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?

Comments

So what?

[Locke2005]

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...

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a Huff Post article. Expect it to be mindless blather and you won't be disappointed.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Computers will soon be capable of programming themselves

LOL.

Re:So what?

[ceoyoyo]

Wow. I solve integral and differential equations in real life. The differential ones are especially useful when they're cost functions and you want your optimizer to run fast.

Is "ship with" really the big takeaway here?

[QuietLagoon]

The summary seems to make a very big deal of "ship with" as the reason that someone would look at computer science. I'd say that it is not up to the shiny new computer to lure an unsuspecting child into computer science. If the child wants to go into computer science, then the child will find the way.

.
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.

Computers DO SHIP with a programming language

[Guillermito]

There is a language called JavaScript that is perfectly suited for learning how to program. Much better suited than BASIC I'd say.

BASIC by any other name

[Zero__Kelvin]

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.

Re:BASIC by any other name

[msk]

B is for "Beginner's".

Re: Not Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Any platform is a pain if you try to do something in a way the designers didn't expect. Apple more so because they try to protect the user by forcing them to stay within very limited options.

Oh and Apple, you can keep CUPS. It is a lousy technology that hardly compensates the community for everything else you took to build X.

Re:Oh, please

[Pseudonym]

Oh, I don't know. I'd have chosen a beginner language that didn't get for loops wrong. 3 times. (range -> xrange -> range again).

When I was 20, I felt the same way about BASIC. Why the hell did we start with such a crapful brain-damaging language? And, of course, BASIC was never one language, either; every micro had its own incompatible implementation, and that's not even going into the incompatible hardware that you couldn't work around.

I'm older and wiser now. BASIC was a great start to the education of a whole generation of programmers. I think of three reasons:

First off, in the days of 8-bit micros, you could understand the whole computer, and in a sense you had to. Printing stuff on the screen was great, but as soon as you wanted to do anything nontrivial, you had to POKE around, which meant you needed to learn about chips and registers and so on.

Secondly, the act of typing in listings from books and magazines taught you a lot about the programs that good programmers gave you. Cut-and-paste just isn't the same, and "read these snippets then download the whole working program" is just wrong.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, when you made it to university or the software industry, you weren't using BASIC any more. Your first "real" programming language was your second programming language (third, if you managed to get an assembler for your micro), which forced you to unlearn all the bad habits which BASIC got you into.

So I wouldn't mind people using Python as a beginner language, if we all agreed, as a software industry, never to use Python in production. Not only would we all be more productive programmers and our software would be of far higher quality, it would give the kids of today the education they need. You can start today by referring to Python exclusively as a "beginner language" every chance you get.