First woman honoured with Turing Award

One of the most prestigious prizes in computing, the $100,000 Turing Award, went to a woman Wednesday for the first time in the award's 40-year history. Frances E. Allen, 74, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques for optimizing the performance of compilers, the programs that translate one computer language into another.

Neat! I was always amused that the first person who could have been described as a 'programmer' was Lady Ada Lovelace, love-child (how scandalous *g*) of Lord Byron.