4 ms·
Another grandmother gets thrown under the bus. Grandma as the archetype of computer ignorance is a played out plot device.
by fogus 15y ago
Another grandmother gets thrown under the bus. Grandma as the archetype of computer ignorance is a played out plot device.
- llimllib 15y agobut... in this story Grandma's the hero and the one that gets it, right? So this Grandma doesn't "get thrown under the bus".
- zephjc 15y agoWell, the author unknowingly does: his grandmother mistakes the assignment operator for the equivalence operator.
- rdtsc 15y agoActually, he points out his grandmother is well ahead of you fools since she has an intuitive understanding of immutable data structures and is distraught that one would modify state in-place like that. In her head she probably thought, "hmm that's what the state monad is for" or something like "yeah that'll get you in trouble when you make your code multi-threaded".
- sliverstorm 15y agoHardly a mistake only made by grandmas.
- huxley 15y agoI've disliked that stereotype for a while. My mother (who is 68) started off programming with punchcards when she was working on her Masters in Economics, she eventually moved into executive work but still kept up her chops with Basic and Fortran well into the 1990s. Nowadays, she uses VNC to telecommute into work every morning to avoid having to deal with traffic. If I had married earlier and had kids as soon as some of my schoolmates did --and my kids did the same in turn-- she could have been the great-grandmother of 20+ year olds. I think we should almost be to the point in computer history where age-based archetypes/stereotypes of computer ignorance can be safely retired.
- moheeb 15y agoHaha...you've got to be kidding! Have you ever seen an old person drive?