She was in her 30s when she wrote it.
It was the survey of the state of the art at the time, but obviously it is not the state of the art now. Then why should you read it? Because it is written in two layers.
The first layer goes, we tried many optimization ideas, but only these were effective in practice: inlining, register allocation, etc. Others were not. Surprisingly, this layer is still mostly true today! This is both happy and sad depending on your view. Personally I think it testifies that compiler is a mature field, and it matured by 1970. (And that Frances Allen did lion's share of work maturing it.)
The second layer is, so here is how you should do inlining, register allocation, etc. While this layer is also full of gems, it is necessarily badly outdated. The paper predates graph coloring register allocation, for example. On the other hand, ironically, the state of the art 1970s algorithms are often a good choice today when you want an algorithm that is fast and low memory. (Ironic, because they were slow and high memory at the time!) This doesn't apply when there is an important new concern, for example cache locality, but happily it mostly doesn't affect compiler.
I think there should be a project to write the-state-of-the-art-in-1970s compiler. It would be a great simple and minimal alternative to GCC and LLVM, and it would also work great as a JIT code generator. We probably should name it Fran.
Simple things can run at higher speeds than complex things. Simplicity should be an architectural element, not a quality, but a feature.
Your idea for the Fran compiler is excellent. Throw in METAII from Dewey Schorre and it can be language agnostic.
> graph coloring register allocation
I knew some people working on linear optimization, at the time one of the most performance-intensive applications around (with real money/competitiveness in many industries riding on it). The compiler that produced the best code, by quite a bit, was the IBM FORTRAN compiler (3090 was the preferred target at the time), which also didn't do graph coloring. It just allocated the registers by loops from innermost to outermost.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯\
For a simple compiler, we should also look at Wirth's works, and Wirth's rule: an optimization has to pay for itself, that is, the compiler compiling itself with the optimization both in the executable and in the source code has to be faster than without it in both places.
I saw her 2007 Turing Award speech. I have tremendous respect for Fran and like your idea to name a codegen after her :-)
About two weeks after I started working there, she showed up in my office, and introduced herself. She'd heard about a new PL person joining, and she'd gone and gotten my dissertation and read it, so that she could come talk to me about it. Not that my dissertation was anything special: that's just the way that Fran was.
She was an amazing person. Brilliant, and kind, and generous. The world needs more people like her.
I heard that she was working on a software product that among many other things would do fast matrix multiplication using some parallelism.
So, just for the heck of it, I wrote and ran a little routine in PL/I that used PL/I's feature of multi-tasking to get some parallelism and showed my code to her. She was a little surprised I'd written the code, had a smile, and explained why her work closer to some hardware features (I don't recall the details) would be faster!
I wasn't surprised or disappointed that my little PL/I tasking code would be slower than what she was doing, but at least I got her to explain the hardware she was using and how she was exploiting it!
As I recall, she was married to Jack Schwartz at Courant Institute of NYU and as in
Nelson Dunford and Jacob T. Schwartz, Linear Operators.
But I think you maybe need to work on how you present this anecdote - as it is, it reads like you tried to mansplain her own research to a Turing Award winner. I hope you approached with more humility than this telling suggests?
Also, you should be aware that contextualizing professional women in terms of who their husband is or what his credentials are has long been used to underplay women’s individual achievements. Again, I don’t think that’s your intent, but you could consider whether, in the case of talking about Jacob Schwartz, you would have been moved to drop in the detail of who he was married to?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
graycat's comment contains several details that go against your interpretation. For example the fact that Fran "had a smile" and patiently explained to him why his "little PL/I routine" would be slower than her state-of-the-art optimization work is clearly intended to depict the narrator as naive, and Fran as the expert. The mention of PL/I means that this anecdote likely took place fifty years ago, decades before she Turing Award winner. And the story makes it perfectly clear who ended up being the explainer and who the explainee. Indeed, that seems to be its main point.
As for the marriage bit, the strongest plausible interpretation is simply that it's interesting. Anyone familiar with computer science history would be interested to find out that the two of them had been married, and certainly that goes both ways: an anecdote about Schwartz would be enhanced by mentioning his marriage to a famous compiler optimization researcher. Indeed, it's not hard to find web pages about Schwartz that do this.
I don't think your points are entirely ungrounded, but they weren't the most plausible or good-faith reading of the comment. The cost of introducing an ideological scolding into a discussion like this is non-zero, so there needs to be a bar to clear. That's one reason why we have that guideline, which has proven to work well in situations like this: it basically leads to scolding for egregious cases, forgiveness for borderline cases, and open-mindedness in unclear ones.
Why the question mark at the end? Are you expecting the poster to reply for your own benefit or is it that you'd enjoy seeing him/her apologise publicly for sharing a personal (and presumably happy, at least to them) memory of a former work colleague who has just died. A memory that you have just tortuously construed into a supposed sexist encouter with literally zero insight, context or knowledge ?
Perhaps you might wish to consider your own humility.
That is actually very common in my experience when people talk to me about some guy and they think I might have heard of his wife.
Imagine the frozen look of disgust on everyone's face. Imagine the flush of shame coming to your cheeks.
That's what you did. You should apologize for that.
Optimizing Compilers for Parallel Computers, lecture by Frances E. Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv-wXcUxrmE
Frances Allen, 2006, ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture, "Compiling for Performance: A Personal Tour" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjoU-MjCws4
Later, my wife was the first to receive the IBM PhD fellowship established in Fran's honor. Fran awarded it to her at a conference (Grace Hopper I think) and of course was gracious, offering to help as your career moved forward. Thankful for that investment in our future.
First female winner of the Turing Award.
Lots of other notable stuff.
Sadly, this is the first I've heard of her. Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer.
Edit: To be clear, I really meant "I hope other people here are familiar with her work, even though I am not because I'm not a real programmer." I'm happy to see that some people are, in fact, familiar with her and her work.
Sadly, no, it's not just that. Most my immediate colleagues, for example, don't know of her or her work, either. It's one heck of a field.
She had expressed some dismay, in interviews, at being the first woman to win the Turing Award. Not the Turing Award part, of course, the "first woman" part. She was far from being the first deserving candidate who didn't happen to be a dude. So I hope she wouldn't mind linking this here, even today: https://www.hillelwayne.com/important-women-in-cs/
Is this just because achievements are usually recognized in retrospect, or is this because the 50s to 70s were the most influential portion of computer science (since all groundbreaking things were discovered in the beginning), or is this because women were pushed out more and more by the 70s?
Just to put the second part of your comment in perspective, there have only been 3 female winners of the Turing award, total, by my count.
I would guess that people who work on building compilers and compiler optimization are more likely to know her name than programmers.
Many worthwhile people in the world. Not all of them are famous to the people who would love to know them.
At least we can both get to know her more starting now.
Given my reason for clicking the link, I believe it's the first time I've seen her mentioned on HN. I likely would have clicked on any article with the name Frances in the title and remembered the name if I had ever seen it before.
Because I'm a woman, I actively keep my eye out for female role models. I have a fairly strong math background (for the world at large -- not for the HN crowd) and spent some time looking up info on Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female Fields Medalist, and even blogged about it at the time.
Given my interest in female role models and my personal association with the name Frances, I think I would have known the name had I ever seen it before. It would have likely stuck with me.
I've been here eleven years. It seems I've never seen her name before. And, in fact, if you search for it, it comes up (in the titles section, as part of a description, not really a title) only once ten years ago (until the past 24 hours).
For example: [0]
> Any idea why this one in particular made you feel that way?
Perhaps there's something to do with the fame of the person?
It's difficult to say but it appears that the implicit HN 'criteria' for this is in computer science is to at least be famous enough to be an ACM Turing Award winner. Maybe this is why the reception to the death of another fellow computer scientist and engineer was low. [0]
Nevertheless, they are both worthy of the HN black bar to recognise their achievements to computer science. But I would expect to see a black bar for Frances Allen's passing but unfortunately not for Bill English.
I read one of Frances’ papers on compiler optimization, and while some of it went over my head, it was still valuable information; the world is a sadder place without her.
