Linda Liukas' Programming book for Children has Huge First Day on Kickstarter

This sounds like a fantastic book. I only wish that I had thought about this before. I want one for my kids and for my niece and nephew.

It is sad that both sides of the gender gap here have decided to make this book about gender. No one made this article out about people and they great things we can accomplish. I'm disappointed.

Seems like lot of comments have concerns with the programming part, so here is my view why indirect approaches can be also important:

When we started Rails Girls with Linda, we saw that there were plenty of programming workshops, books and education available. We didn't want to create one more. Instead we focused on creating easy, one-day workshop to get you to try and see what programming and technology is about, while also building your first sample application and getting meet the local tech scene. After the workshop we tell the people that you now have all the tools and contacts you need for programming or creating something. It's up to you to learn more.

The important part was that all these people (probably thousands at this point) got over the first step and of whom many wouldn't have touched programming otherwise.

In the same way I don't think this book should be about teaching programming that much, but more as creating stories and personalities for technologies to peak interest. Children's interest usually leads to questions and to more interest. You can then use that energy, answer the questions, teach more and extend the workbook exercises to more challenging things. You can also use those characters as a basis to explaining the technology world or talking about what you do for living.

The point is that when you're trying to get a new demographic interested, you need to find a way to get them over the first step, which is to get them involved and getting them interested. The earlier this happens, the better.

Why project like this and the Goldie Box are important, is that they create a story, a world and excitement around technology, for those who might miss or haven't found their innate interest yet.

Don't dodge criticism by retroactively changing the meaning of what you said. We all know damned well the major lack of diversity in programming is the lack of women.

Rather affirm that this is exactly part of what you were saying [1]. I'll one-up you: indeed, the chance of a male writing such a book is much smaller than the chance of a female writing such a book. Acting as if gender wouldn't influence choice of content and style is ridiculous.

And before anyone jumps on my back: I'm telling it like it is, which implies nothing about how I think that it should be.

[1] Why would 'diversity' be a good thing, if not for the fact that it results in, you know, more diversity? Differences in the input result in differences in the output.

On the contrary, I'm very glad that HN is as critical as it is. Is it the Only Correct Worldview? Absolutely not, and if you rely primarily on HN to forge your opinion of tech and startups and programming, you're going to be very cynical and blasé.

I'm sure that if Donald Knuth posted a "Show HN: I've been writing a book called The Art of Computer Programming", half of the comments would be negative (a fair lot of them would likely be about programming isn't an "art" and how it's preposterous to call it one). And so what? Again, I don't see this as a problem unless you hold HN to be some sort of ultimate source of information and discussion, which it is absolutely not.

But given how insufferably pompous SV culture can be at times ("Yeah we're changing the world with our totally rad app, and building the most amazing engineering team in the world"), I actually find it refreshing how comments on HN will try to pick anything apart and find whatever flaws it may have. It can be borderline ridiculous at times, but honestly so is everything else.

tl;dr if you're sick of HN, you're probably spending too much time on it

The initial comments appeared to me to be skewed toward criticism that was negative and/or tangential to the book's goals. It appears to have improved somewhat.