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Melinda Gates Was Encouraged To Use an Apple and BASIC. Her Daughters Were Not. (huffingtonpost.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In August, Melinda Gates penned Computers Are For Girls, Too, in which she lamented that her daughters "are half as likely to major in computer science as I was 30 years ago." So, what's changed in the last 30 years? Well, at last week's DreamForce Conference, Gates credited access to Apple computers at school and home for sparking her own interest in computer science [YouTube], leading to a career at Microsoft.
So, as she seeks ways to encourage more women to get into tech, Melinda may want to consider the effects of denying her own children access to Apple products [2010 interview] and of Microsoft [in 1984] stopping computers from shipping with a beginner's programming language (a 14-year-old Melinda reportedly cut her coding teeth on BASIC).
Melinda can raise her kids however she wants -- maybe her kids will just start programming with the Ubuntu that's shipping with Windows 10. But is it a problem that there's no beginner's programming language currently shipping with Macs? Over the years Macs have shipped with Perl, Python, Ruby, tcl, and a Unix shell. Do you think Apple could encourage young programmers more by also shipping their Macs with BASIC?
So, as she seeks ways to encourage more women to get into tech, Melinda may want to consider the effects of denying her own children access to Apple products [2010 interview] and of Microsoft [in 1984] stopping computers from shipping with a beginner's programming language (a 14-year-old Melinda reportedly cut her coding teeth on BASIC).
Melinda can raise her kids however she wants -- maybe her kids will just start programming with the Ubuntu that's shipping with Windows 10. But is it a problem that there's no beginner's programming language currently shipping with Macs? Over the years Macs have shipped with Perl, Python, Ruby, tcl, and a Unix shell. Do you think Apple could encourage young programmers more by also shipping their Macs with BASIC?
It's just like what I say about calculus: it's important to understand the basic concepts of integration and differentiation, but you are NEVER going to solve integral or differential equations in real life (any sane person would use numerical methods). Computers will soon be capable of programming themselves, so while it is useful to have a basic understanding of how computers work just like it is useful to have a basic understanding of how electricity works, trying to teach EVERYONE to program is pretty much solving a non-problem. Also, the fewer people that know how to program, the more I can charge for my services...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Is she planning on getting them an Apple II or earlier?
If you want your child to learn computing, Linux and Windows are much better choices than any Apple or Android product. She made the right choice.
Granted I did some BASIC before I jumped into Perl but I have taught Perl to novices before and they've done just fine with it. I would think it would be just fine for a beginner.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Unlike the 1980s, nowadays it's trivially easy to get BASIC (or most any other computer language) onto your computer, regardless of platform - usually for free.
And if you want to stay in the walled garden and something which has ostensibly been vetted, there's a $4.99 version of BASIC available for OS X / MacOS in the App Store.
#DeleteChrome
Didn't Apple just release a program that teaches kids Swift? Most kids are on iPhone / iPad these days anyway vs. Mac
.
The bigger problem to be solved occurs down the road when females start encountering artificial barriers and discrimination against their participation in the field.
Best course of action --- ask female computer science people (and I don't mean a person who brought Microsoft Bob to an unsuspecting world, but real female computer science people) what obstacles they faced and what would they do to remove them.
it ships with a mac (as a free download). or download swift playground to your kids ipad. there's no point in putting something like basic - which is a one-way-street as it will hardly help you with learning a language that's actually usable - on a computer for kids to learn.
There is a language called JavaScript that is perfectly suited for learning how to program. Much better suited than BASIC I'd say.
they ship with apple-script, which is more useful than basic and you can download swift for free. do you think apple could encourage young programmers more by also shipping their macs with ALGOL?
html + javascript is for todays kids what basic was to us some 30years ago.
It's available everyhere and you can do thing that is usable. Much like the basic back then.
It's called JavaScript, and every computer comes with an interpreter (web browser) pre-installed.
Every Mac comes with Python, Ruby and Perl (not that I'd recommend the last one, but some people are masochists), just like Linux.
You can click a button in the app store and get Swift, C, C++, Objective-C and there are other buttons for pretty much anything else you could ever want.
Scratch [scratch.mit.edu] is the new basic.
so where are her leggings, uggs, infinity scarf, and pumpkin spice latte?
Somebody seems to think that BASIC is a beginners language more so than others because the B happens to stand for BASIC. Nothing about BASIC makes it more suited to beginners than many other languages out there, including but not limited to Python. I would go so far as to say that BASIC was a good language for beginners in the early 1980s, but would be a very bad place for someone to start in in 2016.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Python & Ruby are not suitable for beginners? But somehow BASIC is magically unique???
Macs are pre installed with AppleScript, obviously.
Python, Perl, several Shells, AWK - actually one of my favourite beginner languages.
However having a simple language which is already displayed as an icon on the Dock would probably rock.
Still waiting for a viable successor of Hypercard ... (and please don't post links to that company that is changing its name every 2 years and claims it RealCoder or LifeCoder or however it is called now is a Hypercard successor, it is not, it is rubbish)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Exactly. OS X ships with Python, which is a far better and more appropriate modern-enough learning platform.
"...by also shipping their macs with BASIC", lol.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Companies and governments are pouring rivers of money into encouraging girls into IT. Is it really worth it? Do they really make so much better programmers to justify huge investment needed?
Oh for god's sake - who gives a darn what their kids have on their computer - they have a computer, so they'll be fine. This is all clickbait. Not to mention invading what little privacy Gates' kids might have left. Is there not some place the media would have the discretion to stay out of?
Don't step on the baby.
It's their choice. Trying to force them to go into a field that *you* want them in will likely either sour them on it altogether or, even worse, send them into a field that they don't have any real aptitude for.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
my daughter just hit college and I pushed her toward medicine. C.S. is a dead end. Math isn't, but that's not exactly C.S.. Outsourcing + H1-Bs means you'd have to be crazy to go into computer science right now. Most places I see are 80/20 H1-Bs for the onshore and 95/5 if you include offshore. Bring back the jobs and us parents will bring back our students.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Limited job prospects, and social skills and physical appearance are worthless in computer programming.
There is good pay for good computer programmers. More than half of the population would make for bad computer programmers. A moderate percentage can be ok computer programmers, (people writing Java internal applications). A small percentage can be good computer programmers, (writing in C++ at Microsoft, Google, Facebook). However, a moderate part of the population can be sexy, which pays relatively well, and is applicable to many jobs ranging from pure application (strippers) to being one of multiple skills (trophy wife, actor, pop singer, pharma salesmen). Furthermore, women tend to be more social, and valued than men: things which computers don't care about, hence the good use of asocial, ugly, hard working men.
In every description I've read of her work at Microsoft, Melinda Gates was a manager, not a software developer. Her MBA probably took her a lot further than any CS education did. The loudest voices for enlarging the pool of tech workers certainly don't code for a living, and would consider that beneath them.
Maybe women are just smarter and don't want to enter a field that usually involves working long, stressful hours, getting little respect, and being ruthlessly discarded at age 35 so the next fresh college grad can be slotted in at a lower salary.
You do realize that AppleSoft BASIC was written by Microsoft, right?
Geez-Louise, this revisionist Apple-centric history is driving me nuts!
Perl is a great contemporary replacement for Applesoft BASIC: it is easy to get started in, links easily with other parts of the operating system, and is infinitely expandable.
Yes, as ShanghaiBill writes, some Perl programmers enjoy writing obfuscated code, but "some" is not equal to "all." The best Perl programmers write code that is as readable as Java, with less reliance on cramming everything into regular expressions.
The main problem for kids is a lack of code written to be read, so that they can organically absorb how it works and get started on their own projects quickly, because in my experience, all the good programmers learned their craft by getting passionate about creating something and driving themselves toward that goal.
Alternative Right.
when your only out-of-box scripting experience was Batch file programming and a rich DOS installation had only q-basic ide instead of a realtime q-basic shell then MS intentionally depricated their viable console environment. A gui is notVisual Basic development. it was like MS would rebel against itself in each OS release and then let back in the infrastructure they failed to render obsolete but only discover they actually depend on the abandonware they built the new sysyem with.
Every year tbey try to retire a cubicle but he writes himself back in wjen they realize he is missing something.
For students or families who favour Apple products, Swift is the obvious choice. Very modern and yet easy to learn. But powerful enough to make real apps.
Start with the Swift Playgrounds app on an iPad. Teaches by setting challenges:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/ap...
Then download XCode for Mac when ready to take it further.
XCode has Playgrounds for your own experimenting.
DL it for Ubuntu and you will be out form under the company that makes you sad.
Do you think Apple could encourage young programmers more by also shipping their Macs with BASIC?
no.
Most coders know only one method of learning to code: excruciating brute force trial and error
There's no *rational* reason for learning to code to be annoying at all, but we do this to ourselves because it reinforces difficulties we overcame in the past.
One example, this code.org Star Wars Javascript tutorial: https://studio.code.org/s/star...
It's perfect...also there are a few great "getting started with programming Python/Javascript" books by No Starch Press I would recommend.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Python is the new BASIC. My kids are being taught in Python. Their schools have Python posters up, and they do their work in it. No need to go back to the 80s and learn BASIC as I did, the school community is all about Python - at least here in the UK, not sure about elsewhere.
You can code a LOT of cool stuff with just BASH, which mimics how BASIC used to run on the Apple ][ computers of the 80's. I mean any command you can run within a bash script, you can also type in the CLI.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Why do we put up with feminists posting exclusionary, sexist stories like this ?
Computers do not discriminate by gender, normal people do not discriminate by gender, but feminists do, and it's time we stopped letting them promote their shit.
No, because BASIC is an awful language that's hard to use. Meanwhile, languages intended for everyday use have got much more accessible, like Swift, which Apple uses in their free learn-to-program iPad app, Swift Playgrounds: http://www.apple.com/swift/pla...
Every child should start with C++.
Weed out the weak early on, and the industry will be a lot healthier.
A Mac is a PC made to look cute. That is why it appeals to women. That is also why it costs so much more for equivalent processing power.
Macs have Python out-of-box. What's the problem? Python is most definitely a "beginner's language".
AppleScript, Python and Perl are all installed on your shiny new Mac - you've clearly never opened a Terminal window to see the latter two. Would it be helpful to ship with BASIC as well? Not in my opinion.
Back in 1984, getting software was not as simple as it is today. Home computers were still relatively new and resources scarce. Having a suite of software provided on purchase was a great way to get started on a computer.
Today, computers are ubiquitous and internet connectivity pretty much universal. In just a few minutes, anyone can download an IDE and get started on just about any platform of their choice. There is little need to preload software to get people started. Realistically, it doesn't matter whether it is Windows, *nix, or OSX. I save the holy war for other to fight.
Get every kid a basic Arduino and let them learn on something as basic as 1980's computers but that can also interact with the outside world via I/O pins.
What Melinda Gates points out in the TFA is amazingly simple yet profoundly insightful and yet the slashjocks can't wrap their big heads around it.
BASIC blew any and or all other "beginners languages", developed since then, out of the water. The reasons are fairly simple to understand, but you have to grasp how they were interconnected.
If you weren't using computers and programming between 1976 and 1984, you probably can't intuitively grasp how things actually were, and what is stated below was true for millions of children around the world, in dozens of different real languages. One of more negative aspects of the "good ole days" is that personal computer were not available for everyone, they were reserved for privileged children from families with incomes sufficient to be able to afford such and these costs were not insignificant, costing families upwards of a $1,000.00.
BASIC as a programming language is dead. It will never come back. But that does not mean that there is no absence. Our expectations have changed radically, what we demand from computers today was far beyond anything anyone could do with BASIC. Truly replacing BASIC is a herculean task, not something easy, and it is an open question whether there will ever be an equivalent again. The problem set solved by BASIC was many orders of magnitude smaller than what anyone could reasonably content themselves with nowadays. There were no videos(cameras capable of capturing pictures or videos), mp3s(computer generated audio was positively primitive compared to today), text and hi-res graphics were frequently completely separated, you could have one or the other, rarely both. The complexities of GUI programming rendered BASIC obsolete and still form the most fundamental hurdle to the development of something truly functionally equivalent. But if you still contend that Python or Javascript could in anyway inherit the mantle from BASIC you simply do not get it.
But is it a problem that there's no beginner's programming language currently shipping with Macs?
I'd recommend JavaScript as beginner's programming language.
It has all the language features that a beginner needs, and it's absolutely ubiquitous.
I think Javascript is a great language to learn to program. It ships with *every* computer, tablet, phone on the planet.
You need not only the interpreter but also a text editor so that you can make the HTML and CSS and JS files. Notepad is fine to start with on a PC, but does a text editor ship with every iPhone and iPad? I thought iOS was designed to hide the concept of a "file".
If you have to have a custom editor just to make a language usable its a fail in my books.
Then I'd say the same about something like Lisp or Scheme, which needs parenthesis matching in the editor to be usable.
Computers will soon be capable of programming themselves
there's no beginner's programming language currently shipping with Macs
You have the Unix shell, wha else do you need, you insensitive clod?
I remember messing w/ SuperCard when it first came out. (if I remember correctly, it was like Hypercard, but with support for color).
Based on the wikipedia page on it, they added MacOS X support in 2002, and it now runs natively on Intel macs.
There's also a note that there's a windows runtime for it. (but not an editor).
Of course, the basic version is $179, and the one w/ extra stuff is $279 ... but if you have any HyperCard materials lying about (box, manual, install disk, etc.), they'll knock it down to $129/$199.
And it looks like you can grab the beta or 30 day demo to try it out.
The only thing that I can't figure out is how you get people the player -- do you have to distribute it w/ your stack, or is there somewhere people can download it from once and be done w/ it?
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Medicine hey? She might be just in time, or she might graduate just in time to see physicians replaced by computers. And good riddance.
Thanks... The baby boomers are going to need a lot of doctors. Of course, most will get shit for wages after accounting for the years of study required because Medicare will continue to cut payments to below the bone.
Sure, the terminal a.k.a. the tty is great for doing terminal things like running Unix-like programs.
But, as the 'tty' name indicate, it's a one-dimensional interface. It's made of 1D text, whereas BASIC supported 2D text. i.e. you may take control of the screen and get characters drawn wherever you like, with something like LOCATE 20,12 : PRINT "HELLO"
This would print HELLO in the center of the screen, if your screen is 40x25
Isn't that nice?
Sure, just use a library like curses but now you've made it a lot more complicated.
Want graphics? Most CS students will probably find it hard. In BASIC you'll have some sort of PLOT or LINE command. Done.
I agree with everything else you said about writing perl as readable as Java (or C IMO), but easy access to regex is what makes perl most unique and useful.
The alternative is what, exploding every regex into a little parser? You can't avoid the need to search for patterns in streams of data sometimes, and that's really what perl is made for.
Either approach needs to be well documented with example input text in the comments next to every regex pattern or fragment of parser logic. Extracted fields need to be well labeled. As long as you do those basic things, I'll take a good regex pattern over a wall of code that parses the same way.
The new outlet of feminism and of pussies with a penis who defend feminism.
*cough* Logo *cough* turtles *cough* graphics
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
One of the very first programming languages I ever used when I was in primary school was HyperTalk. I later learned C, but I make money using LabView!
Medicine isn't what it used to be. Between insurance companies, hospital corporations, medicaid / medicare and Obamacare the medical career has lost much of it's luster in recent years, at least it has here in the United States. The salaries are way down and the cost of medical school, like most higher education in America, has never been higher. She'll be in debt up to her eyeballs before she ever sees her first patients and she will spend the better part of her career paying off that debt. Adding insult to injury, the health care business is not immune from cost pressures and foreign competition. Ever heard of medical tourism? Yeah that's a thing now in American healthcare because the prices here are so insane. Finally, even though the prices are high the money isn't going to the doctors or even the insurance companies but rather into the pockets of the drug companies and the hospital corporations. That $600 EpiPen is funding multi-million dollar paydays for drug company fatcats, not the employee doctors working for the hospital corps. You say that getting a C.S. degree is crazy, but going to medical school isn't exactly the pinnacle of wisdom anymore either.
Be glad you aren't in Australia where "trained" "doctors" are coming their droves from India due to very open immigration policies. And these "doctors" are extremely variable in ability. At least in C.S. usually someone's life is not at stake as there is in medicine.
"Melinda Gates was encouraged to use what is now a nearly 40-year-old computer and the best language that was available back then in 1980. Her kids have been exposed to much more modern stuff."
And seriously...why does this turn into a discussion over why "there's no beginner's programming language currently shipping with Macs"? The OP seems to have no opinion on what SHOULD be but certainly seems to think it's a shame that Melinda Gates doesn't do something about Apple's policies on programming languages.
Never mind that it's incredibly easy to install the dev tools needed to start working with Swift...or that many kids that I know have started experimenting with that, even going so far as to put apps on the App Store, which even generate a bit of revenue and expose them to the full end-to-end system of software development. It's not "included" as a "beginner's programming language," so let's call out Melinda Gates over it.
I know Microsoft isn't exactly considered saintly here at Slashdot, but seriously?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Just let basic die already. It's already comatose and on life support, please just resist any temptation to bring out the defibrillator. Kids today can type javascript straight into a browser and get useful results to impress their friends right away. The transition from there to a properly structured language isn't too hard. Or master javascript and parlay that into a summer job implementing automagic web pages.
The problem with basic is, it basically teaches negative programming skill.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If you weren't using computers and programming between 1976 and 1984, you probably can't intuitively grasp how things actually were,
Nobody was advertising computers on prime-time TV much, and they certainly weren't advertising big-budget games and online services targeted at the mass market. The kids buying (or pestering their parents into buying) those early "home" computers were the nerds who'd seen them in electronics magazines etc. and read the reviews (which, at the time, used half of their column-inches to discuss how good they were for programming). Sure, there were kids who couldn't have a home computer because their family couldn't afford one, or because the Commodore PET at the orphanage had been stolen to pay for drugs... but at the time there were many, many kids who could have had a computer, if they'd made it a priority, but didn't because they weren't remotely interested in computers and Facebook hadn't been invented yet.
I got one mainly because I'd been hooked on programmable calculators and wanted to take the next step. To afford it, I flogged virtually every half-decent, non-essential possession I had (not claiming too much hardship here - at least I had the stuff to sell - point is it didn't just magically appear after a hint to Mum & Dad). Oh, and as for that "BASIC programming book" it was missing from the set of photocopied manuals I got with my Superboard II so I had to suss it out from a couple of examples, a list of keywords and a couple of pages of "Illustrating BASIC" serialised in a magazine that I had a couple of copies of (I did eventually find a copy of Kenemy & Kurtz in the school library - god knows how it got there - and that was a brilliant book). When you wrote programs you saved them to cassette tape and crossed your fingers. "Editing" code mainly consisted of completely re-typing the line you wanted to change - maybe your system had some sort of kludgey "line editor" to help. Later on, you got to save up money for things like an assembler, decent text editor, FORTH, Pascal and eventually C - the latter two being complete non-starters unless you had a floppy drive (which, at the time, cost more than the rest of the computer).
In short, not many kids in the late 70s or early 80s stumbled into programming because they stumbled onto something called BASIC on this box that they'd been given to play games on (not that you'd get a 1980 personal computer purely on the strength of a game of "Star Trek", "Hunt The Wampus" or a Scott Adams text adventure). Later, maybe, when the first generation of kids had written some games for them to play, but not then.
I remember, circa 1981, "acquiring" a copy of a new game that had (for the time) a massive advertising campaign consisting of quarter page adverts in colour in a computing magazine... it was a huge inspiration on the grounds that, (a) it was pretty crap, and (b) if they were prepared to publish that crap, they might publish my crap. So I threw together my own crappy game in a weekend and, sure enough, a few weeks later I was published and slightly richer: Never got to join the ranks of those teenage computer game millionaires who learned to drive in Ferraris, but I did stretch to a 70cc scooter. There were plenty of opportunities for anybody who could do simple programming at the time, and even those of us who didn't join the lucky few who hit the jackpot could, with a bit of application, make useful money. Certainly, my first computer was the last time I had to rely on the Bank of Mum & Dad for stuff I wanted.
Fast forward to today: if you care to look that "basic-free" Mac actually comes with Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and bash scripting as standard. The browser has Javascript built-in. For a free download you can get XCode with C, C++, Objective C and Swift, along with a complete IDE - including the "Swift Playgrounds" that Apple have been working on specifically to provide an "instant gratification" tool f
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I think the problem is not so much that programming languages aren't available, it's that they're not easily accessible to a total newbie.
I cut my teeth on a C64 - You turned it on, you were in BASIC. The instruction manual (A fabled thing, rare in modern times) had a bunch of programs illustrating the basics (haha) of how it worked.
I typed a few in, got annoyed when it didn't work ("SYNTAX ERROR"), re-read it a few times, found typos, tried again, watched in amazement as stuff happened, tried modifying them to see what would happen ('PRINT "STEVE IS A PEA BRIAN!"'); Some changes worked, some didn't. I kept prodding it until it did.
At the moment when you turn on a computer, there is no programming environment - It is all arbitrary icons. You have to download and install them or break into the super secret Command Shell and figure out how to run them using Zen and The Force, and that is beyond the abilities of most newbie children, and most adults too.
Heck, I still regularly have trouble with adults who get confused between turning on the monitor and turning on the computer ("But why...?")
You can Power Shell right out of the box in Windows. .NET framework has a free IDE or you can text it, or at least did not long ago... Then there are literally dozens open source interpreters you can install and code on. So I'm not sure what she's lamenting. Perhaps motivation?
The problem I have with BASIC is that it is unstructured and teaches way too many bad habits.
VB.Net is nice in that it is quick to get started with and isn't super picky about upper/lower case but is structured and a decent place to start.
I'd like Python if it didn't blow up because you had 5 spaces instead of a tab.
I got my first TRS-80 Model I (Level II) back in 1980, when I was 13.
When you turned the computer on, it presented you with a prompt where you could just start entering BASIC.
Many of us would carefully enter BASIC code printed in the pages of 80 Micro magazine. You couldn't help but learn coding...
It's an object oriented dialect. It's a free download. It has tutorials and I believe a teacher/student guide. So if you want BASIC for macOS, there it is.
http://xojo.com/
More medical jobs are being sent overseas and automated as well. No industry is protected from either outsourcing or automation entirely.
Apple has released Swift Playgrounds for the iPad which is aimed at getting kids (ages 12 to 100) interested in programming and teaching them basic programming concepts in a fun way. Swift is one of the best modern programming languages. This is a nice effort by Apple. If you have an iPad, check it out.
Sun has the best openGL based gui. Then again, they drag the Framebuffer device and console shell along with them.
I learned a lot more about programming something useful from HyperCard than I did from BASIC on the Apple II.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
When I was a kid I was exposed to BASIC (I owned a ZX81 and a C64) at home and Pascal at school, but what really hooked me was what could I do with them that was mostly entertaining, and just minimally useful. With the Commodore, it was a hacking a couple of games typed from a magazine. With Pascal was generating relatively nice graphics with for-loops.
Programming is a tool, and it should be thought as such: teach them how to tackle a problem with an algorithmic approach, e.g., how we can enumerate all possible combinations of who-seats-next-to-who in the classroom, using some constraints (Joe wants to sit next to Eddy)... whatever.
Teach a lazy kid how to make a computer work for him, and you've created a programmer. [Insert Bill Gates' quote here]
You may want to avoid clearly obsolete-wrong patterns ("GOTO is Evil"), but other than that, any language is good. Eventually, they'll find their language of choice, but they would likely keep the basic set of skills that built back when they learned.
Apple Inc. does not build or design computers anymore.
They currently do sell legacy computer hardware, i[fill in the blank], but over the time since OS X 7 (Lion) they have been reducing the OS and hardware capabilities to be only a ppt viewers with MP3 audio playback.
As far as programming language support at Apple, Timmy Cook and none of the "Executives" including the guy who is "supposed" to know some "thing" about NeXTSTEP but is only a marketing guy with no skill or training, cannot program in ANY computer language and can't speak Chinese, Japanese, or any European country language and barely gets by at speaking American-English while attempting "conversations" with other people in the U.S.A.
"I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." -- Dijkstra
Funny, my son majored in Applied Physics, which required math up the wazoo. I gently urged him to take a programming course which he enjoyed and took a couple more courses. When it came time to find a job, the only thing he could find was programming jobs. Which has now turned into a career. But yeah, sure C.S. is a dead end. I guess you must be right.
Funny, I see all sorts of high paying jobs where H1Bs and offshoring are NEVER an option. To make either one work, you need well thought out and detailed requirements and time. You also need some cultural understanding to work within a "team". I see less and less of both as time goes on.
my daughter just hit college and I pushed her toward medicine. C.S. is a dead end.
C.S. is not a dead end. It's the foundation that can lead to Infosec and Incident Response (pen testing, digital forensics, handling data breach investigations and remediation, malware reversing, etc). Given the state of anyone and everyone getting hacked these days, with no indication that this will ever change, the employment future is bright for those of us in this field. These jobs are not typically off-shored (clients don't like their data, logs, etc, being shipped to different legal jurisdictions) and we are struggling to find enough qualified people to do this work.
That said, given the aging population, medicine and nursing are probably also highly employable fields.
Hey Melinda, if your children lack encouragement, guess whose fault that is? You are their mother, for god's sake. Stop trying to get everyone else to do your job for you. This message is applicable to all parents. Stop asking others to clean up your mess.
If you extend your logic out farther in time: The future of Apple is IOS. The best development for iOS for children is SWIFT Playground. Therefore, your question should have been "shouldn't school-aged children be given access to an iPad and SWIFT Playground." Yes. A thousand times, yes.
I noted the stoppage of shipping operating systems with basic back in the 80286 days. I asked one engineer from a vendor. (I was in computer sales and service way back then.) and was told they quit shipping with BASIC because you could modify the BIOS and erase copy protection from the OS using the PEEK and POKE commands in BASIC.
Back in those days I was enamored with ZBasic. ZBasic was a compiled basic as opposed to the interpretive compilation of vanilla basic. It was lovely to write one set of code and cross compile to run under very different operating systems such as TRSDOS, MS-DOS, C64, Atari, CP/M, or LS-DOS. The cross compiler for Unix was a bit buggy so I never went there. A friend of mine had a set of editor macros to make it compile for Linux.
Yes, chilluns, at one time people were encouraged to experiment with their systems rather than being threatened with lawsuits for modifying their purchased tech. I wonder if you would still get sued for "modding" if you put on the net how to turn an old PS/2 into a home automation server?
NRRPT/RCT
My son took an Introduction to Programming for Engineers class in his first semester, and that was it. He immediately switched to CS and never looked back.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I was born in the 70s. I was never encouraged to get into computers as a hobby or as a career path. It was an unusual choice of hobbies and set me apart from my peers. I am a man.
When I was younger, it was fun. When I was older, I was able to read job listings and salary ranges. There was no gender angle, pro or con.
Reconsider what you're pushing your daughter towards. Medicine is hell. (at least in America).
I'm an MD, married to an MD.
We're not going to push our child towards medicine. We've half-jokingly said we're actually gonna encourage her to be a plumber. Why would we inflict a possibly massive debt to complete her education, several years (3-7, depending on career path, plus several more if you do a fellowship) of over-work with fairly low pay (making it difficult to pay aforementioned debt, and likely leading to mounting interest from deferred payments), leading most likely to a rapid burn-out due to unending hours of high stress, constant fear of lawsuits, repeated battles to be paid by insurance companies (each of which has it's own special (and often changing) list of criteria they will use to "control costs"), mounting expenses to maintain medical records, constant worry about the continually-growing documentation requirements eventually biting you in the ass... Oh, and, you know, the usual stress of medicine such as angry patients, worried patients, angry relatives, worried relatives, and (again depending on your focus) dying patients.
Medicine (in America) is hell. I'm not saying go C.S; from what I read on /. and elsewhere, you're very right, but if you're gonna inflict medicine on her, make sure she goes into Dermatology or Pathology. At least with Derm she'll make bank and probably not get sued. At least with Path she'll probably not be harassed by patients or insurance companies.
But she'd probably be happier avoiding medicine and C.S. altogether.
Where is Melinda getting her stats I think that a girl growing up today would be many times more likely to become a CS major. I think this is just the timeless trope of a parent lamenting that their children are not following in their footsteps.
For Melinda's daughters a degree in CS would represent a downgrade financially and would not afford them any upward mobility in society. Her daughters would be more likely to learn CS if her mother and father weren't so over the top successful.
Why does it have to be a mac to learn on, could she not learn on a pc or do girls need a pretty mac before they'll sit down in front of it? I don't think that's true though.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
http://basic256.org/index_en
My daughter needed a simple lang and PLATFORM to program a science fair project. After much research I settled on http://basic256.org/index_en.
Has open text output windows and a graphics output window with a decent manual and examples.
She did very well at the State Science Fair last year, and now is programming a VERY SIMPLE global warming simulation.
She's on her way, if I tried to teach her python, which I dislike greatly. Whitespace? Seriously? She probably never would have finished.
Now on her college application she is listing the 4 trophies she walked away with from the state science fair. So please tell me how I did her a disservice.
C:\Users\bob>ver
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.3.261]
C:\Users\bob>wmp captain-america-civil-war-1080p.wmv
Please wait. Windows is now rebooting to install your free upgrade to windows 11
(2 hours later)
Error: Device "Realtek Audio Card" not found
(1 week later)
C:\Users\bob>ver
Microsoft Windows [Version 11.6.6.6]
C:\Users\bob>wmp captain-america-civil-war-1080p.wmv
Preparing file hash for "captain-america-civil-war-1080p.wmv". 0... 25 ... 50 ... 75 ... 100% done
Sending hash to partner vendors
Illegal copy detected. Sending your name and current location to anti-piracy@MPAA.org
This PC has been found to be in violation of the DCMA. Shutting down to preserve evidence. Prepare for lawsuits, f***er!
nowadays it's trivially easy to get BASIC (or most any other computer language) onto your computer
Eh? Back in the 80's elementary schools where I was often had computers that had two 2.5" floppy drives, no HDD, and booted directly to BASIC (actually BASIC mind, not QBasic etc) when no boot media was installed. It doesn't get much easier than that.