Candice Tillman“Most successful programmers are men,” is one of many common misconceptions about programmers . Female programmers are not often in the spotlight, and their contributions are less known to the world. Today we decided to compile a list of the top female programmers whose contributions have played a huge role in computer science and information technology.
- Grace Hopper
Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was one of the first programmers of the ASCC computer, called Mark I. She invented the first compiler for a programming language and was one of those who popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages. Her ideas influenced the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. She coined the term “debugging” to correct computer glitches and programming errors.
- Ada Lovelace
Ada Byron , also known as Lady Lovelace (December 10, 1815 – November 27, 1852), was a writer and gifted mathematician. She was the first woman to develop an algorithm that could be processed by a machine or computer. Based on her notes, it is brought out that the algorithm she invented would have been accurately processed on the first general machine computer. Thus, she is considered the world’s first programmer.
- Lois Hybt.
Lois Mitchell Hybt (born 1934) was an American computer scientist. She was one of ten people on the IBM team that developed FORTRAN, the first successful high-level programming language. While developing FORTRAN, she analyzed the flow of programs created by other sections of the compiler. She also created the first parser for arithmetic expressions.
- Barbara Liskow
Barbara Liskow (born November 7, 1939) was one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in computer science in the United States and a Turing Prize winner who developed the Liskow Substitution Principle (LSP). She has led many important projects, including the Venus operating system and the development and implementation of CLU. Barbara also created Argus, the first high-level language to support distributed programs and demonstrate pipelining techniques, and Thor, an object-oriented database system.
- Francis Elizabeth Allen
Frances Elizabeth Allen (born August 4, 1932) is an American computer scientist in the field of compiler optimization. Allen was the first female member of IBM and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Prize. Her accomplishments include core work in compilers, program optimization and parallelization. She has spent most of her career developing advanced programming language compilers for IBM Research.
- Gene Bartik
Jean Jennings Bartik (December 27, 1924 – March 23, 2011) was one of the first ENIAC computer programmers. She and her colleagues developed and codified many of the basics of programming while working on ENIAC, as it was the first computer of its kind. After working on ENIAC, Bartik went on to work at BINAC and UNIVAC and worked for various technology companies as a writer, manager, engineer, and programmer.
- Margaret Hamilton
Margaret Highfield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) was a systems engineer and scientist. She was the director of software development at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed the onboard software for the Apollo space program. This software included algorithms developed for the Apollo command module, the lunar lander, and the subsequent Skylab. She was the one who coined the term “software development.”
- Shafi Goldwasser
Shafi Goldwasser (born 1958) is an American-Israeli computer scientist, winner of the 2012 Turing Prize. She has made significant contributions in the fields of computational complexity theory, cryptography, and number theory. She is the co-author of probabilistic encryption , which established and achieved the gold standard of security for data encryption. Shafi also invented zero-disclosure proofs, which demonstrate the validity of a statement without transmitting any additional values, and is a key tool in the development of cryptographic protocols.
- Karen Spark Jones
Karen Spark Jones (August 26, 1935 – April 4, 2007) was an American information scientist. Karen contributed enormously to the development of information retrieval of unstructured documentary information. The foundations of her development have been used in the creation of search engines.
- Radya Perlman
Radya Joy Perlman (born January 1, 1951) is an American programmer and network engineer. She is well known for her invention of the Linking Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges. She has also made major contributions to network design and standardization, such as link state routing protocols.
