of girls drop out of math and science—before that girls
still love math.
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Allen: That’s been a popular belief, but I don’t believe it. Look at the
Westinghouse competitions. Women are winning those. And there are a lot
of women in engineering—taking all the tough sciences and mathematics in
high schools. At my little high school in Croton, New York, we had a
Westinghouse person nationally come in fifth. And they have a nice science
program. Six of the seven people in it this year at the senior level are
women doing amazing pieces of individual science.
What’s happening with those women is that they’re going into socially
relevant fields. Computer science could be extremely socially relevant, but
they’re going into earth sciences, biological sciences, medicine. Medicine is
going to be 50/50 very soon. A lot of fields have belied that theory, but we
haven’t.
Seibel: What is it, then, about computer science that is so unappealing?
Allen: A lot of people think it’s the games and the nerdiness of sitting in
front of a computer all day. It’s going to be interesting how these new social
networks online will have an effect. I don’t know. But I feel it’s our problem
to solve. It’s not telling the educators to change their training; we in the
field have to make it more appealing.
We have to give the field an identity that expands it further than the identity
it seems to have now—a much more human identity. We haven’t articulated
why we like this field and what’s exciting about it and what’s exciting about
the future and why it’s a great field to be in.
Seibel: So why do you like it?
Allen: Part of it is that there’s the potential for new ideas every day. One
sees something, and says, “Oh, that’s new.” The whole field gets refreshed
very frequently. It’s very exciting to think about what the potential for all of
this is and the impacts it can have.
Isaac Asimov made a statement about the future of computers—I don’t
know whether it’s right or not—that what they’ll do is make every one of
us much more creative. Computing would launch the age of creativity. One
sees some of that happening—particularly in media. Kids are doing things
they weren’t able to do before—make movies, create pictures. We tend to
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think of creativity as a special gift that a person has, just as being able to
read and write were special gifts in the Dark Ages—things only a few people
were able to do. I found the idea that computers are the enablers of
creativity very inspiring.
Seibel: You have been the first woman in many categories—first Turing
Award winner, first IBM Fellow. Do you feel like there were women before
you who were overlooked?
Allen: Oh, yes, absolutely.
Seibel: So when you won the Turing, did you think to yourself, “Gee,
there’s another woman who should have won this a long time ago?”
Allen: Well, the very first thing I thought about was how wonderful it was.
And then I started to think about all the many other women who were
never recognized at all for their work. In many cases, their work was stolen.
I thought about the women who had done some very amazing things that
have not been recognized, even by their peers. When I approach them and
say, “You need to join some professional organizations—I’ll write some
recommendations for you,” they kind of shy away from that.
Seibel: So you think that part of the problem is they don’t get recognized
because they’re not putting themselves in a place to be recognized as easily.
Allen: Right.
Seibel: Are there any particular folks that you would like to name—to give
a little recognition now?
Allen: Well, there’s Edith Schonberg, who is a great computer scientist. In
terms of technical work, it’s just one first after another on some of her
papers. She’s had work stolen—absolutely brutally stolen. She wrote a
paper on debugging of parallel code, which is a very hard problem. It was
not accepted at a conference and somebody who had been on the program
committee made three papers out of it. That kind of thing. It happens in our
field and we don’t have good ways of dealing with it.
Seibel: And it happens more to women?