I've always had my suspicions about that damn ACM!

In a pathetic article article entitled How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution, Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, writes:

Why aren’t there more female software developers in Silicon Valley? James Damore, the Google engineer fired for criticizing the company's diversity program, believes that it’s all about “innate dispositional differences” that leave women trailing men. He’s wrong. In fact, at the dawn of the computing revolution women, not men, dominated software programming. ... Who wrote the first bit of computer code? That honor arguably belongs to Ada Lovelace, the controversial daughter of the poet Lord Byron. When the English mathematician Charles Babbage designed a forerunner of the modern computer that he dubbed an “Analytical Engine,” Lovelace recognized that the all-powerful machine could do more than calculate; it could be programmed to run a self-contained series of actions, with the results of each step determining the next step. Her notes on this are widely considered to be the first computer program. ... [Later, m]en from established fields like physics, mathematics and electrical engineering [made] the leap to a new one that had no professional identity, no professional organizations, and no means of screening potential members. They set out to elevate programming to a science. By the mid-1960s, that led to the rising influence of professional societies for programmers, including the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM. The leadership of these groups skewed heavily toward men, and they began building barriers to entry in the field that put women of this earlier era at a distinct disadvantage, particularly a requirement for advanced degrees. [emphasis added]

Oh, now I finally understand why the ACM selected Don Knuth as their Turing Award Winner in 1974! It was because he was a white male! And now I know why C. A. R. Hoare, another white, male Turing Award Winner, used his Turing address to criticize the Ada programming language for being overly complex and hence unreliable. It was because the language was named after a damn woman! I've always had my suspicions about that ACM!

On a serious note: Professor Mihm insinuates that the attempts to "elevate programming to a science" consisted largely of the machinations of a bunch of white males to set up a men's club that excluded women. Professor Mihm thereby dismisses all the efforts of computer scientists to build the modern edifice of algorithmic knowledge as just so much white male sexism. This tells you all you need to know about the quality of thinking among the post-modernists who walk the halls of humanities departments of our universities today.