The highest honor in the field of Computer Science, the A.M. Turing Award, has gone to a woman for the first time. The special lady is Frances E. Allen, who worked at IBM for her entire career. She got some nice prizes with the award:

The various prizes: cufflinks, a tie clip, a certificate praising the recipient for “his accomplishments.”

Nice. She gets $100,000 too, so I guess that part is good.

Via Salon.com.

Yesterday was a pretty slow day at work, nothing was breaking (besides Quark and the fonts of couse, but what’s new). I found myself spending a lot of time reading Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror. I always enjoy Atwood’s viewpoint on things.

I stumbled across two different articles he wrote about teaching programming. The focus is on trying to understand why so often some people ‘get it’ and others just don’t. I have to admit, I’m also quite partial to the title.

• Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

The second article is kind of sort of related but focuses on how people who already program can get better at it:

• How To Become a Better Programmer by Not Programming