TITLE: Meta-Blog: Follow-Up to My Adele Goldberg Entry
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 24, 2009  3:45 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
When I was first asked to consider writing a blog
piece for the
<A HREF="http://findingada.com/">
   Ada Lovelace Day</A>
challenge, I wasn't sure I wanted to.  I don't
usually blog with any particular agenda; I just
write whatever is in my mind at the time, itching
to get out.  This was surely a topic I have thought
and written about before, and it's one that I
have worked on with people at my university and
across the state.  I think it is in the best
interest of computer science to be sure that we
are not missing out on great minds who might be
self-selecting away from the discipline for the
wrong reasons.  So I said yes.

Soon afterwards, ACM announced Barbara Liskov as
the
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-03.html#e2007-03-21T14_03_39.htm">
   winner of the Turing Award</A>.
I had written about
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-03.html#e2007-03-21T14_03_39.htm">
   Fran Allen</A>
when she won the Turing Award, and here was another
female researcher in programming languages whose
work I have long admired.  I think the
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle">
   Liskov Substitution Principle</A>
is one of the great ideas in software development,
a crucial feature of object-oriented programming,
of any kind of programming, really.  I make a
variant of the LSP the centerpiece of my
undergraduate courses on OOP.  But Liskov has done
more -- CLU and encapsulation, Thor and
object-oriented databases, the idea of Byzantine
fault tolerance in distributed computing, ...  It
was a perfect fit for the challenge.

But my first thought, Adele Goldberg, would not
leave me.  That thought grew out of my long love
affair with Smalltalk, to which she contributed,
and out of a memory I have from my
<A HREF="http://www.sigplan.org/oopsla/oopsla97/ap/page61.html">
   second OOPSLA Educators' Symposium</A>,
where she gave a talk on learning environments,
programming, and language.  Goldberg isn't a
typical academic Ph.D.; she is versatile, having
worked in technical research, applications, and
business.  She has made technical contributions
and contributions to teaching and learning.  She
helped found companies.  In the end, that's
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-03.html#e2009-03-24T06_13_47.htm">
   the piece</A>
I wanted to write.

So, if my entry on Goldberg sounds stilted or
awkward, please cut me a little slack.  I don't
write on assigned topics much any more, at least
not in my blog.  I should probably have set aside
more time to write that entry, but I wrote it much
as I might write any other entry.  If nothing
else, I hope you can find value in the link to her
<EM>Personal Dynamic Media</EM> article, which I
was so happy to find on-line.

At this point, one other person has
<A HREF="http://www.jessirae.com/blog/articles/2009/03/24/adele-goldberg">
   written about Goldberg</A>
for the Lovelace Day challenge.  That entry has
links to a couple of videos, including one of
Adele demonstrating a WIMP interface using an
early implementation of Smalltalk.  A nice piece
of history.  Mark Guzial mentions Adele in
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK2N19TV2XSOK1R">
   his Lovelace Day essay</A>,
but he wrote about three women closer to home.  One
of his subjects is
<A HREF="http://home.cc.gatech.edu/jlk">
   Janet Kolodner</A>,
who did groundbreaking research on case-based reasoning
that was essential to my own graduate work.  I'm a
fan!
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