I taught myself how to program and I did it using QBASIC and the help menu included within QBASIC. (This was in '98, so I often programmed on a computer with no Internet access and cellphones with Internet were pretty rare, if they even existed in my country.) I think if I had tried anything else, I probably would have got bored and abandoned programming before even achieving anything. To simply make a program in Java requires writing code you won't understand for a while. And getting user input is daunting for a newbie. C/C++ is the same. And IDEs can be troublesome. Even JavaScript is still troublesome for a newbie to get user input and print to the screen, when writing from scratch.
QBASIC, on the other hand, was great. The IDE was small and easy to use and the language itself made simple tasks easy to accomplish; "print" followed by a string to print to the screen, and capturing input was 1 or 2 lines of code. Starting simple and working your way up I feel is a great way to keep someone's interest (especially very young people), especially when you don't have to write a dozen lines just to get your program to run or to achieve simple tasks. QBASIC is a bit outdated, but I'm sure there are good modern choices for writing and running basic.
Whenever I see a diversity figure of something like 30%, it's usually described along the lines of "not great". So what percentage would be "great"? At what point can we say the diversity is good enough? Or that it is a realistic reflection of the numbers of those actually interested in the industry for each group? Or are we trying to engineer some even split for some purpose? Because an exact 50/50 split sounds unrealistic to me.
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I taught myself how to program and I did it using QBASIC and the help menu included within QBASIC. (This was in '98, so I often programmed on a computer with no Internet access and cellphones with Internet were pretty rare, if they even existed in my country.) I think if I had tried anything else, I probably would have got bored and abandoned programming before even achieving anything. To simply make a program in Java requires writing code you won't understand for a while. And getting user input is daunting for a newbie. C/C++ is the same. And IDEs can be troublesome. Even JavaScript is still troublesome for a newbie to get user input and print to the screen, when writing from scratch. QBASIC, on the other hand, was great. The IDE was small and easy to use and the language itself made simple tasks easy to accomplish; "print" followed by a string to print to the screen, and capturing input was 1 or 2 lines of code. Starting simple and working your way up I feel is a great way to keep someone's interest (especially very young people), especially when you don't have to write a dozen lines just to get your program to run or to achieve simple tasks. QBASIC is a bit outdated, but I'm sure there are good modern choices for writing and running basic.
Whenever I see a diversity figure of something like 30%, it's usually described along the lines of "not great". So what percentage would be "great"? At what point can we say the diversity is good enough? Or that it is a realistic reflection of the numbers of those actually interested in the industry for each group? Or are we trying to engineer some even split for some purpose? Because an exact 50/50 split sounds unrealistic to me.