CS Programs Changing to Attract Women Students

Magnifico writes "The New York times is running an article about a push by American universities to actively recruit women into Computer Science courses. The story, 'Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold', explains that the number of women in CS is shrinking: 'Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.' One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the nerd factor. To attract women students to the CS field, 'Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.' Changes at CMU increased women students in the CS program from 8 percent to nearly 40 percent."

Comments

Great for the gene pool

[grub]

1) Geek woman get CS degrees & jobs.
2) Geek woman meets geek man.
3) ???
4) Aspergers!!!

Re:Great for the gene pool

[bigtomrodney]

Its funny you should mention geeks meeting up. Is that the best reason to actively recruit women?
What I'm trying to say is if women don't want to enroll, so be it. Why force this 'positive discrimination'? Now if it was said that there was an overall drop in students enrolling then I would understand some concern but I just don't understand why we should force equality.

Personally I have no interest in signing up for a degree in Fashion Design. Some men may and more power to them but if there are more women signing up than men I don't think they should spend time or money trying to make fashion design more butch.

Re:Great for the gene pool

[Moofie]

Are you using the Chewbacca Defense? That does not make sense!

Re:Great for the gene pool

[Chris Burke]

What I'm trying to say is if women don't want to enroll, so be it. Why force this 'positive discrimination'?

Because of the negative discrimination that is artificially limiting the number of women in the field in the first place. Discrimination in the form of men assuming that women "don't want to enroll", simply because they're women and thus less interested in our manly computer engineering/sciences.

Look at this thread. I guarantee (in part because a lot has already shown up) that you'll see men in computer fields stating as fact that women don't really want to be in computer science. You'll see them state as fact that women aren't as good in computers as men. That it's an obvious "natural difference" that means that there really shouldn't be as many women in CS, only those rare few that have what it takes to match up with the men, and thus recruiting more is futile or even counter-productive. And then they'll say that all this proves that there isn't any discrimination against women in CS. Despite the fact that the real reason there are few women in CS -- men in the field discriminating against women -- is put blatantly before them every time they look in the mirror.

It's the same thing that went on in the 70s and 80s with women in the fields of law, business, and medicine. Fields dominated by men, and those men said that clearly women neither wanted nor were capable of succeeding in these fields, and hence would continue to be minorities. Well time passed and the women proved both that they wanted to and that they could, and you'd look like an archaic dinosaur with severe damage to the tact centers of the brain if you said otherwise. Computers, a field that has been dominated by a particularly anti-social breed of men even more prone to insulation than lawyers or MBAS, is the next stop. Encouraging women, letting them know that there are people in the field who welcome them, that the ones telling them what they want to do with their own lives are dinosaurs on the way out, that's helpful.

It may be that once we have gotten rid of all the sex discrimination in the computer field that there will still be fewer women in the field. It may be that there is in fact natural tendency that affects the ratio of men vs women. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that if you think that we are at that point, today, where sex discrimination doesn't exist? Then you're 1) male and 2) delusional.

Re:Great for the gene pool

[hobbesmaster]

The real question is why are all the women in engineering (at my school) signing up for Civil, Mechanical and Chemical (more women than men in CME from what I can tell) instead of Electrical, Computer and CS? (CS is in the College of Engineering here)

If I had to pull numbers out of thin air, I'd say that approximately 1/3 of MEs and around 1/2 of CEs are female. This compares with 1/20 or so in EE and maybe 1/10 to 1/5 in CS. (again, at my school - and I may be wrong on the CE/ME numbers)

Why? I bet the women learning about building bridges are capable of learning control theory or algorithms if they were interested - why aren't they interested?

Of course, most engineers on /. will take exception to the lumping in of CS with all the engineering disciplines (ie, ones that you can be a PE in), I generally do as well, but I think its interesting because it takes the same "kind" of person to declare any one of these majors - you have to like math, and thats the same for a real CS curriculum.

Re:Great for the gene pool

[Chris Burke]

Yeah I read the article, and I don't know where you're getting that. I see them de-emphasizing programming experience for acceptance to the program, and I see them talking more about uses and applications for computers than just the programming of them. No mention of actually changing the curriculum. Maybe adjusting teaching styles, but what's wrong with that? The difference between what these people think women want and the men I described in my post thinking they know what women want is that the people at CMU actually talked to women to get an idea of what they wanted, and have shown success as a result.

Nerd factor?

[onion2k]

One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the nerd factor.

If someone, male or female, is put off entering a particular study path because they're concerned about how other people will view them then they simply aren't passionate enough about it. Hell, they're not even interested in it. They're better off leaving the place open to someone a little less vacuous.

Maybe it's just me, but I see no reason why people need to be recruited into compsci. There's plenty of interest in it already. Should there be more men going to beauty school just to balance out the demographics a bit?

Let people decide what they want to do and stuff the perceived lack of equality.

Re:Nerd factor?

[freemywrld]

Maybe it's just me, but I see no reason why people need to be recruited into compsci.

I agree. I am woman in the IT field, and am very passionate about it. I have a degree in Biology -it turns out I am also passionate about science. I understand that universities care about demographics across programs, but you rarely hear about programs trying to attract more men for Women's Studies, do you? Anyway, my main point is, attracting women to CS can be all fine and good, but what I would really like to see is a job market that is more gender balanced. There still exists a school of thought that women are less suited to IT. More women with CS degrees may help this some, but in the end, not everyone who is interested in IT work necessarily gets a CS degree.

Re:Nerd factor?

[cultrhetor]

What does equality as in ability have to do with equality as in quantity? Absolutely nothing: try again.

Re:Nerd factor?

[Omnifarious]

I've been on the interviewer side of the table more than once when a woman showed up to be interviewed. In general, the reaction (not in front of her of course) has been to be flabbergasted and pleased that we might actually end up with a girl who was working in the tech side of the business.

We did apply the same standards of hiring both (yes, I said both, it only happened twice, and both times the girl was Asian) times and she made it. Once just scraping by (she didn't care a lot about quality and took criticism very poorly, but she did know how to program fairly well) and the other doing pretty well.

I find this rather depressing. When I worked at Amazon, the only women who were ever hired as programmers were from Asia (most from India). There is some strong cultural force at work here that discourages women from becoming programmers.

I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers. I don't think it's a harassment issue. That's not something I've especially noticed. Though, since I'm a guy, it's possible it just passed me by.

But, I haven't noticed the bias you speak of. As I said, the places where I've been an interviewer people were really happy that a woman was interviewing. And it wasn't because they wanted to hit on her either. :-)

Re:Nerd factor?

[mrbooze]

But no reasonable people are expecting perfect 1:1 ratios. We're talking about a 1:2 ratio in a situation where there is no identified genetic reason one gender would dominate over another so much, and that ratio is not consistent in other countries. That leads to reasonably suspect that the reasons are cultural and can be improved. If they can be improved through reasonable attempts to recognize the needs and desires of different groups, there's no good reason not to. A diversity of backgrounds, both gender, ethnic, and class, are good for any team, as it provides more perspectives to look at a problem. That doesn't take the place of skill and competence, but if you can have skill and competence *and* diversity, that's a great place to be.

Re:Nerd factor?

[shalla]

I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers. I don't think it's a harassment issue. That's not something I've especially noticed. Though, since I'm a guy, it's possible it just passed me by.

Actually, it's often a very subtle thing--not harassment, but a definite bias against women in certain fields. Most people don't even realize they're doing it. In high school, I had the best grades in my honors math and science classes and was willing to help classmates with questions. When awards time came at the end of the year, the math and science awards went to the guys I'd helped (and outscored), and I got the English and Social Studies awards. Looking at the years ahead of me and behind me, the same thing was true. The girls might be just as good as the guys, but the perception by the generation in charge was that the guys were better at math and science and the girls at languages and humanities.

If you listen carefully, it comes out in little things people say, and in the toys people buy children. Thank God my parents watched me play with all my brother's cool stuff and bought me building sets and used computer magazines (for the TI 99, baybee!) to help offset the insipid Barbies and tea sets I got almost exclusively from other people. (I mean, I support kids getting dolls and tea sets, too, but not JUST that.)

If you want an enlightening experience, go to a computer show with a woman that you know knows something about computers and see how many of the vendors there address her versus how many address you when speaking, regardless of who asked the question. I once had one vendor answer all my questions to my husband. At the end of the conversation, I pointed out that he'd overlooked me, and that was a poor way to treat a customer. He asked me what gave me that impression, as though I were overreacting. We actually had to explain that he was ending his sentences with "sir," which pretty obviously excluded me from the conversation. (Boy, was he embarrassed.) That's not unusual at computer shows. Heck, when we went car shopping, even car salespeople picked up more quickly that I was the one they wanted to focus on and talk to or they were going to lose the sale.

If you aren't with a woman, or if you aren't with a woman who is trying to ask questions and get an answer, you might never see these things, but added up over a lifetime, it's enough of a subtle deterrent to influence some women who are good at several different fields. Why go for one like comp sci when you can choose another one that is as lucrative and more accepting?

Just something to keep in mind as you go about your day. You might be surprised what you catch yourself thinking (we're all culturally brainwashed to some degree), or your coworker buying for his new daughter without a second thought... And that, of course, is ignoring the people who specifically raise their daughters to be wives and mothers and nothing else.

nerd factor

[Visaris]

Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.

I realize that there is more to CS than programming, but I would be surprised if theoretical computer science, which is more math intensive, would be that much more appealing. . . . Any way you go, I don't see how to remove the nerd factor from CS.

Re:nerd factor

[Millennium]

Exactly. While programming is not the only aspect of computer science, it is easily the most important. De-emphasizing it amounts to lowering the bar, and that isn't acceptable in any field. Diversity is nice, but it's not worth compromising standards of excellence.

Surely there is a better way to attract women to CS. Surely the issue of women not being interested isn't just a "Programming is haaaaaaaard" thing; women are not Barbie dolls. If we assume that there's a genuine problem, then we need to be spending more effort figuring out why, rather than using this as a convenient excuse to lower the bar.

Re:nerd factor

[The_Wilschon]

Programming is to computer science what engineering is to physics. Programming isn't science, it is an application of science. You wouldn't say that engineering is the most important aspect of physics, and you wouldn't say that de-emphasizing the engineering aspects of physics amounts to lowering the bar. Rather, the opposite. Emphasizing the engineering aspects of physics amounts to lowering the bar in a physics program.

Really, the fields of programming and computer science ought to be separated. Most people studying computer science are doing so because they want to learn programming. Conflating the two means that people wanting to study computer science itself have a hard time finding a program which meets their desires. If de-emphasizing the programming aspects of computer science in a conflated program causes more women to enter and complete that program, then separating the two ought to achieve a similar effect, and would still provide a program for those who wish to learn computer engineering more than computer science.

Re:nerd factor

[Millennium]

Programming is to computer science what engineering is to physics.

I'd argue that it's more like what math is to physics (and to computer science).

Programming isn't science, it is an application of science.

It's also the means of expressing that science, which is ultimately why they're as inseparable as math and physics. Take away the ability to record knowledge and it dies.

You wouldn't say that engineering is the most important aspect of physics, and you wouldn't say that de-emphasizing the engineering aspects of physics amounts to lowering the bar.

No, but I might say these things if a school were to de-emphasize mathematics in its physics programs. In fact, this is why I made the Barbie reference in my previous post.

My own CMU story

[bconway]

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. It has been a remarkable experience that I would like to share with the community. Here's an account of my experience.

Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in two days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tomorrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.

Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to find that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increment the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.

Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configure their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have it, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly been developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.

Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of files titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have lives? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Windows!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each touting an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have showered since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch," saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working so I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling my that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered on my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I don't want to lose my uptime."

Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am not even going to ask.

Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...

Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ33R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux after discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stress has been building and I forgot to

Great idea!

[cabalamat3]

Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs

This is a good idea and I think it could equally be applied to boosting the numbers of under-represented groups in other areas. For example, proficiency at flying should no longer be a requirement for airline pilots. And surgeons shouldn't have to be good at doing operations. To say otherwise is elitist and divisive.

20 Years Too Late

[lbmouse]

Why couldn't they have done this when I was in school? It was a regular sausage fest in my FORTRAN 77 class.

Or as the article says:

[khasim]

And there is widespread misunderstanding about jobs moving abroad, said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. Companies may establish installations overseas to meet local licensing requirements or in hopes of influencing regulations, he said, "but the truth is when companies offshore they are more or less doing it for access to talent."

"Cheap labor is not high on the list," Dr. Lazowska said. "It is access to talent."

Bullshit.

If there was that big of a demand over here then more people would be getting into it to take advantage of the high salaries.

There's demand, but there's also a limit to how much will be paid. So it is all about the "cheap labor".

Re:Bad idea

[Red Flayer]

They aren't dumbing down the program. RTFA.

Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science. At one time, she said, admission to the program depended on high overall achievement and programming experience. The criteria now, she said, are high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders.

They are talking about admissions criteria, in the context of high school computing backgrounds. Attracting talent that may or may not have extensive programming experience, rather than focusing just on the people who enter college with a lot of programming under their belt -- those people are overwhelmingly male.

Might they have some catching up to do? Sure. But at least they won't have bad programming habits to unlearn, which can be just as bad as inexperience.

Actually, lots of jobs here

[WindBourne]

They are in small to medium size companies. The large companies will play with hiring contractors, but few are moving their work overseas. The only companies really moving the jobs overseas are monster companies that have enormous IT operations or those that are pure IT companies. MS, IBM, HP, ATT, QWEST, Verizon, etc. are all moving jobs overseas. The reasons vary, and the results more so. Where the large companies have found is that hiring in India is difficult due to the fact that the good ones have already been hired on. Now, the majority are those coming from starter schools and 2 year schools. In addition, Indian law makes firing somebody difficult (as hard as in much of europe). At this time, India is actually worse then hiring in America.
That is why Argentina is catching on. If and when Russia ever gets their act together and create better laws for a business world (and enforces them), then that will be THE place to be.

But even with all that, we will still have plenty of good CS jobs here. But I maintain, that we CSers are better off starting our own companies. Even if you have to do a dozen of them before succeeding.

as a woman programmer...

[butterflysrage]

let me say this... you can change up the university degree all you want and you will not radically change the gender makeup of the student body as that is not where the problem is... it's in the highschools.

The number of girls that are presured by friends, family and even teachers to get out of maths and into the arts and social sciences is crazy. "Math just isn't a good choice for you... how about law? or history?", if this was just from other girls it wouldnt be as bad, but that quote was from my algebra teacher (a course which I got a 90% in dispite his dislike of me). Young girls are actively presured by teachers and adminsistration to avoid maths and science.

If you really want to get more girls into comp sci, stop highschool teachers from telling us what we can and can not do.

Re:Bad idea

[nSignIfikaNt]

This is America. If you can't measure up to the standards then we lower the standards so no one's feelings get hurt.

As a female CS major...

[zelphie]

I'd be overjoyed to see the percentage of women in my courses get above 10%. But I don't think that changing course content should be the answer, since I don't think it's the problem. Instead, I'd blame:

1.) Lack of any experience of CS in high school. Even in schools that offer AP CS (which mine didn't), isn't it usually an elective that could just as well be filled with a language or second science course or music, etc? Since it's not a required class like math or chemistry, it's pretty easy to graduate from high school without ever even realizing computer science exists... or that you're good at it or like it.
2.) And when you get to college, who wants to have all their courses with just guys? Especially when everyone knows that CS majors are nerds? So why bother seeing if you like it? If everyone there already is a guy, then they must be better at or it something, right? Why else would it be so unbalanced?
3.) Bad advising. When I told mine I wanted to take intro to CS, because I was planning on majoring in chem and thought it might be useful, she told me I should take a humanities course instead, because I'd probably get a better grade. Luckily I decided to take it anyway and liked it enough to change my major.

And now when I try to convince friends to take the intro course (because I thought it was fun... and it could be good to know anyway), my guy friends tend to say that it sounds interesting, while my girl friends usually say something about how they'd probably fail. I think until the perception of who can take CS classes and do well in them changes, changing the curriculum or appearance of the program won't do much.

Re:Why does this matter

[Neil Watson]

In theory, anyways, the demographic should be closer to 50/50.

I don't agree with that. Men and women are different. They think differently and are likely to have different interests.

Re:Bad idea

[Jtheletter]

They are talking about admissions criteria, in the context of high school computing backgrounds. Attracting talent that may or may not have extensive programming experience, rather than focusing just on the people who enter college with a lot of programming under their belt

It sounds all well and good when you put it like that, but as an undergrad at CMU in the ECE program (which shares a lot of classes with CS kids, and I had a lot of CS friends) what we witnessed in reality was: the program was dumbed down for girls to get in. This was reflected in many more incoming students not having a clue about how to use a computer, let alone program it, and a lot of female CS majors changing majors by sophomore year. I'm not being mysogenistic here, trust me, CS guys were THRILLED at the prospect of more girls in the program, but it didn't pan out that way. Caveat being this was 1999-2002, I have no knowledge of how it's working now, but in the first 3 years we witnessed lower quality students and more CS degree program dropouts.

Re:Dilute to taste.

[innosent]

Exactly, as an employer looking to hire people as programmers (which would be the majority of the jobs looking for CS degrees), you now have people with a degree that means nothing. There are very few positions (professors, researchers) where theory is more important than actually being able to write code. I say we should go in the completely opposite direction, with more architecture and programming classes (using architecture to have people actually understand what they are doing, and why a certain code block is efficient/inefficient on the hardware it is running on), and only one or two survey courses on algorithms and theory, with more available as electives. CS should be an Engineering degree, as it is in my school (UCF), not a liberal arts degree. I don't see many women in Mechanical, Aerospace, Electrical, or Computer Engineering either, should we stop building cars, satellites, and circuits too? Of course, 28% seems extremely high to me, as my experience has been that there are far less than that in my classes, at least in the later stages (1 each in my senior/grad classes).

Re:Dilute to taste.

[Rei]

How is reducing the dependency on learning specific programming languages "watering down the degree"? Let me tell you, if the first language I had programmed in was Java, I would have been deterred, too. Learning a programming language isn't like learning Swahili here. It's just a syntax for expressing how you want to get things done. The quality of a programmer isn't how well they know a particular syntax; it's what they plan to put into code.

The first part of any learning path should be to allow those who are not familiar with it to see what you can do with it. Do we start teaching mathematics with order of operations? No -- we show first how to count (immediate practical applications), then how to add, subtract, and other things with immediate practical applications. Do we start teaching reading with sentence diagramming? No -- we start with simple sentences (immediate practical applications). Etc. So why should we start on programming with a focus on learning a language? You should start with a simple language with a clear syntax** -- then work on practical applications immediately. Competitiveness and freedom in project selection should also be encouraged early on. If people get to work on what they want and are trying to outdo their friends, they're more likely to spend more time, actually learn what they're doing, and really get into it.

Good coding style (comments, self-documenting code, etc) should be taught and rewarded early. If a more complex language is needed for later courses, the switch should be made as necessary. Object oriented code and important modern coding features/standards (templates, const correctness, etc) should be taught after the introductory courses. Data structures would probably be good after that. As for learning languages, I'm more of a fan of the concept of a later "Programming Languages" class that simply covers learning a number of different languages, stressing the advantages and disadvantages of each. There's no need to frontload the learning of languages. Learn what's neat about programming first, then learn how to be a good coder, then diversify your language and library knowledge.

** -- I learned on BASIC, but something like Python would probably work well. A fun language with a useful syntax would be LPC (a MUD-coding language), since you can "visualize" and "handle" everything that you code, everyone has an avatar in the same virtual world, and it's based on C, so it would make switching to C easier. Another option that would probably help attract teens is Javascript -- relatively simple if you stick to a single browser, and definitely useful since webpages are really popular among teenagers.

Dear GP, sorry for this, it is nothing pesonal

[xtracto]

For fucks sake, I think a lot of people here in slashdot should go and study Computer Science to realize that CS is NOT all about programming, there are countless branches of Computer Science were programming has *nothing* to do. I am making my PhD in Comp.Science right now, and if it wasnt for the fact that I am doing simulations (which in some circumstances it might be possible to do *without* programming like using RepastPy) I would not be using programming.

You people are confusing Computer Science with Software Engineering. Software Engineering is what most of slashdotters would *need* to study in order to be "professional" developers (this is, learn the theory and background behind that PHP, Python, Java, C++, C, Visual Basic, etc etc /coding/ you do).

It is completely possible to study in a subfield of Computer Science (in fact in many of them) without knowing how to program (in fact, many of my fellow PhD students do exactly that, oh, and my own supervisor [a Prof. in Comp. Science] does not /code/).

Several slashdotters will find this last comment offending: I believe that removing Programming will indeed attract more women, basically because this fat-dirty-geek-egocentric-smelly person idea is specifically centered on programmers, coders, etc, not on Computer Scientists overall. Gosh, there are really intelligent Women in Computer Scientists, one that comes to mind now is the cryptoanalyst women that sometimes has been featured in slashdot.

Re:Dear GP, sorry for this, it is nothing pesonal

[fireboy1919]

CS is NOT all about programming, there are countless branches of Computer Science were programming has *nothing* to do

Name one. I bet there's some programming involved in there.

When I was going through, the major CS areas I studied were Computer Vision, AI, Cognitive Science, Security, Compiler Theory, Language Theory, and OS Design.

There wasn't a single one of those that didn't involve writing code. You *can* do those things without writing code, but that's not as useful. You advance the field by showing that you've got a new approach that works better than previous approaches. You write a paper with theoretical and empirical evidence. You get your empirical evidence by running your code.

Sure, you need the theory as well. If you've got an algorithm that you think is always more clever than the currently accepted best - or that breaks something currently thought of as unbreakable, etc, you need to prove it mathematically. But a lot of people will think that you're probably pulling a fast one if you don't have actual data to back it up, so you probably should implement it.

Re:Dilute to taste.

[Rei]

Java is as ugly and awkward of a language as I've ever used, barring LISP-derivatives. As for your comments, pretty much every language people would consider except for C does memory management. GUI programming is not a first year topic. OO is not an immediate topic for learning (late first year, early second perhaps, unless it's as seamless as you see in languages like LPC).

For a beginning language, you want the syntax to be as easy as possible. Let's look at a Java "Hello World":

public class Hello {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!");
    }
}

1) Classes are not beginning topics. They should be introduced as soon as possible, but certainly not at the very beginning. They're req'd in Java. And Java's implementation of them is poor.
2) "public static void" and "String[] args" are nonsense to a beginner.
3) System.out.println is pointlessly verbose. We do *not* want beginners to be having to learn libraries to get anything done.

Java is not an intuitive language -- certainly not for a beginner. Let's iterate over the characters in a string (a typical beginner task, right?). How do you do that in Java? Why, like this:

CharacterIterator it = new StringCharacterIterator("abcd"); // Iterate over the characters in the forward direction
for (char ch=it.first(); ch != CharacterIterator.DONE; ch=it.next()) { // Use ch ...
}

Yeah. A bloody iterator. That's a great beginners topic.(/sarcasm) All sorts of other great "beginner" topics like there being both primitives and classes for all basic number types and the like. Of course, even some primitives are confused -- is a char a character or a number? Why, it's both! Try out "blah" + 's' (JDK 1.1 -> "blahs"; JDK 1.2 -> "blah15"). Java dates are very ugly; I don't think I even need to get into them (certainly a newbie wouldn't want to!). You can't compare strings for equality with == like you do for most everything else; you have to use equals(). You have gems like "".compareTo(null) throwing a null pointer exception. Oh, java nulls, gotta love them. String.valueOf on an int[] returns "null", but on a char[] returns a null pointer exception. Java makes you pointlessly cast all the time and makes you stick parens all over the place; I've seen apps spend half their time casting. Java error reporting when compiling is done very poorly. Java crashes manage to be both verbose and unhelpful -- quite a challenge. There are more incompatabilities between versions and interpreters than you can shake a stick at. Even running a Java program is made needlessly complex for a beginner.

I'll repeat: Java is *not* a language to teach coding to a beginner in. You're going to drive people away by doing that.