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Article: "Rodger, who is trying to turn that around by making programming fun to learn." [...] Prof Rodger: "It's a nationwide problem that there aren't many w
by pbhj 17y ago
Article: "Rodger, who is trying to turn that around by making programming fun to learn."
[...]
Prof Rodger: "It's a nationwide problem that there aren't many women in computer science in general. For example, we only have three women faculty in our department, out of 24 positions. And it's been the same for the 15 years I've been here."
And? 3 women in the faculty, what's the relevance? I don't understand what the sex of the programmer has to do with anything. What is the nationwide problem that having more female programmers will correct?
- patio11 17y agoI think the strategy is hope that girls are accomplished enough logical thinkers to be successful programmers, who can nonetheless be bamboozled into believing that a career in computer science will involve a lot of telling fantastic stories about golfing dragons without ever having to write code. You are never going to address a gap in the number of female programmers by playing around with dragon-and-drop programming. Industry does not need dragon-and-drop. They need people who will take an intensely boring specification document about business rules for an insurance company, and translate that specification document into functional Java code and XML files. Your XML editor will not have a dragon-and-drop interface. A large part of me thinks that people who are not programmers are not programmers precisely because they have some notion of what programmers actually do for a living and would hate it.
- jerf 17y agoAs much as I loved the phrase "dragon-and-drop interface", I believe it works better as "dragon-drop interface".