If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged

I was just thinking some more about this on the same line. If you want to call that privileged, you know, I'm open to that. In fact I'd say arguably this is "more privileged" that merely being rich, which is sometimes oversold.

It's just that I don't feel like I can apologize for this or feel bad. It isn't in anybody's best interest for me to try to pretend this was somehow bad.

The tennis players -- they're both, and so are you. The article asks you to accept that you were privileged, and there's nothing evil about that.

Bull.

My parents were working class slobs, but they bought me a computer at the age of 10. It was a TRS-80 Color Computer which was the cheapest thing you could get at that time. It was just about the only thing they spent money on for me. I got no piano lessons, no braces, no model rockets, nothing -- except a Dad who wouldn't take a foreman position when he was offered one, a Mom who taught me to "stay in a dead end job you hate no matter what"... Hell, the schoolteacher and carpenter next door wouldn't talk to me family since they thought my parents were just a bunch of scabs...

What a load of bollocks. My parents were dirt-poor (on an first-world scale) growing up. I did all my early learning on an IBM PC-XT (which was given to us). It was nearly decade-old technology by the time I started in on QBasic, and not worth very much at all. I bought my first computer at age 14, with money that I'd made over the summer gutting and renovating houses.

Sure, in a sense, I was privileged, in that my dad did everything he could to give me a competitive advantage by introducing me to logic (I wore out his Martin Gardner books), chess (he never pulled a punch. We played for years before I beat him), classical literature (what extra money he had went to books. He has a library I still envy), music (he has a degree in music, which helps explain the lack of financial resources), and mathematics (he taught me algebra and trig years before I ran into them in school). He inspired a thirst for learning in me, and did everything he could to develop my ability to think critically because he didn't have financial resources. If that's a "disgusting flaunting of privilege", then I don't know what to tell you. I'm not going to apologize for having parents who cared about me enough to push me to develop my ability to think. They did the same with my other siblings - two younger sisters and a brother. None of them are programmers, despite the fact that they grew up with more money and technology than I did.

What this article really reads like is someone with a martyr complex making excuses for why they aren't good at whatever. Sure, there are people who are in CS who were privileged, and given a leg up by parents who could afford expensive technology, but it's flatly offensive to say that everyone who was interested in computers from a young age is a spoiled child of privilege who flaunts that privilege in others' faces.

True - when I was ten in 1966 I, following the instructions in a library book, built a Turing machine out of two sheets of paper and, following the program there, added two symbols to three symbols to get five symbols. That was a ll the computer there was for kids in 1966.

Also, this article is total PC crap, following the standard anti-male, anti-white, wahwah bullshit.

She DOES actually touch at the truth for a second when she quotes this

“There is a subset of boys and men who burn with a passion for computers and computing. Through the intensity of their interest, they both mark the field as male and enshrine in its culture their preference for single-minded intensity and focus on technology.”

This is totally true and I was one of them.

Oh, and of course, we're racist too. Here's an exchange-

Because of systemic racism, class differences correlate with racial demographics. In the Racialicious post Gaming Masculinity, Latoya quotes a researcher’s exchange with an African American male computer science (CS) undergraduate:

    “Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that. Now, the only thing that I have been doing since I was eight is playing basketball. I would own them on the court. I mean it wouldn’t be fair, they would just stand there and I would dominate. It is sort of like that in CS.”
    – Undergraduate CS Major

Magically, when the black BB guy owns you on the court it is somehow NOT unfair at all.