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No idea what you mean there. She was being playful . As a former kid, I appreciate that.
Imagine the same video, exactly the same, but with a dude. Still playful, still the same message? Or weird?
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Probably great, because enthusiasm is good.
Too bad we don't have an example of this to look at. I, regretfully, agree with the OP. It would probably seem kind of weird, and then male presenter would seem more than a bit childish.
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If you're unfamiliar I would strongly recommend this ("Doing with Images Makes Symbols"): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZTz76_zdfk The irony of this video is he's in danger of being referenced here in the same way he references Engelbart and Sutherland.
Thank you for a great recommendation; who is the presenter?
The fact that so much of our modern computing environment stems from the work of a molecular biologist trying to teach children to program is lost on many. He's truly a visionary, sometimes wrong, but always at least interesting.
EDIT: Haven't been able to find a proper clip of it, but the really relevant part to this is that back in the 70s at PARC they used to teach Smalltalk to kids, and the apps they'd produce were seriously non-trivial. Things like electronics schematics editors (you can see part of this in passing during the OOPSLA video) were implemented by children. This still blows my mind.
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But it's also determined by a lot more than a veneer of politically-correct pleasantness. I suggest that the best way to deal with such people is use the downvote button. Complaining about tone is just so much noise... it adds nothing to any discussion.
There is a very large gap between not being a jackass and being politically correct. The OP of this thread suggested the former.
I do, however, see a lot of useless, time-wasting, off topic tone arguments.
- It is hard to get Ruby running on non-Linux systems.
- Ruby programs are incredibly hard to understand because the Ruby language is not compact [2]
- Rails is such a big part of the Ruby community, it is hard to find Ruby programs that aren't Rails webapps. So anyone who becomes interested in Ruby from the book, and searches online for more resources, will probably mostly get Rails-related hits.
- These hits will not just be useless to a beginner, but intimidating and misleading. Web application programming is a poor area to direct beginners into, because even the most trivial web application requires understanding a dizzying array of complicated, interconnected ideas such networking, HTTP, URL's, databases, template processing, HTML, browsers...
[1] I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anyone who started programming in these languages, and I'm not saying it's impossible to start there even today. I'm just saying that today there are much better choices available, such as Python.
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Too bad we don't have an example of this to look at. I, regretfully, agree with the OP. It would probably seem kind of weird, and then male presenter would seem more than a bit childish.
Have you seen girls playing with kids? Would you say it's “over the top” when some of them act in a similar way doing so? When a girl plays with a kid in such a way, does it “reinforce some gender stereotype”?
When I was ~9, my parents bought me a book called "Wrote your own adventure programs for your microcomputer" [1] (Well, the Spanish version [2]) I remember reading and reading and reading it, and not understanding it... I tried to replicate some of the ideas, but I think it was quite dense (and the translation was not very good). The curious thing is that, when I properly started learning programming in college, I re…
Those old Usborne programming books were very nicely presented. /Adventure Programs/ http://www.worldcat.org/title/adventure-programs/oclc/104011... and /Fantasy Games/ http://www.worldcat.org/title/fantasy-games/oclc/12824029 had a nice balance between luring you with the game and its setting, and drawing you into how it was implemented as a BASIC program. The high-quality art supported both goals too. (You can see…
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> From what I've seen, a lot of women have a low tolerance for this level of overt critique, regardless of whether the critique is correct or not. Please stop talking.
Thanks for contributing, hendzen. Downvote.
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Would you have heard of her book if she didn't have a kickstarter? That's why she needs a kickstarter. It's a marketing tool, possibly moreso than it's a crowdfunding tool.
If everyone was to use Kickstarter in this way, Kickstarter would lose the appeal it has for hosting niche / innovative projects. Diminishes the tool for the rest of us.
Why Ruby? Python would be a much better choice -- for that matter, C or assembly language [1] would be a better choice than Ruby! Here are the problems with Ruby: - It is hard to get Ruby running on non-Linux systems. - Ruby programs are incredibly hard to understand because the Ruby language is not compact [2] - Rails is such a big part of the Ruby community, it is hard to find Ruby programs that aren't Rails webapp…