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1984 – When women stopped coding

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201–209 of 209 posts

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#201
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like building a skyscraper doesn't require a degree. You don't need a degree to lay bricks, pour cement or assemble rebar. But you do if you're the one designing the structure in the first place. There is a lot of knowledge to be gained by experience, but sometimes it's useful to have knowledge gained from books, and in particular from books you had no interest reading in the first place (which is the real value…

Amazingly, I can design programs too (you arrogant prick). Comparing yourself to an architect and me to a bricklayer. Sorry, is mee too dumb-dumb to read bookie wookie?

It's not about being dumb. You're taking it personal when no offence is meant. Understanding the difference cache hierarchies, or how you reach consensus in a system without a central authority, or to what degree various normal forms of data affect you, or being able to design a sound and complete DSL, or a lot of other things. That is what you get from a proper CS degree.

Does that mean that you cannot program of design programs? No, but there are people out there with more education better suited to design, say, a large scale medical system where certain guarantees must be given.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#202
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books are not the sole property of colleges.

But goals for students with paths including a variety of subjects both obviously useful and apparently useless seems to be (in practice). I occasionally come across situations where those useless subjects suddenly contribute something useful for the problem at hand. I would never have studied them by myself unless forced by the goal of finishing college. At the very least, I would have never studied them to any suffi…

It's really not obvious when you're studying. I often use knowledge that seemed useless at my time at university, but it has surprisingly come in handy every now and then.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#203
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said more likely, but why is that more likely? Because huge shift in public opinion are from my experience, most likely made by marketing agencies. Also ads like these: http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/...

Certainly a horrible ad. But it is for buying a machine. If such ads were the culprit, women shouldn't be driving cars either? I don't know what the ads were like at the time, but I am pretty sure they made similar ads for cars. Also not sure what kind of ads were targeted at women. It's pretty common to this day, although cheap, to just mix a random product with the claim "will make you more attractive to the opposi…

Cars != computers.

Cars are a means of transportation and much more of a requirement to live in urban environment than a computer.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#204
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly a horrible ad. But it is for buying a machine. If such ads were the culprit, women shouldn't be driving cars either? I don't know what the ads were like at the time, but I am pretty sure they made similar ads for cars. Also not sure what kind of ads were targeted at women. It's pretty common to this day, although cheap, to just mix a random product with the claim "will make you more attractive to the opposi…

Cars != computers. Cars are a means of transportation and much more of a requirement to live in urban environment than a computer.

There are quite a few massive cities in wealthy countries where a significant number of people choose not to drive even though they can afford it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#205
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> median salaries for developers in San Francisco ($114,400), ostensibly ground zero for the "shortage", are only a whisker higher than they are for dental hygienists ($112,970) and are considerably lower than for registered nurses ($127,670). What are you trying to prove? Nurses are a frequently-identified national shortage. So, unless you are trying to, by comparison, establish that there is also a shortage in dent…

The NPR report notes that while women continued to enter medicine and law in large numbers, enrollment in computer science abruptly declined, then seeks to explain this through a heavy emphasis on cultural factors. I believe that we should be placing greater consideration on economic factors, and consider that entering computer science may not be economically rational when you consider the other options women now hav…

Another advantage that dental hygienists and nurses have in terms of employment stability is that their jobs can't be shipped out of the country, unlike those of software developers.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is considered a top-notch programming environment... and it's free. It would be the perfect place to put something with built in programming hooks into Minecraft. And... there is already too many people putting too much garbage on devices that people don't need... last thing we need is being loaded down with crap - whether Python, perl or Visual Studios - on a default install of W…

If Candy Crush is installed on your copy of Windows, the OEM got paid for it. A "default" install doesn't have it, although you may see an "ad" for it on the Start Menu which can quickly be removed. Yes, there's way too much colour and movement on the Start Menu in 10.

Wrong: Candy Crush is getting installed on a "clean" install of windows. Straight from the ISO that is straight from MSDN. No "OEM" involvement. Zero.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/securedownloads/?#F...

Color and movement don't bother me since I use a menu replacement ( https://ninite.com/classicstart/ ). I find it less cluttered and, for some strange reason, I have less issues with search.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Candy Crush is installed on your copy of Windows, the OEM got paid for it. A "default" install doesn't have it, although you may see an "ad" for it on the Start Menu which can quickly be removed. Yes, there's way too much colour and movement on the Start Menu in 10.

Wrong: Candy Crush is getting installed on a "clean" install of windows. Straight from the ISO that is straight from MSDN. No "OEM" involvement. Zero. https://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/securedownloads/?#F... Color and movement don't bother me since I use a menu replacement ( https://ninite.com/classicstart/ ). I find it less cluttered and, for some strange reason, I have less issues with search.

I sit corrected, thanks. Odd, Get-AppxPackage -Name king.com.CandyCrushSaga doesn't return anything for me in Powershell

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is pretty cool. You should be proud of your daughter. Mine is 10 going to 11 in a couple of weeks and I've tried getting her interested in programming but no dice. She just prefers gaming, social media, selfies. I wish she was into it =( but I will respect the fact that her destiny might lie somewhere else (or maybe she is just a late bloomer).

It's never too late. I didn't start programming until I was about 13 (admittedly, I'd only ever seen one computer - an Apple II - before I bought my Spectrum), but I know a lot of people in IT who didn't start until their late teens or beyond.

If you are still keen on getting her interested, have you ever tried something like Scratch? It's very easy to learn and the kids that I've taught it to really seemed to enjoy making silly animations or very simple games with it.

Re: 1984 – When women stopped coding

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty cool. You should be proud of your daughter. Mine is 10 going to 11 in a couple of weeks and I've tried getting her interested in programming but no dice. She just prefers gaming, social media, selfies. I wish she was into it =( but I will respect the fact that her destiny might lie somewhere else (or maybe she is just a late bloomer).

It's never too late. I didn't start programming until I was about 13 (admittedly, I'd only ever seen one computer - an Apple II - before I bought my Spectrum), but I know a lot of people in IT who didn't start until their late teens or beyond. If you are still keen on getting her interested, have you ever tried something like Scratch? It's very easy to learn and the kids that I've taught it to really seemed to enjoy…

I started my daughter out with Python but she found it too hard, and I think it kinda soured her on programming. I will look into Scratch and see if she will find that a bit more appealing. She recently did a "coding with Minecraft" thing at school, which is very "Scratch"-like, and she enjoyed it a lot.
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