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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?
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.
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.
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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.