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1984 – When women stopped coding

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Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#21

Post by arien »

cuillevel3 wrote: post #8

I don't think it's about absolute numbers, women did not stop coding. It's just more men starting to code, which makes the share of women smaller.

I was thinking along the same lines (personal computers = more boys interested in CS). Then I found this in the comments section of the article:

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n134/im_thatoneguy/CSDegr...

Interesting that there was a dip of both males and females around 1984. So I'm not so sure of the statement above anymore. However, around the year 2000 there's this peak where males do outnumber females by a great deal (even if the number of females joining also increased).

If all these graphs are accurate I'd wonder more about the Y2K rather than 1984...

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#22

Post by jumpwah »

purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

> What the world needs is an operating system (or systems) or even an application or set of applications that almost everyone would want to use that require programming in some form or fashion to accomplish everyday tasks better.

Tangentially related, but this is why I think Emacs is a great... should I say, 'platform'. Maybe not for young children as in the case you talked about with yours, but a quote from one of RMS's talks about Emacs [1] I think shows what I mean:

> The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.

Maybe it was the syntax of lisp (by which I mean the use parentheses/'S-expressions' vs. using other 'strange code-like' symbols such as curly braces or semicolons) was a part of why they didn't realise they were actually programming?

Of course, this will not work today because editing/writing text in anything other than a WYSIWYG word processor interface is too unfamiliar to the average general purpose computer user, and therefore Emacs would too easily 'scare' off most users. But your comment reminded me of this and I thought it would be interesting to mention.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#23

Post by pjmlp »

Wintamute wrote: post #11
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

I think you're right. Back in the 70s/80s/90s kids had to work at using their computers. In order to play a game in the early 80s I had to hook up a tape recorder, fiddle with the volume, tape a 1kb RAM upgrade to the back of the computer and write some code to start playing a game. In the 90s I had to wrestle with AUTOEXEC.BAT and COMMAND.COM for hours to make DOS recognise my sound card. Technical effort and persev…

You missed the part of moving the tape reader head to match how the tape was recorded. :)

Or using a tiny screwdriver to lift the tape deck when it wasn't possible to move the head.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#24

Post by DanBC »

purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

We have Minecraft which had the potential to create legions of people interested in programming, but the reality is that it's an awful awful introduction to programming.

Microsoft could, if they port it to a sensible language and structure, drag in millions of young programmers.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#25

Post by cheez »

purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

The problem is you haven't caught up with what computers have become: a utility.

They were a novelty when you were growing up, but they are a utility now. What that means is that people who deal with computers are going to be professionals ranging from the spectrum of architect to plumber: there are more plumbers than architects.

Do you think your plumber had an innate desire to be a plumber? No. They looked at their options, picked one and executed.

That's what the future looks like for computing. So, if your child was always going to be the type to be an architect, they'll be one. Or they'll be a plumber.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#26

Post by cheez »

Crito wrote: post #9
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession. Children who develop an interest in programming will become about as common as children who are interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.

Bingo.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#27

Post by Luc »

cm2187 wrote: post #13
Crito wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession. Children who develop an interest in programming will become about as common as children who are interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.

Programming is more akin to engineering than factory working. Languages are getting simpler and more powerful but programs are getting more complex. 15 years ago a typical developper didn't need to worry about multithreading, connectivity or security. It's fundamentally an intellectual job and will remain.

From my Western European point of view, I see a lot of these intellectual jobs being outsourced to Slovenia, Poland and even the Philippines.

I am advising my kids to have good technical skills but also great people skills.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#28

Post by loup-vaillant »

ishener wrote: post #12
ishener wrote: post #10

The actual article is here: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

I think it's important to also show the graph of absolute numbers of computer science students. Maybe the absolute numbers will show that the number of female students did not decrease, but rather the numner of male students increased dramatically, making the female share drop. Just an angle I would pursue.

That would be a worse a measure.

Let's imagine that the number of female students did not decrease. Now the question is, why the boys increased much faster than girls? You can't "angle" that inequality away.

Besides, I wager that the number of students of any gender increased quite significantly in the last decades. So the fact that one gender stagnated in absolute numbers is less interesting than the fact it decreased in relative terms. Absolute numbers would only be interesting if the total stayed relatively constant.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#30

Post by aaronem »

jumpwah wrote: post #22
purpled_haze wrote: post #6

I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media. But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part. While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer. Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a…

> What the world needs is an operating system (or systems) or even an application or set of applications that almost everyone would want to use that require programming in some form or fashion to accomplish everyday tasks better. Tangentially related, but this is why I think Emacs is a great... should I say, 'platform'. Maybe not for young children as in the case you talked about with yours, but a quote from one of R…

I tend to suspect it's partly Lisp syntax but mostly that the entire environment was far enough removed from what people, including the mentioned secretaries, thought of as "programming", that it didn't register with them that that was what they were doing.

You can see the same thing today with stuff like VBA macros in Excel. I've seen some amazingly complex business logic implemented that way by people who absolutely did not think of themselves as programmers, and indeed tended to respond with bafflement to the suggestion that what they'd done could be described as programming.

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