Trouble is, people are taught things but they don't actually learn. Instead they take what they are taught as "the truth" and never actually thing about what's going on. Rules of thumb become dogma.
This isn't just from newer schools who only teach job training courses for high level scripting languages, this effect also happened even when schools taught from the low level chip design all the way up through theory.
Yes, the code is goofy. They're in a very high level language. If they concatenate a million one byte strings one at a time, then there's one million strings that have been created. Ie, reallocate the memory constantly, keep the garbage collector busy, and so forth. Ie, the effort in trying to get the entire contents in memory being build up incrementally was slower than the actual I/O time. Ie, 4 minutes versus a fraction of a second. Meanwhile if they had just written one byte at a time to the file system then both Windows and Linux would happily buffer up that data and write it out much more optimally.
The actual report had other factors involved. Ie, it kept growing a string using a high level language like Java or Python. Thus the underlying runtime system would have to keep growing the string, freeing and reallocating memory, exacerbating garbage collection frequency, etc. Meanwhile the file system is happily buffering all the writes. My guess is that on a similar system using C that the smart programmer isn't going to see these effects, either by relying on the file system to do buffering or else use a fixed size buffer.
What's wrong is that it's unbalanced. You may not care, but I've worked in environments with more female coders and it's a nicer place to work. So what is the worst thing that can happen if people pay attention to this topic? (other than some Limbaugh-esque fears about female nazis taking over, the guy is a comedian and not someone to take seriously)
No one is asking whole populations to change. In particular, no one is asking self entitled while male programmers to stop programming, if that is indeed what they're so scared of that causes them to panic whenever the subject comes up.
But they are being discouraged earlier than that sometimes. The parent who says good girls don't do technical stuff. The peer pressure from other classmates. And so forth. Girls used to be interested in this stuff, now it's a lot rarer, there's got to be a deeper reason than a statistical anomaly.
The thermonuclear club is a lot smaller than the nuclear club. Most aren't worried about terrorists with thermonuclear weapons because terrorists with nuclear weapons are far more likely to occur and far more within their reach. Thermonuclear weapons are used as bargaining chips between a few major nations, these are nearly too expensive to produce by rogue states, certainly out of reach of even well funded terrorist groups. Hydrogen bombs serve much better as deterrents than as actual weapons, a normal nuclear weapon is more practical for use as a weapon for the rogue states or terrorists.
That's true, a lot of the information could be previously released by other while still being classified. There is a difference between someone independently collecting together the clues and facts from prior biographies and interviews, and someone who was actually inside the project with a classification level doing the same thing.
Some of the first public information about H-bomb, now considered "previously released" material, was from a book that the government also tried to have censored. Their failure to do so made the material more popular.
Free will is there of course. But free will is based upon past experiences as well, assuming that only free will is involved. However the balance has changed over time. Women used to be much better represented, today they're poorly represented. Of course some guys who are used to the status quo say "who gives a shit?" But the change in represention strongly indicates that there is some sociological effect going on here, it is not a matter of different genes or hormones.
Free will also is not the only effect here. Children are taught unequally as they grow up. Girls are encouraged not to do boy's type of play, boys are taught not to do girl's type of play. As they get older girls are told that some jobs are not for them, that they should be working to get good husbands. TV says to look pretty. It sounds archaic or from some depressed third world society, but it is indeed happening in subtle ways. So by the time it comes to pick out a career or major in college these days, the number of women choosing computing, mathematics, or engineering is small (and in my experience much smaller than it used to be).
Then there is bias. It absolutely exists. You may claim that you yourself have never shown any bias in any form, but that would be untrue. Everyone is biased. But even if you're more egalitarian than the average you're not everyone. There are going to be people who unconsciously downgrade a resume with a female name up top. Over time that bias multiplies.
Sure, if nursing has a problem, we should fix that too. But to say to do nothing at all until the entire world is equal is the same as saying do nothing. There is indeed an imbalance, it is getting worse over time, so claiming there is no problem is also naive or perhaps a political stance.
Men are not capable of giving birth. Women are highly capable at doing technical and engineering jobs. This is a real issue, not something made up for political correctness.
Except that when I was in school we had more women. I almost always had one woman or more on just about every programming team I was on for classes as an undergrad. They may not always have gone on to developing, some may have decided to do IT or management instead, but the proportion was relatively high compared to today. My first job doing systems admin we had more than half the staff as women at some times. So the common excuse I hear that women just aren't into computing and tech is just completely wrong.
I think the important point of the Bechdel test is that it shows how women are not the primary demographic movies are intended for. The Bechdel test isn't about pointing out disparities in movie casting or showing that sexism exists in the writer's room.
In real life outside the movies it is a very common situtation where two women can have a conversation which is not about men (good things or bad things). In the movies though this is rare. Yes there are many examples that do pass the Bechdel test but far far fewer than you'd expect if the movies were trying to reflect the real world. Compare this to other forms of media; novels do tend to represent women well, even stage plays do a reasonable job, however movies and television don't. The point of the Bechdel test is to make one stop and think, and it's a very simple test.
So in this sense, adapting the Bechdel test to things like job balance doesn't make as much sense. Programming has never pretended to mirror the real world of the average humans. There may be discrimination, bias, and so forth, but that's not what the Bechdel test is about.
The disparity is a problem we should look at and address. It's the whole point. The defenders of the status quo claim it's because maybe women just don't want those jobs; or they claim there's opportunity for any to apply for the jobs. That's part of the problem right there: the status quo. People who are in a decent position don't want change, the boat feels stable so don't start rocking it.
I think there's also the worry that if someone accepts that there might be a problem that it automatically assigns blame to them, or assigns blame to all males, etc. This is why I think so many become so offended that others might be offended.
This doesn't have to do with the code, it has to do with the teams not having a good mix of diversity. Now the unsocialized devs may think this is ok because it should only be about coding and nothing else whatsoever. But in practice we have half the population who are capable of programming but who are severely underrepresented, and not because they're genetically unsuitable or just don't like to program or do math. However a few decades ago women were more represetned, and a few decades before that was a very high proportion of women (in the early years operation of computers was seen as a low status job).
So it's not about the code, it's about the corporation and it's about society. What has changed over the decades to drive women away from computing or related engineering jobs? If we want a society that treats all parts of its demographics equally then this should be considered a problem, whether or not the "code" cares.
It's not about being offended, it's about being treated as a second class human being. Only a moron could look around today's society, even in modern first world countries, and think that all members are treated equally and given equal opportunities. It's heavily male dominated in most areas, and heavily white male dominated in most western countries. Sticking the head in the sand and claiming that the code doesn't care is naive.
If no one gives a shit about who writes functions, then why are women so underrepresented in computing? Do not say it because women don't like programming or engineering, because that's clearly false. Women had much more representation in the industry 30 years ago. It's been declining over the years while the frat boy attitude in the workplace has been going up.
If you're perfect, then great. But there are many men who are offended that women would even compete with them, many men who intimidate others especially women, many men who think telling a dirty joke is proper on-the-job conduct, many men who see discrimination but do nothing about it and thus reinforce the status quo.
I'm old enough to remember when people claimed there was no racism in the 70s either.
That's because there's never once been a white or east asian terrorist. Actual terrorists aren't going to be shaking like a leaf, they're going to blend in, they'll know the travel routine, no one's going to look at them twice. Some of these guys may be geniuses, like Kaczinski.
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But if Comcast doesn't service that area then Comcast calls it "nowhere".
This is patently false. Rush Limbaugh would never say that as he's previously said that we've already turned into the Soviet Union.
The Sierra Nevada bewery definitely needs to be a sponsor of the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser.
Trouble is, people are taught things but they don't actually learn. Instead they take what they are taught as "the truth" and never actually thing about what's going on. Rules of thumb become dogma.
This isn't just from newer schools who only teach job training courses for high level scripting languages, this effect also happened even when schools taught from the low level chip design all the way up through theory.
Yes, the code is goofy. They're in a very high level language. If they concatenate a million one byte strings one at a time, then there's one million strings that have been created. Ie, reallocate the memory constantly, keep the garbage collector busy, and so forth. Ie, the effort in trying to get the entire contents in memory being build up incrementally was slower than the actual I/O time. Ie, 4 minutes versus a fraction of a second. Meanwhile if they had just written one byte at a time to the file system then both Windows and Linux would happily buffer up that data and write it out much more optimally.
The actual report had other factors involved. Ie, it kept growing a string using a high level language like Java or Python. Thus the underlying runtime system would have to keep growing the string, freeing and reallocating memory, exacerbating garbage collection frequency, etc. Meanwhile the file system is happily buffering all the writes. My guess is that on a similar system using C that the smart programmer isn't going to see these effects, either by relying on the file system to do buffering or else use a fixed size buffer.
Yes, he had a Q level security clearance. He was a member of the project after all.
What's wrong is that it's unbalanced. You may not care, but I've worked in environments with more female coders and it's a nicer place to work. So what is the worst thing that can happen if people pay attention to this topic? (other than some Limbaugh-esque fears about female nazis taking over, the guy is a comedian and not someone to take seriously)
I never said it was due to sexism, just sociological reasons rather than biological ones.
No one is asking whole populations to change. In particular, no one is asking self entitled while male programmers to stop programming, if that is indeed what they're so scared of that causes them to panic whenever the subject comes up.
But they are being discouraged earlier than that sometimes. The parent who says good girls don't do technical stuff. The peer pressure from other classmates. And so forth. Girls used to be interested in this stuff, now it's a lot rarer, there's got to be a deeper reason than a statistical anomaly.
If you can pick one up with a clean and jerk, you're welcome to carry it. Except for you, Doctor Banner.
The thermonuclear club is a lot smaller than the nuclear club. Most aren't worried about terrorists with thermonuclear weapons because terrorists with nuclear weapons are far more likely to occur and far more within their reach. Thermonuclear weapons are used as bargaining chips between a few major nations, these are nearly too expensive to produce by rogue states, certainly out of reach of even well funded terrorist groups. Hydrogen bombs serve much better as deterrents than as actual weapons, a normal nuclear weapon is more practical for use as a weapon for the rogue states or terrorists.
War also never changes.
That's true, a lot of the information could be previously released by other while still being classified. There is a difference between someone independently collecting together the clues and facts from prior biographies and interviews, and someone who was actually inside the project with a classification level doing the same thing.
Some of the first public information about H-bomb, now considered "previously released" material, was from a book that the government also tried to have censored. Their failure to do so made the material more popular.
Free will is there of course. But free will is based upon past experiences as well, assuming that only free will is involved. However the balance has changed over time. Women used to be much better represented, today they're poorly represented. Of course some guys who are used to the status quo say "who gives a shit?" But the change in represention strongly indicates that there is some sociological effect going on here, it is not a matter of different genes or hormones.
Free will also is not the only effect here. Children are taught unequally as they grow up. Girls are encouraged not to do boy's type of play, boys are taught not to do girl's type of play. As they get older girls are told that some jobs are not for them, that they should be working to get good husbands. TV says to look pretty. It sounds archaic or from some depressed third world society, but it is indeed happening in subtle ways. So by the time it comes to pick out a career or major in college these days, the number of women choosing computing, mathematics, or engineering is small (and in my experience much smaller than it used to be).
Then there is bias. It absolutely exists. You may claim that you yourself have never shown any bias in any form, but that would be untrue. Everyone is biased. But even if you're more egalitarian than the average you're not everyone. There are going to be people who unconsciously downgrade a resume with a female name up top. Over time that bias multiplies.
Sure, if nursing has a problem, we should fix that too. But to say to do nothing at all until the entire world is equal is the same as saying do nothing. There is indeed an imbalance, it is getting worse over time, so claiming there is no problem is also naive or perhaps a political stance.
Men are not capable of giving birth. Women are highly capable at doing technical and engineering jobs. This is a real issue, not something made up for political correctness.
Except that when I was in school we had more women. I almost always had one woman or more on just about every programming team I was on for classes as an undergrad. They may not always have gone on to developing, some may have decided to do IT or management instead, but the proportion was relatively high compared to today. My first job doing systems admin we had more than half the staff as women at some times. So the common excuse I hear that women just aren't into computing and tech is just completely wrong.
No, not until we get rid of the anti-SJW trolls.
I think the important point of the Bechdel test is that it shows how women are not the primary demographic movies are intended for. The Bechdel test isn't about pointing out disparities in movie casting or showing that sexism exists in the writer's room.
In real life outside the movies it is a very common situtation where two women can have a conversation which is not about men (good things or bad things). In the movies though this is rare. Yes there are many examples that do pass the Bechdel test but far far fewer than you'd expect if the movies were trying to reflect the real world. Compare this to other forms of media; novels do tend to represent women well, even stage plays do a reasonable job, however movies and television don't. The point of the Bechdel test is to make one stop and think, and it's a very simple test.
So in this sense, adapting the Bechdel test to things like job balance doesn't make as much sense. Programming has never pretended to mirror the real world of the average humans. There may be discrimination, bias, and so forth, but that's not what the Bechdel test is about.
The disparity is a problem we should look at and address. It's the whole point. The defenders of the status quo claim it's because maybe women just don't want those jobs; or they claim there's opportunity for any to apply for the jobs. That's part of the problem right there: the status quo. People who are in a decent position don't want change, the boat feels stable so don't start rocking it.
I think there's also the worry that if someone accepts that there might be a problem that it automatically assigns blame to them, or assigns blame to all males, etc. This is why I think so many become so offended that others might be offended.
This doesn't have to do with the code, it has to do with the teams not having a good mix of diversity. Now the unsocialized devs may think this is ok because it should only be about coding and nothing else whatsoever. But in practice we have half the population who are capable of programming but who are severely underrepresented, and not because they're genetically unsuitable or just don't like to program or do math. However a few decades ago women were more represetned, and a few decades before that was a very high proportion of women (in the early years operation of computers was seen as a low status job).
So it's not about the code, it's about the corporation and it's about society. What has changed over the decades to drive women away from computing or related engineering jobs? If we want a society that treats all parts of its demographics equally then this should be considered a problem, whether or not the "code" cares.
It's not about being offended, it's about being treated as a second class human being. Only a moron could look around today's society, even in modern first world countries, and think that all members are treated equally and given equal opportunities. It's heavily male dominated in most areas, and heavily white male dominated in most western countries. Sticking the head in the sand and claiming that the code doesn't care is naive.
If no one gives a shit about who writes functions, then why are women so underrepresented in computing? Do not say it because women don't like programming or engineering, because that's clearly false. Women had much more representation in the industry 30 years ago. It's been declining over the years while the frat boy attitude in the workplace has been going up.
If you're perfect, then great. But there are many men who are offended that women would even compete with them, many men who intimidate others especially women, many men who think telling a dirty joke is proper on-the-job conduct, many men who see discrimination but do nothing about it and thus reinforce the status quo.
I'm old enough to remember when people claimed there was no racism in the 70s either.
Was that the motivation of Tim McVeigh? Didn't blow himself up but he's very high up in the terrorist with the most body count list.
That's because there's never once been a white or east asian terrorist. Actual terrorists aren't going to be shaking like a leaf, they're going to blend in, they'll know the travel routine, no one's going to look at them twice. Some of these guys may be geniuses, like Kaczinski.