5 ms·

The first movers in programming were women.

• eropple 11y ago
  That's somewhat correct on its face--though, as krapp notes, a little disingenuous--but, more importantly, is wholly irrelevant to the growth of tech as an industry, which is what I pretty specifically pointed at rather than at "programming" (as if a trade skill was the point here in the first place). But you knew all that. So why'd you post that?
• krapp 11y ago
  The first movers in programming were the military, who assigned the role of 'programmer' to women because it was considered, not to put too fine a point on it, women's work.
• nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Yep. As was Margaret Hamilton who invented both software engineering and fault-tolerant, hardware-software design. Bunch more on top of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist... Been my favorite for the last year or two since a friend told me about her work doing... basically much of what I was trying to do lol. Her software resume kicks much of Silicon Valley's ass. Yet, many wouldn't hire women and certainly wouldn't know one invented the engineering aspect of their field after another invented programming. ;) Many similarly impressive women in tech and colleges that face uphill battle getting good jobs. Messed up... Note: Her USL and 001 Toolkit handled specification, semi-automated design, automated coding, automated testing, and handled SCM issues for arbitrary platforms. You could say she was the first "full-stack" engineer with a broader definition of full-stack. ;) 001/USL are really weird so one line of my research is doing same with a user-friendly, specification and implementation language + extensive metaprogramming + good heuristics. Racket or RED are likely implementation languages when I get the concepts all together.