pycon is at the same time as PAX East

I know there's a conference of some kind or other every week, and it's really hard to avoid conflicts, so maybe I shouldn't be so selfish as to think that the ones that are important to me shouldn't conflict with each other.

And maybe Grace Hopper isn't actually that important to me. I want to talk to women, but I want them to be women who do what I want to do. And it might be the case that those women, the other twenty of them, are all at ICFP and not at Grace Hopper, in which case the choice is clear. It breaks my heart, though. I mean, Grace Hopper was a PL hacker. And Fran Allen, in 2006 the first and only female Turing Award winner? Compiler hacker. These communities shouldn't be mutually invisible and unimportant.

"...first and only female Turing Award"

Don't forget Barbara Liskov, who also did some PL.

Holy shit, I forgot Barbara Liskov. Correction: both women who've gotten a Turing Award have been PL researchers. Thank you.

Edited at 2012-10-04 06:38 pm (UTC)

I've never been able to tell this, but is Grace Hopper exclusively for women?

No. From what I hear, the attendees are 5-10% men.

Mark Guzdial was there :)

http://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/at-ghc-saying-high-tech-is-a-meritocracy-doesnt-make-it-so/

Alan Eustace was there, too. There were multiple tweets about him getting out in the middle of the dance floor and shaking his booty.

I understand he's got a reputation as a dancer, actually...

Grace Hopper might not worry too much about conflicting with academic conferences in general? I remember there being a lot of undergrads, first year grad students, teaching faculty, diversity/recruitment staff, industry people.... maybe only 1/4-1/3 grad students/faculty who'd be concerned about research conferences?

The researchers I did meet seemed pretty diverse though, and I'm sure PL was covered as well as everything else.

Sorry you're not here! Would have been great to see you.

There is a pretty intense job fair here... and its kinda weird to be with so many women :)

I have been SHOCKED by how many people don't know what free and open source software is. Not just that they don't know what Postgres is (which never really surprises me), but they srsly don't have any clue that Linux is different than windows in any way other than the weirder people tend to be into it as an obsessive hobby.

So glad there was an open source track this year.

I think that Portland is something of a utopian enclave of People Who Know What Copyleft Is. It's really cool that you're going out and spreading the word.

I asked a member of the ICFP steering committee (my advisor) about this. He said that nobody brought it up when they were deciding on the dates, but that he was surprised that no one had brought it up, since Grace Hopper was also an ACM event.