It was pretty funny imagining her—a petite artsy (actually she was a full-time artist at that point) grandmother type when I talked to her—knocking back shots of whisky with the boys but apparently that's what they all did...
Adele Goldberg would have been an excellent interview subject. Not up to the level of interest of Knuth, but certainly up to the level of some of the others.
I try not to jump to conclusions with these things. There's no telling who returned Seibel's calls and who didn't.
She was one of the very few women I ever saw in a STEM subject and good at it.
Her husband was Jack Schwartz of the fundamental 'Linear Operators' with Nelson Dunford, as I recall, at Yale. Schwartz was long at Courant and did a programming language SETL, 'set language', for allowing programming via essentially set theory notation.
Interestingly, Ada Lovelace, also a woman, is considered the first programmer. She wrote a program to compute the calculate "a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with [Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine]." [1]
I could be wrong, of course.
http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html
Despite this, the author (Peter Seibel) begins his introduction by mentioning Ada Lovelace in the very first sentence. In the next sentence, he talks about the six women - Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum - who were called to be the first programmers of ENIAC.
I don't know if this was explicitly intentional on Seibel's part, a sort of gender-balancing of the book given its one female interviewee, but it was a nice reminder of how, at one point in time, it wasn't strange at all that women were among the forefront of computer pioneers. Today, the numbers have receded to the point that some people just think that women are inherently not "built" for programming. Well, some clearly were...this isn't like arguing whether the Navy SEALs should let in a real life "G.I. Jane"...given the history of women in programming, it's still a strong possibility that the gender disparity is heavily influenced by social trends and stigma and is something that we can mitigate.
(note: I'm not accusing Seibel of not having enough diversity in his book...it's very likely Fran Allen was the only woman available for his book and who played as interesting a part in history as Robert Knuth, Peter Norvig, and the other big names that Seibel interviews)
Edit: Also, the Fran Allen interview is really interesting. I jumped to it to see her thoughts on the gender disparity, but most of the interview is on her thoughts about early programming, teaching scientists to code, and how C ruined the art of compilers