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1984 – When women stopped coding

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Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#41

Post by prof_hobart »

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…

My daughter is 9 and has been fascinated by coding since she was about 6 - initially with Scratch, but she's just moving on to Javascript.

I didn't push it on her at all - she asked me one night what I did for a job, so I showed her a bit of code I'd been doing and she was hooked.

I've also done an after-school club in Scratch for the kids at her school (9 out of the 10 were girls), and they really enjoyed it as well .

Clearly just an anecdote, but the interest is still out there somewhere.

And going back to my childhood in the early 80s, there were a group of us who were into coding. But we were very much the nerdy group - it wasn't as if everyone was a budding programmer back then either.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#43

Post by cm2187 »

dagw wrote: post #31
cm2187 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The future probably won't be 15 highly educated, highly paid developers working on a simple web app like today. It will be 1 highly educated, highly paid developers guiding 15 lower paid 'blue collar' developers in developing a web app.

I don't really believe in the "blue collar" part but I think engineering may give us a clue. You have a small number of highly educated engineers working on tough problems: aeronautics, complex structural issues, etc. But the average electric or electronic board in a home appliance is not designed by sophisticated engineers, rather by a mid range average university graduate or sometimes even a technician.

But we need the tools to get there. Easy languages, technologies that are immune to basic security risks, and that provide safe ways to do multi-threading easily. Right now we are in the unsustainable position where the tools require skills that too many developers lack. And the result is regular data leaks, corporate systems full of bugs, etc.

A profession can't rely on all of its members to be very smart to deliver quality. But it will be an intellectual profession nevertheless.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#44

Post by krylon »

DanBC wrote: post #24
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.

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

The first thing I would like them to do is include some form of programming tools with Windows. On a Mac[1], you have Python, Perl, and Ruby available on a default installation, and you get XCode for free from the App Store. A fresh installation of Windows, OTOH, is a barren wasteland in comparison, and the effort it takes to change that is significantly higher.

[1] On GNU/Linux, *BSD you have at least Perl installed, and on most Linux distros Python is part of the base system, too.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#46

Post by chongli »

apalmer wrote: post #34

Doesnt intuitively make sense to me... adult women stopped being drawn into the computerfield at the same time that male children began getting computers as gifts? wouldnt their be a distinct lag effect of maybe 5-7 years between when the boys got their computers and entered the work force? I think the shift probably had more to do with the perception that computer programming was 'important', a lot of the early view…

Your intuition around the 5-7 years lag time would seem to line up pretty damn well with the beginning of the computer revolution in the late 70s. What's the problem, exactly?

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#47

Post by lordnacho »

skoczymroczny wrote: post #39
Wintamute wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you mean CONFIG.SYS :)

Oh man, that reminds me of the 90s. You used to have this situation where certain games required a certain memory configuration (640K / extended memory).

So the first thing I did that ever resembled programming was a boot script that would give you a menu of which game you wanted to play. It would say "1) Beneath a Steel Sky 2) Dune 2 " etc. And they it would prompt you to put the right CDROM in.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#49

Post by aggieben »

Can someone post the TL;DR (uh....TL;DL?) from the podcast here? Looks like a decent discussion going on, but can't tell that anyone actually listened :-)

I'll cop to the fact that I'm just not going to spend the time, though I'm interested in the conclusion(s).

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#50

Post by threatofrain »

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've had some similar anecdotal experiences in an education franchise, where I've found that it's very difficult to convince boys or girls that math, physics, programming, or computer science is fun or worthy. In fact, I have trouble convincing them that any intellectual pursuit is worthy. Kids tend to enjoy "science" more, but only in terms of what appears to them as fun experiment. When you try to explain anything behind it... it's boring. I'm sure it's similar for the robotics programs popping about.

I am also aware that I am just one more adult voice competing for any child's attention, a noise among a chorus of people all with their opinions about what's important. Boys and girls alike question the immediate value of these subjects. They see them as work forced upon them by adults.

Like you, I have also noticed that the boys and girls of today, at least in middle class areas, often have touch-screen devices as their first device. Those are just game machines with tons of advertisements. I am sure those companies know that they are advertising to kids. The kids love the ads because viewing it means an in-game reward. But that's an aside. The main point is that these devices aren't an obvious portal to software or technical interest.

I have noticed that many schools have a small cadre of children who, by some combination of successful grooming by parents or personal inclination, do enjoy technical subjects and technical mastery. I think at some point, the social reinforcement by that small cadre of children overtakes the importance of parental grooming.

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