alt Hacker NewsTo credit a technical advance to a person's identity is to commit the 'Correlation is not Causation' fallacy. While diversity in a technical pool is interesting, the technical merit of the contribution must stand alone, independent of the contributor's personal characteristics. Shifting the focus from 'Does it work?' to 'Who wrote it?' is fundamentally anti-meritocratic and undermines the value of the technical discussion.
The health of a technical community like this one depends on its ability to separate the merit of the work from the moral character of the contributor. This is a necessary separation to preserve the integrity of the technical commons. For instance, a paper on a secure hash algorithm should be judged only on its mathematical proof, regardless of the author's personal life. Any attempt to link the two injects ad hominem fallacy into a technical evaluation.
You'll notice that the author (me) didn't actually credit the invention of the computer to Turing's sexuality.
But it is an undeniable fact that he was gay.
If the British government had banned him from working at Bletchly Park because of that, would the computer still have been developed? Certainly he wasn't the only one working on it, but historians and computer scientists seem to agree that he was a key figure.
The health of a technical community depends on its ability to attract contributors from a wide variety of backgrounds.
We agree that the result of the work is what is important. I'm arguing that Stephen Hawking can't participate unless you install wheelchair ramps.