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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?
Children need to learn FORTRAN early on - I want them to know the pain I grew up with.
#DeleteChrome
"Computers will soon be capable of programming themselves"
For some measure of "soon," right after we all have flying cars in our garages. Hey! We could put the two together and call it Skynet!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
A Mac is a Unix machine that you don't have to fight with to watch a movie on. They're excellent choices for someone to learn programming.
Oh fuck off. What's so hard about:
> git clone ssh://github,com/supermovieview/viewer.git ./configure ./configure
>
> make
> make install
> (permission denied)
> sudo make install
> supermovieview
> (usage supermovieview filename)
> supermovieview captain-america-civil-war-1080p.wmv
> (error, wmv not supported. Maybe install supermovieview-codecs?)
> git clone ssh://github,com/supermovieview/codecs.git
>
> make
> make install
> (permission denied - ffs)
> sudo make install
> supermovieview captain-america-civil-war-1080p.wmv
> (error, failed to open audio stream)
> sigh
> sigh: command not found
Ah, okay. You might have a point.