The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:03am on Wednesday, 14th October, 2015:
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In the past three days, I've seen independent Facebook posts telling me that Margaret Hamilton invented software, Grace Hopper invented software and Ada Lovelace invented software.
It's great that we're seeing female programmers getting recognition (in fact it's great that we're seeing any programmers at all getting recognition — how many famous historical male programmers can you list?), but when three different programmers have the same claim made about their contribution to the world of computer science, it's clear that in at least two cases the claim must have been stretched.
Let people's achievements stand on their own. If they're good enough to be mentioned, you don't have to overstate them. If you do overstate them, you're kinda saying that what the people actually did isn't really as good as you wish it were, which is rather insulting.
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Copyright © 2015 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).