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A couple of months ago, SoylentNews covered the debate on whether to rename historical buildings, monuments, and other landmarks, specifically centered on the case of Calhoun College at Yale.
YaleNews now reports that a decision has been made to rename the college after Grace Hopper, a computer scientist who also served as a Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, and who was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year.
Yale President Peter Salovey announced today that the university would rename Calhoun College, one of 12 undergraduate residential colleges, to honor one of Yale's most distinguished graduates, Grace Murray Hopper '30 M.A., '34 Ph.D., by renaming the college for her.
Salovey made the decision with the university's board of trustees — the Yale Corporation — at its most recent meeting. "The decision to change a college's name is not one we take lightly, but John C. Calhoun's legacy as a white supremacist and a national leader who passionately promoted slavery as a 'positive good' fundamentally conflicts with Yale's mission and values," Salovey said. [...]
This decision overrides Salovey's announcement in April of last year that the name of Calhoun College would remain. "At that time, as now, I was committed to confronting, not erasing, our history. I was concerned about inviting a series of name changes that would obscure Yale's past," said Salovey. "These concerns remain paramount, but we have since established an enduring set of principles that address them. The principles establish a strong presumption against renaming buildings, ensure respect for our past, and enable thoughtful review of any future requests for change." [...]
In August, Salovey asked John Witt '94 B.A., '99 J.D., '00 Ph.D., the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law and professor of history, to chair a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. [...] The Witt committee outlines four principles that should guide any consideration of renaming: (1) whether the namesake's principal legacy fundamentally conflicts with the university's mission; (2) whether that principal legacy was contested during the namesake's lifetime; (3) the reasons the university honored that person; and (4) whether the building so named plays a substantial role in forming community at Yale. In considering these principles, it became clear that Calhoun College presents an exceptionally strong case — perhaps uniquely strong — that allows it to overcome the powerful presumption against renaming articulated in the report, said the president.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 13 2017, @09:23PM
I've been studying the history of CS and programming. FORTRAN (Formula Translator) was the first high level language, and the designers focused on demonstrating that a compiler could generate decent code, as people were skeptical that a machine could be programmed to do as well as experts writing code by hand in assembler. So early on, optimization was pretty important. FORTRAN was a success. Then ALGOL was hastily cobbled together by committee to head off the developing proliferation of languages that the pioneers saw were coming if they didn't do something. They tried to make ALGOL the standard for Structured Programming. It didn't quite work out. Many people went their own ways, making programming languages. ALGOL was still very important, often serving as the foundation these explorers and experimenters used to add their own ideas about what a programming language ought to be. Thanks to ALGOL, they didn't have to start from scratch.
At this point, COBOL enters the scene. Hopper observed that both FORTRAN and ALGOL were heavily based on mathematical notation, and she felt that programming should be accessible to more people than just expert mathematicians. That's why COBOL is so wordy and verbose.
I always wondered what the heck happened to ALGOL. Why is FORTRAN still around, but ALGOL is gone? 1968 was the last update. I learned that Pascal was originally intended to be the next version of ALGOL. It explains a few peculiarities about Pascal, such as making a big deal out of the trivial distinction between a procedure and a function, and using := for assignment. The ALGOL designers wanted to use an arrow for assignment, but computers didn't have arrow symbols in those days. They couldn't use the composition "<=" because that was already used for "less than or equal to". So they settled on :=. Anothar reason for a combination like that was that the issue of direction wasn't settled. Should a statement like a=b mean that the value of b should be assigned to a, or the other way around, that the value of a should be assigned to b? Using ":=" leaves open the option of doing "=:" to mean the latter.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday February 14 2017, @02:15AM
What happened to ALGOL? It's still around in the form of JOVIAL, which is used in military avionics systems. But more important are "algorithmic languages", languages essentially derived from ALGOL. We used them all the time. C, C++, Objective C, Java, JavaScript are all "algorithmic" languages.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.