And sadly, that woman was not Grace Hopper.  The winner of the coveted 2006 Turing award is none other than Fran Allen.  No, I've never heard of her either.  Apparently, she has been a lifelong IBM software engineer, and her accomplishments include, uh, er, something to do with optimizing compilers.  She is apparently the head of many different computing organizations and has spent a great deal of time teaching classes as an adjunct professor.  This reminds me of the adage, "those who can, do, those who can't, teach".  I'm at a loss to explain why Ms. Allen was selected to win the Turing award, other than she is an aging female software engineer, and she is still alive to receive the award in person.  She didn't even have an entry in Wikipedia until a few days ago, what's with that?

It's my opinion that if the ACM wanted to give this award to a woman that badly, they should have honored Grace Hopper posthumously, with her family receiving the prize.  Hopper had a major impact on the world of computing, with the invention of the COBOL programming language, and this impact was felt most forcefully as we approached the year 1900.  COBOL has always been the de facto standard for big-iron mainframes that crunch data in back offices that are impervious to its stench.  And to prove the point that people will actually pay money to romance a pig wearing lipstick, Fujitsu is keeping the corpse alive with NetCOBOL for .Net.

So I give my personal award for best lifetime achievement to a woman in the IT industry to Grace Hopper.  If it weren't for her contributions, we may still be using a variant of RPG or PL/I.  Nuff said.