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From the New York Times Magazine:
The Secret History of Women in Coding
Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?
By Clive Thompson
Feb. 13, 2019
The 1990 H-1B visa, obviously. Employers chose to employ foreign men over American women.
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That is the truthful answer alright, but ….. we need to find a different answer. We need a politically correct answer, not a truthful answer.
Previous discussions about this: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-decline-of-women-in-computing/
https://www.unz.com/isteve/npr-when-women-stopped-coding/
OT:
India Wants To Use Flesh Eating Turtles To Rid The Ganges Of Decomposing Bodies (HBO) [VICE News]
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance, natch.
This will give feminists fits – if they even notice. Do they continue to support the Kalergi Plan invasion/America Last, or tech jobs for women, and therefore, patriotic nationalism and protectionism?
Back when you had lots of female coders, wasn’t coding much simpler then? The 1960s I assume.
I think the greater attention to detail required by less interactive programming (e.g. punchcards vs. compiled code vs. interpreted code) and less capable debugging environments would be a bigger factor.
Today much of the coding in client server. You are serving up or receiving web pages, and some of these web pages are on your phone. There are protocol issues (are we running TLS1 or TLS2?, what level of SSL?, are we doing two stage authentication?, is the browser up to date?, etc.), database issues, and connectivity issues. This stuff is hard to debug.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
The same thing occurred in the electronics industry. Years ago I had business with defense-related electronics facilities in California where the shop floors were populated primarily by young (Asian) women. Same consideration: attention to detail with the ability to assemble extremely small electronic components with their delicate hands.
Can you believe this! I once worked for a defense company that had a shop exclusively "manned" by women, of all things, braiding cables linking electronic components.
Suspect that over the years robots have taken over a lot of these jobs where women excelled with special skills that men could not perform.Replies: @Anonymous
No no no. He means “what went wrong” among the things you’re allowed to say. Not to mention think.
This whole business will go much more smoothly if you play along and quit thinking Bad Thoughts.
Ouch!
Finally a topic I have experience with. At nearly thirty years experience in paid IT work, here’s the dirty little secret:
There ARE women developers in IT in the USA, they just happen to be Chinese or Indian. At least what I saw in my career in and around Chicago.
At a higher level, I presume one thing that grew the numbers of male developers vs. female developers is the move from plain English procedural style coding like COBOL used on mainframe computers to more abstract, object oriented code like C++, C#, JAVA (and JavaScript). That mirrors the move away from straight line, repetitive processing to more interactive, flexible applications. I started out with COBOL and found the change to the abstraction of OOP hard going until I got some experience under my belt. Starting out cold learning OOP I might have dropped out of Comp Sci.
Speaking of the H-1B, I was recently having a conversation with my boss’s boss the other day regarding the difficulty of finding good technical staff in our industry. Our industry being defense.
He immediately launched into a spiel about how, “Trump cut H-1Bs, we need more, we need to bring those people in,” etc.
Yes, folks, even in the defense industry magic visa/passport/dirt theory is an accepted fact by many.
I think this individual buys into it because he has an adopted daughter from China. Thus, he is universalizing his positive experience with her to all potential immigrants.
Wow, that article is clueless as can be. As are all the comments posted so far.
I don’t think that the main women featured in the article was typical. I think most women were programming accounting stuff in COBOL, not operating systems in assembly. Those COBOL jobs are gone because of spreadsheets at the low end and commercial applications on the medium-high end.
H1-B doesn’t fit the timeline, I don’t think. It’s more to blame for age discrimination against older white guys. Engineering managers don’t like staff who are older, and more experienced, than them.
When I was a computer science major in the early 80’s, somewhere between 30% – 40% of the students were women. The program was a mix of hardcore male nerds like me and more or less normal males and females. The normal students among us were rational careerists who viewed C.S. simply as a reasonably safe way to make a good living, sort of like accounting. I bet this distribution (nerd males plus normal males plus normal females) was pretty common in C.S. departments at the time. Obviously, the careerists’ concept of the field came under a double squeeze afterward from both the H1-B and large-scale outsourcing.
Now, several decades later, the demand for coders is booming enough that the careerists are coming back. I’m out of the field now, so I haven’t followed what this has meant for female representation.
In fairness, something else happened besides H-1B visas and outsourcing. The Apple II and TRS-80, introduced in 1977, exposed a lot of middle school and high school guys to programming. (Unlike today’s computers, these machines came out of the box with highly accessible programming capabilities.) So this cohort swelled the size of the male hardcore nerd group as the 80’s went on. Of course, Apple II and TRS-80 programming was also there for young female students, but on average, boys and girls tend to be interested in different things.
why does closing the gender gap always involve good things. Why doesn’t isn’t there a movement to close the gender gap in homeless deaths?
Gender balance among programmers in India is a lot “better” in India than it is in the US. Even within the US, the share of women among Indian visa workers is much higher than that of native-born American women.
Your thesis is wrong.
NYT has censored my comment that programmers in America are increasingly from India (now I need to see how long this comment stays in the awaiting censorship state here).
The author embeds hints in the article: the Swedish Paradox
“Well,if I don’t do programming, what else could I do?” If you are a Malasian or Indian woman (his examples) programming is an incredibly lucrative occupation, compared to other, female choices. Of course you will choose programming.
But as Sweden has discovered, if you provide other, traditionally female occupations that are just as lucrative as male occupations, women gravitate to them. And that is the Swedish Paradox: The more occupational choices you offer women, the more they gravitate to female jobs.
The flip side of this article (conspicuously omitted) is how many professions are now overwhelmingly female that once were male? Psych? Soc? And how many new “female” degrees have been created since 1950: Interior design, fashion merchandizing, etc.
Can’t start intersectionality wars! BadThink! BadThink, host!
It’s a vicious cycle. Import H1Bs to the U.S. to work in the tech sector who are desperately seeking bobs and vagene. The H1Bs, in their fervor for bobs and vegene, push women out of the tech sector, opening yet more positions for H1B workers. Now with fewer women, the H1Bs get even more frustrated and horny for send bobs and vegene.
There'd be a PhD thesis in there somewhere if they were importing Norwegian code coolies.
When you see stuff like this:
you know the article if fraudulent. I am surprised he didn’t tell us that Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler as well. Maybe he did. I stopped reading when I got to the bit above.
I suspect you were being sarcastic. If not, do you have any evidence that the upsurge in H1Bs occurred around the time women stopped being interested in programming? I recall being in college in the ’70s and there were very few women in programming classes even then.
Food for thought:
https://newtheory.com/2-21-of-indian-graduating-computer-programmers-can-write-correct-code/Replies: @HA
She was the wedlock daughter of Lord Byron and his wife Anne Milbanke
Oh dear no. That happened before 1970. dBy 1967, when I got into the business, it was in no way a woman-dominated business., at least where I was
Easily solved. Pass out wigs to foreign men and encourage them to be ‘women’.
The bobs and vagene cycle! LOL
There’d be a PhD thesis in there somewhere if they were importing Norwegian code coolies.
Code-coolies.
What do you tell people who have been pushed out of jobs as computer programers? Learn to Code?
-American soldier
-Coffee shop owner
-Uber driver
-SAT tutor
-Blogger
-Create and sell apps
-Day traderReplies: @anonymous
A self reinforcing process as well. We all know how well boiler rooms full of Pakistani code monkeys relate to the rather sensitive sensibilities of modern western women…
Moreover affluent women no longer works as in the 70s and 80s. If your husband is affluent, its lunch, soccer and yoga now. Seems rather quaint for the wealthy.
It’s not that simple. Computer programming has changed a lot from the era of punch cards and COBOL. Programming was originally thought to be a mundane job where they could redeploy the women “computers” (like the Hidden Figures black ladies who single handedly sent us to the moon) who used to punch numbers into adding machines, not a job for super smart geeks. It was assigned to women because it was a low prestige job like secretarial work. And in those days there was a dearth of professional jobs for mathematically minded women. The list of careers started and ended with high school math teacher.
The big break I think is when computers became accessible to kids – originally thru terminals in middle/high school computer labs and later with PCs. Certain boys naturally took to programming like fish to water in their little spergy way – hey I can stay up all night coding and write a game where the space aliens shoot at each other. Most girls had (and still have) absolutely no interest in coding on their own and would rather chat with their girlfriends than spend 10,000 hours coding for no earthly reward. By the time they graduated high school, the boys were so far ahead (boys who had been coding since age 10 vs. girls who had never written a single line of code) that their lead was insurmountable.
Meanwhile, bright Wellesley girls realized that they could get much less demanding jobs in the HR dept. or something anyway (and those jobs paid better than coding).
I once tried to convince a girl to learn to code. She went to dental school instead. It took her less than a day to decide she didn't like programming
Carnegie Mellon’s efforts were remarkably successful. Only a few years after these changes, the percentage of women entering its computer-science program boomed, rising to 42 percent from 7 percent; graduation rates for women rose to nearly match those of the men. The school vaulted over the national average. Other schools concerned about the low number of female students began using approaches similar to Fisher’s. In 2006, Harvey Mudd College tinkered with its Introduction to Computer Science course, creating a track specifically for novices, and rebranded it as Creative Problem Solving in Science and Engineering Using Computational Approaches — which, the institution’s president, Maria Klawe, told me, “is actually a better description of what you’re actually doing when you’re coding.” By 2018, 54 percent of Harvey Mudd’s graduates who majored in computer science were women.Replies: @snorlax, @Peripatetic Commenter
There are more quasi-technical, support roles than ever -- product managers, testers, data analysts, UX engineers, etc. These roles do not require far right tail abilities or an obsession with a linux terminal. For most of these roles, women are ideally suited due to higher conscientiousness and less attitude.
Unrelated, take a look at the photos of Apple's Leadership. https://www.apple.com/leadership/. It articulates the point well. H1B's -- 95% of which are worthless -- are coolie labor.
"Even getting the program into the IBM 704 was a laborious affair. There were no keyboards or screens; Wilkes had to write a program on paper and give it to a typist, who translated each command into holes on a punch card. She would carry boxes of commands to an “operator,” who then fed a stack of such cards into a reader. The computer executed the program and produced results, typed out on a printer."
Many of these ancillary menial jobs get lumped into the statistics of that era, which distorts the supposed gender ratio. But then...
"As one of the world’s first interactive personal computers, it would be a breakthrough device that could fit in a single office or lab. It would even have its own keyboard and screen, so it could be programmed more quickly, without awkward punch cards or printouts."
But then again a lot of modern "programming" jobs are probably little more than tweaking pixel padding in CSS.
As everyone on this board knows, I am a Democrat-voting liberal. I just sit on this board to anger conservatives. So I will tell you what happened. It was a close call, but the YKWs decided that it would hurt the white male more to bring in pajeets than support Project More Women in the Workforce Than Ever Before. That way the pajeets could take the white man’s job and fu&k his women. And create a browner America for his grandchildren. Win, win, WIN. I get tired of winning.
The gender imbalance created by H1-B visas could be offset by more H-4 visas for tech-savy wives.
From the New York Times Magazine article:
On a spring weekend in 2017, more than 700 coders and designers were given 24 hours to dream up and create a new product at a hackathon in New York hosted by TechCrunch, a news site devoted to technology and Silicon Valley. … Most of the contestants were coders who worked at local high-tech firms or computer-science students at nearby universities.
The winning team, though, was a trio of high school girls from New Jersey: Sowmya Patapati, Akshaya Dinesh and Amulya Balakrishnan. …
They all became interested in coding in high school, each of them with strong encouragement from immigrant parents. Balakrishnan’s parents worked in software and medicine; Dinesh’s parents came to the United States from India in 2000 and worked in information technology. Patapati immigrated from India as an infant with her young mother, who never went to college, and her father, an information-tech worker who was the first in his rural family to go to college.
https://youtu.be/P9yruQM1ggc
Her most noteworthy activity was closing down the freeway on behalf of the Gentle Giant Mike Brown. She’s done absolutely nothing for her district but wins much publicity for daily denouncing Trumpisn whatever that is.
I agree, a big part of this is the changing nature of the task. When I was starting compilers were slow. You would actually get up and go do something else while you waited. I love programming but the faster the compilers got, the more concentrated the task was on the enjoyable part. No way would I have had the patience for the punch card era.
I once tried to convince a girl to learn to code. She went to dental school instead. It took her less than a day to decide she didn’t like programming
Women think their is a little man inside the computer who fetches stuff for them:
Carnegie Mellon University and Harvey Mudd College addressed that problem by creating two tracks of classes, one for beginners and one for experienced coders.
Carnegie Mellon’s efforts were remarkably successful. Only a few years after these changes, the percentage of women entering its computer-science program boomed, rising to 42 percent from 7 percent; graduation rates for women rose to nearly match those of the men. The school vaulted over the national average. Other schools concerned about the low number of female students began using approaches similar to Fisher’s. In 2006, Harvey Mudd College tinkered with its Introduction to Computer Science course, creating a track specifically for novices, and rebranded it as Creative Problem Solving in Science and Engineering Using Computational Approaches — which, the institution’s president, Maria Klawe, told me, “is actually a better description of what you’re actually doing when you’re coding.” By 2018, 54 percent of Harvey Mudd’s graduates who majored in computer science were women.
Just employ a minority teacher who passes them all regardless of work and grades tests really easy.
Does wonders for minority graduation rates.
And how were the winners decided upon?
Even when I was at UCLA at the end of the punch card era most of the CS students where male.
The reason why there were probably initially so many women was because of all the relatively simple COBOL programs being written in the financial services industry. Those women were probably helping generate things like amortization tables for mortgages and annuities before they were trained to write those simple programs.
As computers became more powerful, they also required more knowledge than basic math. Operating systems, macro-assemblers, compliers, floating point packages were all programming that needed an engineering background. As things became more and more engineering oriented you had fewer and fewer women.
As for pay engineers and programmers made more than the HR women and got huge wage increases in the 80s, partly due to the Reagan’s defense push.
Off-topic: As widely predicted in the comments section here, but not widely recognized by the Democratic leadership, it turns out that the Diverse have no particular attachment to their stale pale elected incumbents.
If Ivy-educated elite African immigrants dethroning their fellow Democratic ethnics in order to throw the border wide open to all comers doesn’t end up producing true and complete social equality in this country, I don’t know what will.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/nyregion/ny-congress-primaries-2020.html
Women are outstanding at coding, but just not the type they are talking about here. Women talk in code and if you don’t learn it you will have a miserable life.
Carnegie Mellon’s efforts were remarkably successful. Only a few years after these changes, the percentage of women entering its computer-science program boomed, rising to 42 percent from 7 percent; graduation rates for women rose to nearly match those of the men. The school vaulted over the national average. Other schools concerned about the low number of female students began using approaches similar to Fisher’s. In 2006, Harvey Mudd College tinkered with its Introduction to Computer Science course, creating a track specifically for novices, and rebranded it as Creative Problem Solving in Science and Engineering Using Computational Approaches — which, the institution’s president, Maria Klawe, told me, “is actually a better description of what you’re actually doing when you’re coding.” By 2018, 54 percent of Harvey Mudd’s graduates who majored in computer science were women.Replies: @snorlax, @Peripatetic Commenter
So in other words dumbing down the curriculum. CS101 classes don’t suffer fools, but they don’t assume you’ve ever written a single line of code.
While many girls may like spending a lot of time talking to their friends, we should pay more attention to the outliers, since programming is an activity for outliers, not the general population.
I believe everyone here has been exposed to more than one "little miss know-it-all" in grammar school and high school. They don’t have many, if any girlfriends, they don’t think of boys much in the romantic sense, because they know they have little chance in anything happening, and don’t like being frustrated or embarrassed. They will nod to you in class so you know your answer is right in a surprise written math quiz. They are self-contained little shits who enjoy being right.
Girl Nerds.
These girls are potential programmer fodder. If you look for 'em, you'll find 'em right under your nose. "Selling" the idea to them in a way that they'll "get it," probably isn’t a waste of time.Replies: @Peripatetic Commenter
If you look at percent of CS majors who are female, the number maxed out in the 80s.
This may explain the higher echelons of the tech industry, but for the bulk of tech jobs, your description does not apply.
There are more quasi-technical, support roles than ever — product managers, testers, data analysts, UX engineers, etc. These roles do not require far right tail abilities or an obsession with a linux terminal. For most of these roles, women are ideally suited due to higher conscientiousness and less attitude.
Unrelated, take a look at the photos of Apple’s Leadership. https://www.apple.com/leadership/. It articulates the point well. H1B’s — 95% of which are worthless — are coolie labor.
Yes, this is what is wrong with immigration. Not what you say. What is wrong with immigration is that it puts natives out of work, lowers wages (even in the coding industry), and, I know you’ll probably cheer this, and so you should then be for immigration–prevents any sort of unionization.
People need to understand The Way. The Way of the World is like this: If someone has something of great value, OTHERS will try to take it or partake of it. That is the problem of greatness. It is a double-edged sword. Your stuff comes to be admired by the world but also acquired by the world.
If you something of low value, it may not be much, but then, you need not worry about others taking it from you. Who robs a house to steal a piece of brass or clump of iron?
If you have something of great value, it's great to have it, but then, everyone else wants it too. This is why anyone who finds gold better be very quiet about it or make legal claim backed up by guns to keep the gold for himself. Otherwise, there's gonna be a gold rush.
Because white nations are the best in the world, Mass-Immigration-Invasions are essentially the White Rush. "Let's all rush to white nations and grab the white gold."
Jews understood this because they experienced it. They created the most powerful and profound concept of God(at least accessible to most people, as Hinduism may be more profound but is exceedingly confusing and complex). With every passing year, the pagan gods seemed sillier(just superhumans with lots of flaws) whereas the Jewish God seemed infinitely mysterious and meaningful. So, naturally, there was the real danger of goyim trying to take this God for themselves. And so, Jews came up with the Covenant, a spiritual-legal contract between God and Jews. Jews told goyim, "Yeah sure, our God is the one and only God of all, but He has a special contract with us, so you guys stay away." Now, that's good thinking. But then, a bunch of renegade Jews managed to smuggle the concept and reformulate it for universal acquisition. Jews must still be pissed because Google never runs Easter doodles.
Jews also mastered the law because they amassed great fortunes. The Way of the World is for have-nots to grab stuff from the haves. It's been that since time immemorial. So, Jews needed the power of law to back up their claims. (But then, Jews also mastered the law to justify their taking of stuff from other peoples, such as land from Palestinians.)
Now, Anglos found the bestest land in the world. It's hard to think of better land than North America. Western Europe is nice but small. Russia is vast but much of it is either too cold, too dry, or desolate. China is huge but relatively lacking in natural resources for such a huge chunk of land. South America is vast but hot and jungly. Africa is huge but hotter. Australia is huge but mostly useless. North America has prime land for agriculture and has tons of resources of all kinds. It has great natural beauty. It has everything.
On top of that, it was settled by the most advanced and talented people of the time with good genetics and sound culture. And these early Anglos and Northern Europeans knew what they had. It was like Eden come true. Take over the territory and populate it with their own kind, and it'd be the greatest power. And the prophecy came true. It wasn't long before the US became the most powerful nation(and Canada became essentially US-lite, the 51st state).
This is why the Founders were race-ists. They understood the US needed a racial contract between whites and the land. Otherwise, others would try to come to the US and take the great stuff from whites. Why? Because people flock to greatness and want it to take it or partake of it.
Jews have a great eye, having worked as pawnbrokers and jewelers forever. They know how to assess value, and they never saw anything like America. Great land, great resources, and managed by talented Northern Europeans. So, how could they take over? First, by flattering the white goyim. Assure the Anglo elites that Jews and immigrants are oh-so-very-grateful to assimilate into Anglo-America. Put forth the notion of the Melting Pot, the idea that immigrants would simply and happily melt into existing America and become good Americans.... except that when more and more ingredients are added to the pot, it goes from the new ingredients melting into the old to the old elements losing to the new, or from new people assimilating to White America to White America assimilating to the World. The US now looks like hapless Uncle Sam surrounded by a gang of gypsies pickpocketing him from every angle.
If you have something of low value, you need not worry too much about keeping it. I don't think the Congo has to worry too much about being inundated with mass immigration fro Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and other parts of Africa. But if you have something of high value, you better have a powerful contract or covenant with the possession on legal, political, and emotional grounds because OTHERS will try to take it from you. If you don't stake it, others will take it.
Israel and Sweden are nice nations. So, black Africans head to both. Israelis knows black Africans are coming to take from them, so they build walls and invoke the special covenant between themselves and the land. In contrast, dumb Swedes listened to weasels like Barbara Specters and pulled out the stakes holding down their national tent. Without stakes, Swedish tent is blowing in the wind. Nice places come under heavy pressure of migratory winds. This is why nice civilizations always built walls to keep out the barbarians.
Just like a house will fall apart if all the nails are pulled out, a nation(esp a nice nation) cannot hold together without a contract/covenant that nails down ownership to a people based on race, culture, and history.
It would be great if someone who programmed back in the old days, before compilers, told us about what it was like. From a technical point of view, that is: what was the activity of programming like? what kinds of demands did it make on your ability to solve problems, and your capacity to handle detail?
I suspect that in the very early days, “programming” meant flipping toggles to just load someone else’s instructions. Though I’m not so sure…
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
You had to be familiar with all aspects of the 8080 microprocesor including the start sequence and and interrupt processing.
You started by putting your program on what looked like that yellow square graph paper. You wrote the asembly language opcodes in line by line. When you were done, you went to the book to get the hexidecimal opcodes to put next to the assembler version. You had to hand calculate the distances of the jumps.
The system had the ability to set an address in memory. You had to place your code with repect to the 8080 start sequence. You entered your program in hex byte by byte. If you needed to put code in another place you had to reset the address pointer. Probably the very first computers did use something similar but with toggle switches.
When you were done you hit the start button. If you didn't see what you thought would happen, you likely are in an endless loop. If it halted you got a led indicating that.
It took a lot of work just to be able to write a program to generate a simple tone on the speaker. You also learned quite a bit. When were were creating groups, I didn't know anybody and got stuck with two women. Every time I asked them what should we do they looked at me with blank faces. I ended up doing all the work. Because I asked questions of the TA all the time, he thought I was the dummy and gave them higher grades than me. It wasn't worth trying to get the grade changed, it was only a lab.
We consistently did worse that the other groups who had 3 guys who knew what they were doing. But you do learn quite a few things that are subtle. When we did our tone program our sound had a noticeable discontinuity that nobody else had. It was because I used a nested loop so every time the lower 8 bits rolled over, the tone was broken. I realized that the other teams must have done the math to convert the two 8 bit registers into a 16 bit loop counter. This is the kind of stuff you don't get when using a complier.
Obviously someone programmed the programs and the operator just punches in the appropriate verb/noun combo to run the pre-programmed routine.Replies: @Autochthon
From flipping switches to typing (punching cards).The former could get lenghty and complicated; for later, PLENTY of details. In essence, when toggling, you work with digital electronics. Can't get more "detailed" than that.Not...... quite, especially the later.
O.K.
If....IF...you really want to understand how all that REALLY work(ed), I strongly suggest taking a good look at any homebrew computer project.
Try this, for example:
http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
Good luck!Replies: @Anonymous
H1B is good for the country.
Whites in Trailer parks cannot code.
They are lazy, indigent and stupid.
Many H1B guys marry or date White girls(I am one of them) and more and more white girls are now open to date Non White men and bear children of color.
The real war is being won by Immigration and Miscegenation and the White Supremacists can do nothing about this.
We Asians will rule the world.
End of White race is near and am not at all sad.
Even Mr. SAILER admitted that Hapas will be the future elite of America.
Refute me if you can.
OT
Reading Eric Kaufmann’s new book Whiteshift, he traces the self-loathing of white elites back way before the post modernists and leftist critical studies guys, to at least the beginning of the 19th century, but it seems that some key ideas percolated up in the early 20th century. Here’s something about a guy I never heard of, Randolph Bourne:
Bourne’s 1916 article is here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1916/07/trans-national-america/304838/
He suffered from birth defects and died at 32.
My aunt-in-law was just such a woman- “systems analyst” in the pre-Internet economy SF Bay area. While a smart lady, and certainly way more distinguished than a secretary, hers was decidedly different work than the math and computer science PhD-heavy environment of today.
Let me also give you some inside dope from the heart of today’s Silicon Valley based on my own professional contacts- women don’t like this type of work! I know dozens of women from top Silicon Valley firms, most of them of those far Eastern backgrounds providing the bulk of Silicon Valley’s distaff STEM staff, and while they can hack it OK as coders in their 20’s, almost all hate-hate-hate this type of work by their 30’s and transition to more paper-pushy roles at the same companies. These are not bogus Diversity Inc.-type HR racket jobs- more like ‘compliance’ type work of checking status, filing reports, etc.- the sort of detail-oriented task planning women are known for. Useful and fully honorable work, but let’s not pretend it’s ‘tip of the spear’ type innovation which these companies depend on.
I've worked in HR for 4 different software companies, been heavily involved in college recruiting, hiring, retention, aptitude testing of candidates, hack-a-thons, code challenges - you name it.
That occasional strong American female programmer who can hold her own with anyone in app development does exist but does NOT want to continue doing that for very long - they usually stay in software but move into Project Management, Consulting, QA Management or the type of middle management 6-figure $$+ paying roles that are still lightly technical but don't require your nose to be in the keyboard for all 8 hours of your day, pushing out code in hands-on fashion.
Of course, H-1B Indian females are an exception, they still on the technical side for much longer but still have less stomach for it over time in comparison to Indian males.Replies: @nebulafox, @Anon
Nonsense. Programming was done at math departments and EE departments before computer science departments were created. Initially programming was very mathematical. If you did not know math you did not program. Now however many programmers including the good ones do not know math at all.
We iz Kang-arooz.
https://twitter.com/AupolNews/status/1095808584473104384
The answer is The Patriarchy. Toxic Masculinity. Bro Culture.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that woman would have gone into coding before 1970 are now going into law and medicine, two fields which are now majority female. As well as other fields where women were rare.
This is not the fact you’re seeing. You may go about your business. Move along.
I suspect that in the very early days, "programming" meant flipping toggles to just load someone else's instructions. Though I'm not so sure...Replies: @Tom Crispin, @MarkinLA, @istevefan, @peterAUS
Old style programming: The Story of Mel
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
I have been looking forward to this for a long time. I can’t wait until the NYTimes reading stale pale liberals wake up to the fact that the people they imported against the wishes of Americans have no interest in them, have no interest in whatever interests them, have no interest in their snarky tv shows, no interest in Coen Brothers movies, and especially no interest in their stale pale leadership. When voodoo and Santeria animal sacrifices are conducted in the US (and they will be) PETA just might wake up to the fact that only Trump could have saved their pets. Of course the way things are going, we will have human sacrifices before long.
COBOL was female-friendly,a nice procedural language that comported well with the narrative-oriented female mind. But languages have become more abstract, non-procedural, more function-based. Females – generally! – just don’t think this way or enjoy abstractions.
I don’t know if client-server architecture requires this type of programming (vs the batch report oriented mainframe systems), or if these new languages (C, Java, Python etc) just happened to get developed by the same geeks who pioneered UNIX and that’s why they became the standard.
I suspect that in the very early days, "programming" meant flipping toggles to just load someone else's instructions. Though I'm not so sure...Replies: @Tom Crispin, @MarkinLA, @istevefan, @peterAUS
Back in the late 70s Intel made a simple computer board for teaching that allowed you to enter simple programs. It was based on the 8080 microprocessor. It had a hexadecimal keypad and a few outputs like a simple LED character display and a speaker attached to last bit of a designated register.
You had to be familiar with all aspects of the 8080 microprocesor including the start sequence and and interrupt processing.
You started by putting your program on what looked like that yellow square graph paper. You wrote the asembly language opcodes in line by line. When you were done, you went to the book to get the hexidecimal opcodes to put next to the assembler version. You had to hand calculate the distances of the jumps.
The system had the ability to set an address in memory. You had to place your code with repect to the 8080 start sequence. You entered your program in hex byte by byte. If you needed to put code in another place you had to reset the address pointer. Probably the very first computers did use something similar but with toggle switches.
When you were done you hit the start button. If you didn’t see what you thought would happen, you likely are in an endless loop. If it halted you got a led indicating that.
It took a lot of work just to be able to write a program to generate a simple tone on the speaker. You also learned quite a bit. When were were creating groups, I didn’t know anybody and got stuck with two women. Every time I asked them what should we do they looked at me with blank faces. I ended up doing all the work. Because I asked questions of the TA all the time, he thought I was the dummy and gave them higher grades than me. It wasn’t worth trying to get the grade changed, it was only a lab.
We consistently did worse that the other groups who had 3 guys who knew what they were doing. But you do learn quite a few things that are subtle. When we did our tone program our sound had a noticeable discontinuity that nobody else had. It was because I used a nested loop so every time the lower 8 bits rolled over, the tone was broken. I realized that the other teams must have done the math to convert the two 8 bit registers into a 16 bit loop counter. This is the kind of stuff you don’t get when using a complier.
George HW Bush and the US Congress passed a law in 1990 to attack and undercut American STEM workers by flooding the USA with foreigners on work visas. The 1990 immigration law pushed by George HW Bush and the US Congress was designed to lower wages for American workers and it was designed to destroy cultural cohesion in the USA.
Treasonous globalizer rat George HW Bush was eager to attack American workers by flooding the USA with foreigners. The H-1B visa was one of the methods and weapons that dirtbag rat George HW Bush used to viciously attack and undercut American workers.
Trump has now joined with the dead globalizer scumbag, George HW Bush, in his attacks on American STEM workers by calling for massive increases in guest worker foreigners and visa worker foreigners and other scams to attack American workers.
http://immigration-weaver.blogspot.com/p/a-legislative-history-of-h-1b-and-other.html
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_NSF_SG_Complete_INET.pdf
Outcourcing to India took off after 1995.
So… Here’s the plan…
1. Culturally encourage White women to have as their goal, instead of having White babies and raising a secure coherent family, to become Tuff, Fierce Grrrls Who Can Coding.
2. Have them go heavily into debt to learn Fierce Mad Coding Skillz.
3. Once they’re out of school and staggering under debt, give all the coding jobs to foreign H1-B pajeets instead.
Voila! White women are broke, debt-saddled and unmarriageable, White fertility is further whittled down, and America is even further buried under an even thicker layer of Mud.
It’s perfect! In fact it’s so (((perfect))), it’s almost as if (((Somebody))) schemed the whole thing up at the last Council meeting…
Sexist
Having grown up in the 80s, this rings true. Knew lots of nerds, both male and female, but only male ones showed any interest in programming at all. Probably 50 percent of the male nerds coded as a “hobby”, 0 percent of the female ones did at a middle class school district. Even the male ones who didn’t code regularly, had more than a passing interest in computers, never heard a female nerd ever bring up computers in a conversation once. The girls might have taken programming classes, but they never did it at home for fun.
So even working from home, part-time, with a woman who is a total science and computer geek, the model broke down.
Maybe she'll get back into it in 10 years or maybe not. But I say, let people choose their majors and careers and job based on their own inclinations, and if that means only 5% of coders are female, so what?Replies: @peterike
I don’t know if client-server architecture requires this type of programming (vs the batch report oriented mainframe systems), or if these new languages (C, Java, Python etc) just happened to get developed by the same geeks who pioneered UNIX and that’s why they became the standard.Replies: @International Jew
C is not “new”. It’s been around for 47 years now, and it appeared only 13 years after COBOL.
Moreover, all the other languages you mentioned are procedural (and in any case I think the word you were looking for was imperative, but they all are that too).
What distinguished COBOL was nothing like that anyway. It was rather the (misguided) replacement of “math-like” syntax like a+b with chatty expressions like to a add b. This was done with the idea that nonprogrammers (“suits”) would more readily understand computer code.
Moving on along, it’s clear you have no idea what client-server systems are (the term you were reaching for was probably interactive). And Python’s inventor was a child when Unix began.
Your comment as a whole is packed misunderstandings in a way that’s remarkable even in the company of fellow unz.com readers.
BTW, 13 years is an eternity in the computer industry, particularly in the early days when Moore's Law was running 4-8x faster than it is today, and the fundamental building blocks of software engineering were still being created.
And C is actually even older; it was a modestly updated version of B from 1969 and created by the same guys.No; unlike C, Java and Python, COBOL only supported procedural programming. It had no concept of functions that returned a value, or took parameters by value (copy). In C terms, instead of being able to write this
int add(int a, int b) {return a + b;}
you had to write everything like this
void add(int *result, int *a, int *b) {*result = *a + *b;}Batch processing, i.e. a human inputs some data and the program spits out a result, can be reasoned about entirely in procedural terms. A client-server design, where two different programs (possibly running on separate computers) communicate with each other, makes no sense without functions—the programs are separate and can't read each other's data, so they need functions that pass copies of their data from one to the other.He was an adult when Unix was commercialized and a significant contributor to it; he wrote the first version of the popular glob(3) function in the POSIX C library.Replies: @Anonymous
Or it could be that, because women are different, if the task is framed in a different way so that they can internalize its meaning, when they otherwise might not, women can do as well as men, and even in a different way that would accelerate the progression of programming.
While many girls may like spending a lot of time talking to their friends, we should pay more attention to the outliers, since programming is an activity for outliers, not the general population.
I believe everyone here has been exposed to more than one “little miss know-it-all” in grammar school and high school. They don’t have many, if any girlfriends, they don’t think of boys much in the romantic sense, because they know they have little chance in anything happening, and don’t like being frustrated or embarrassed. They will nod to you in class so you know your answer is right in a surprise written math quiz. They are self-contained little shits who enjoy being right.
Girl Nerds.
These girls are potential programmer fodder. If you look for ’em, you’ll find ’em right under your nose. “Selling” the idea to them in a way that they’ll “get it,” probably isn’t a waste of time.
While many girls may like spending a lot of time talking to their friends, we should pay more attention to the outliers, since programming is an activity for outliers, not the general population. Statistically, there are more outliers among males than females. And the ratios are large at 3 SDs.
Also, in my experience, East Asian females are better programmers than white females.
I have a niece who made a nice income coding at home. She always had work, and could do it on her own schedule. Guess what? When baby number 2 came along she discovered that her husband’s income was quite sufficient, thank you, and that she would rather be a full time mother. Then baby 3 showed up.
So even working from home, part-time, with a woman who is a total science and computer geek, the model broke down.
Maybe she’ll get back into it in 10 years or maybe not. But I say, let people choose their majors and careers and job based on their own inclinations, and if that means only 5% of coders are female, so what?
I found this article rather maddening and could not finish it.
I graduated high school in 1974 and we had a computer programming class. Basic. All the students were male. It was not a rich school. When I got to college every single student in my mathematics and chemistry and physics classes showed up computer literate. In my (limited, sample size N=1) experience the author has an error in the reasoning from the git go.
Early in the industry computer work was considered drudgery. When smart people chose to do computers instead of trying to get into one of the traditional prestige professions like medicine or law it was all over for the women.
I know a lot of housewives married to programmers who studied computers and other technical subjects when they were college students.
Our Assembly language class programmed on a simulator of Knuth's Mixall machine run on the 360. The only actual computer we got to touch was the Intel 8080 teaching system in a lab.
By 1982, thanks to DARPA money, everybody had access to terminals that were connected to VAX machines where you could store and execute your programs interactively.Replies: @simple_pseudonymic_handle
I was in Berkeley. If in science and engineering the other students thought you were a vulcan. You were right there when the whole thing was exploding at time zero!
Soon there won't be anybody left who knows what a punch card or a slide rule is. Like really really soon. Some people remember their prom or their big game. My big day was when IBM showed my class around their facility for an entire morning. I can still see those big tape drives zig zagging and hear the the printers clacking. Big iron.
https://d2r9nfiii89r0l.cloudfront.net/dimg/800x600/dimg/us__en_us__ibm100__system_360__woman_at_360__800x593.jpgReplies: @peterAUS, @peterAUS
I used to hire fire and supervise programmers . Lots of them in lots of places. I had lots of different kinds of people who worked in my section. I even had two black programmers – not many people can say that. But I never had a single female coder.
I am speaking here of my private industry computing history. Before that I had a long public administration computing history where almost all my employees were women. I had ascended in local government because I was the guy who knew computers. This was the seventies. I had begun with an Altair but soon moved to a Commodore PET. I finagled a PET from the budget by claiming it was a statistical calculator like an HP. But it allowed me once I learned BASIC to write useful programs like a word processor or a spreadsheet. My home grown software was pathetic compared to subsequent commercial products but if you are the only person anywhere who has a computer and a word processor it’s different. You are the Magic Man.
So I got recruited to bring automation to the Welfare Department. They had a big unit with about a hundred women who prepared case papers to be tabulated by the departmental main frame every night. So I had a large staff of civil servants who were nominally data analysts but none of them could program anything. My major effort was to lighten ship. I removed – not exactly fired – about two thirds of them. By this time personal computers were being available. My women wanted them but only to use as word processors. I had to create a new position to hire someone who actually knew anything at all about PCs. The guy I hired was of course a guy. No women applied.
A year or so later I quit government and hired myself out as a software consultant. I went to a Russian outfit in San Francisco. Everything was exactly the opposite. Everyone was a male and everyone thought of themselves as a programming genius. At this company they had allowed almost everyone to make up a private Access based database. The result of which was that no one knew anything. Too many data base experts is worse than none.
I became the manager of the programmers – all men. I went through a number of Internet startups and interviewed a lot of coders and would be coders. In those days of the Internet boom there were people of every kind and type except for women.
When I was young I had read that women were well suited for coding. And maybe that was true at one time in the heyday of COBOL. COBOL was created by a woman (Grace Hopper) and it was composed to be as much as possible like English. This was in contrast to the other early language FORTRAN (formula translator). FORTRAN was algebra like. Girls don’t like algebra.
FORTRAN led to BASIC and BASIC led to the web scripting languages like VBScript that fueled a lot of the early web craze. Women were excluded from all the fun.
Conduct this experiment at home. Capture some young females and make them do algebra. Their kinfolk will come for you with torches and pitchforks.
The US actually has a greater percentage of women programmers than Western European countries except for Italy do. Western Europe generally hasn’t had programmer immigration like the US has had. Eastern Europe and Asia have the highest percentage of women programmers. Their economies have less developed service sectors with the sort of frivolous service and administrative jobs that women gravitate to.
https://www.cio.com/article/3305761/careers-staffing/where-in-the-world-are-the-women-software-developers.html
Treasonous globalizer rat George HW Bush was eager to attack American workers by flooding the USA with foreigners. The H-1B visa was one of the methods and weapons that dirtbag rat George HW Bush used to viciously attack and undercut American workers.
Trump has now joined with the dead globalizer scumbag, George HW Bush, in his attacks on American STEM workers by calling for massive increases in guest worker foreigners and visa worker foreigners and other scams to attack American workers.http://immigration-weaver.blogspot.com/p/a-legislative-history-of-h-1b-and-other.htmlReplies: @MarkinLA, @Undocumented Shopper
The push started under Reagan with phony NSF studies predicting a tech worker shortage.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_NSF_SG_Complete_INET.pdf
I suspect that in the very early days, "programming" meant flipping toggles to just load someone else's instructions. Though I'm not so sure...Replies: @Tom Crispin, @MarkinLA, @istevefan, @peterAUS
Here is an online simulator for the Apollo guidance system computer. You can actually punch in programs using their verb/noun entry system.
Obviously someone programmed the programs and the operator just punches in the appropriate verb/noun combo to run the pre-programmed routine.
This crucial point is too often hand-waved. A lot of self-described people who are "good with computers" or even "[Web, database, etc.] designers or administrators" are adroit with using software like Office, FileMaker, Dreamweaver, Wordpress, etc.
That's s skill, sure; but it's not programming.
If you aren't working from the terminal or IDLE, etc. you're not a programmer.
Mocking up wireframes or refining specificationa is similarly bologna ("I'm an idea man!" "Yeah? I have an idea: let's built a starship and travel te galaxy. What's that? How? How do i know – I'm an idea man!").
A related problem is lack if granularity precisely because so many people are ignorant about computers. Even people who've never swung a hammer or turned a screw in their lives seem to understand "construction" isn't a useful description of work except in very general terms: helpers running back and forth with tools or holding a pipe in place are not at all comparable to master plumbers, carpenters, masons, electricians, etc.; who themselves in turn usually have no foggy idea how to operate heavy equipment, and even the average expert controlling the backhoe has no business operating a crane for a high-rise project. And on and on.
People don't know "coding."
They know langauges and platforms: Python, Ruby, Swift, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, AngularJS, Django, Flask, Selenium, Spring, etc.
They don't (for practical purposes) know about "databases or even SQL: They know PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.
Knowing the foundations underlying databases and concepts like variables, sets, integers, text, etc. makes mastering specific things easier, and knowing one language or system absolutely makes it easier to learn another, especially if its forked from the same original system, as it were.
But plenty of goons with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and SQL would have you compare them to full-stack developers expert with six languages, five frameworks, every popular flavour of database imaginable. It's silly. It's like comparing your aousin who did four years in the infantry to a grizzled, decorated gunnery sergeant, or your brother who can beat everyone in town at hoops to Kobe Bryant.
There's a huge dearth of meaningful distinctions and details of just what is being referred to in all this rhetoric about "programming jobs" or "the computing sector" and it really makes most of the commentary meaningless for lack of context.
The bare metal guy and the gal who's a wizard with Word, and every one in between, cannot meaningfully be discussed as "programmers" or even "computer experts."
And by the way, I have blown the minds of brilliant electrical engineers – guys who design integrated circuits – by doing slick things with software. So these skills are not a nested hierarchy, but rather overlapping circles on a Venn diagram. You don't want the dude at Synopsys or Cadence perfecting software for testing and validating chips
to start designing your commercial Websites, nor vice-versa, and often the back-end guys are best left tweaking APIs and databases while some dude with eons of success designing interfaces (maybe even one with a background in industrial or graphic design, collaborating with the programmers) refines the front end.
TD, I consider any reply from you to be validation for me. Thank you.
A lot of early female programmers in 70’s/80’s were simply “grabbed” by companies like AT&T or IBM and trained since they were already employed there. That worked to create some early women coders.
And code was much simpler and more direct then – you built one self-contained system to run on one single platform. Today code is created with maximum abstract flexibility and must be compatible with a whole host of other systems, services, data inputs/outputs, API’s, etc. – and it’s built with future change in mind.
Nowadays you are expected to have a CS degree or tangible code samples or working apps just to get an interview – and women don’t want the drudgery of going through CS classes and staring at columns upon columns of code just to find that one bracket symbol or stray pipe character that is out of place and causing your code to malfunction when run.
So even working from home, part-time, with a woman who is a total science and computer geek, the model broke down.
Maybe she'll get back into it in 10 years or maybe not. But I say, let people choose their majors and careers and job based on their own inclinations, and if that means only 5% of coders are female, so what?Replies: @peterike
That’s hate-speech, bro. In the UK you’d probably see the inside of a cell for tweeting that.
Treasonous globalizer rat George HW Bush was eager to attack American workers by flooding the USA with foreigners. The H-1B visa was one of the methods and weapons that dirtbag rat George HW Bush used to viciously attack and undercut American workers.
Trump has now joined with the dead globalizer scumbag, George HW Bush, in his attacks on American STEM workers by calling for massive increases in guest worker foreigners and visa worker foreigners and other scams to attack American workers.http://immigration-weaver.blogspot.com/p/a-legislative-history-of-h-1b-and-other.htmlReplies: @MarkinLA, @Undocumented Shopper
Partly true. In the early 1990’s the annual limit was 65,000 and H-1B visas were issued mostly to foreign graduates of US universities and to employees of multinational corporations (think of an employee of Goldman Sachs moving from the London office to the New York one.)
Outcourcing to India took off after 1995.
I suspect that in the very early days, "programming" meant flipping toggles to just load someone else's instructions. Though I'm not so sure...Replies: @Tom Crispin, @MarkinLA, @istevefan, @peterAUS
Slow.
Depended on a hardware.
From flipping switches to typing (punching cards).
The former could get lenghty and complicated; for later, PLENTY of details. In essence, when toggling, you work with digital electronics. Can’t get more “detailed” than that.
Not…… quite, especially the later.
O.K.
If….IF…you really want to understand how all that REALLY work(ed), I strongly suggest taking a good look at any homebrew computer project.
Try this, for example:
http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
Good luck!
You could also get an Apple II real or emulated) and do some 6502 assembler.
At the other end of things, there are mainframe and minicomputer emulators running on 64 bit Intel hardware, everything from CDC Cybers and Burroughs B series, the VAX and its VMS operating system, to the IBM 370 and its earlier operating systems, to the geek favorite of all time the Symbolics Lisp Machine.
So for those with the urge, the tools are there. You just have to get off your ass and do it.Replies: @peterAUS
OT: Trump admin looking at eliminating feds’ use of disparate impact.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/02/14/trump_looks_to_end_numbers-only_bias_theory_governing_american_life.html
Getting rid of it would be a giant win for our society, reducing the chances of the US becoming an ethnic Thunderdome.
This is an interesting angle on the Kavanaugh choice:And the comments are even supportive of the article. Did this come from some kind of alternate reality? What is RealClear Investigations?
You’re exactly right.
I’ve worked in HR for 4 different software companies, been heavily involved in college recruiting, hiring, retention, aptitude testing of candidates, hack-a-thons, code challenges – you name it.
That occasional strong American female programmer who can hold her own with anyone in app development does exist but does NOT want to continue doing that for very long – they usually stay in software but move into Project Management, Consulting, QA Management or the type of middle management 6-figure $$+ paying roles that are still lightly technical but don’t require your nose to be in the keyboard for all 8 hours of your day, pushing out code in hands-on fashion.
Of course, H-1B Indian females are an exception, they still on the technical side for much longer but still have less stomach for it over time in comparison to Indian males.
I am reminded of the elusive black corporats attorney. Blacks go to law school snd then end up in some side profession rarher than as a partner in a firm.
I encountered that divide in the perception of computer programming. It would have been 1975 that the elementary school had someone from the school district come out to test nine-year-old me to figure out how smart I was and what they ought to do about it. After administering an IQ test, he asked me what I would like to be when I grow up. I said I would like to be a computer programmer. He said I had the intelligence to do something a lot better than that, somewhat as if I had said I wanted to work in a lab cleaning test tubes. I lived in a less-well-off working class neighborhood, and was nine years old with little idea of workplace labor, so I had no idea what he meant. Computers were the most brainy idea around, so making them work must be a job for really smart people, I thought. This other perception of programming as a mundane record-keeping activity was enlightening.
https://twitter.com/porter14159/status/1095880203061080065
"Get me infosys stat! I need a room full of H1 goons here by noon Friday or were toast. I gotta an update to push "
I know Ive said this before but … it’s clear as day to me that early computer programming was more inclusive of women because it hadn’t been clearly separated from other stereotypically feminine jobs involving typing words on a machine. Computer programming was women’s work because typing was women’s work. So, what these feminists seem to want is a return to the times when women did all of the most menial jobs that people didn’t see or think much of, while men got all of the jobs wielding power.
visa workers are not really the reason, but yeah that didn’t help.
work in physics, astronomy, and computer science, are things a few women actually can do, at a reasonable level of capability, mainly because they happen in a clean, air conditioned office. as soon as you step out of that environment, their presence drops to about zero.
the main reason there are few women now is that as compute science stuff got progressively harder and more complicated as the decades went on, less women could do it, or wanted to do it. they can do run of the mill IT jobs for sure, but almost none of the harder jobs, and definitely none of the serious lead programming jobs. you have to be spergy to even do some of those harder IT jobs and no women are like that. webmaster, DBA, sure. IT technician, maybe (though i’ve never seen a woman who opens computers and fixes hardware). very standard software development programming for business software that has been programmed a million times, occasionally. once you get into the network stuff, nah. and none of the serious programming.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/02/14/trump_looks_to_end_numbers-only_bias_theory_governing_american_life.htmlReplies: @Anonymous, @res
Conservatives should have been fighting to roll back disparate impact for the last 40 years. Instead, they fought for tax cuts, abortion and Israel.
Getting rid of it would be a giant win for our society, reducing the chances of the US becoming an ethnic Thunderdome.
"Well,if I don't do programming, what else could I do?" If you are a Malasian or Indian woman (his examples) programming is an incredibly lucrative occupation, compared to other, female choices. Of course you will choose programming.
But as Sweden has discovered, if you provide other, traditionally female occupations that are just as lucrative as male occupations, women gravitate to them. And that is the Swedish Paradox: The more occupational choices you offer women, the more they gravitate to female jobs.
The flip side of this article (conspicuously omitted) is how many professions are now overwhelmingly female that once were male? Psych? Soc? And how many new "female" degrees have been created since 1950: Interior design, fashion merchandizing, etc.Replies: @Marty, @mmack
Law.
What went wrong?
Other than another recitation of the Lovelace myth, not much.
Oh, come on. This is the best you can do? You’re ‘The Duck’, don’t you take any pride in your trolling? This is not, ‘duck’ quality or quantity. We expect a certain level of incompetence and incoherence from our duck.
There’s a hidden amnesty in the Senate “compromise.” Any “sponsor” of an illegal allien minor, or anyone in the same household, cannot be deported.
So every single illegal central american household with a minor gets amnesty. And the few that don’t already have one: call up the relatives and get a kid up here asap!
lol. Maybe you are confusing keypunch operators with programmers.
So every single illegal central american household with a minor gets amnesty. And the few that don't already have one: call up the relatives and get a kid up here asap!Replies: @Lot
The bill is 1100 pages long. Nobody has read all of it. How many other hidden amnesties are in it?
In the old days, like the 1970’s, programmers came from 20 somethings sitting on a couch in their parent’s basement watching TV. Seeing all the Control Data Institute commercials aimed at these unemployed couch potatoes gave them a sense of purpose in life. I work in computer programming and there are just as many women in the IT department (over 300 people in the department) of my company as men. I think that lack of female programmers is a myth. BTW, the plum jobs in programming went overseas years ago. That is why Russian and Chinese hackers can infiltrate the databases of large companies so easily, they are the ones who programmed them!
Early in the industry computer work was considered drudgery. When smart people chose to do computers instead of trying to get into one of the traditional prestige professions like medicine or law it was all over for the women.
I know a lot of housewives married to programmers who studied computers and other technical subjects when they were college students.Replies: @MarkinLA, @simple_pseudonymic_handle
I graduated in 74 and we didn’t have a programming class. Even at UCLA, the Campus Computing Center, as far as the students were concerned, the computer (IBM 360/91 a supercomputer of the day) was a hole in the wall where the printouts came from and a card reader. There was a video terminal that told you where your job was in the queue.
Our Assembly language class programmed on a simulator of Knuth’s Mixall machine run on the 360. The only actual computer we got to touch was the Intel 8080 teaching system in a lab.
By 1982, thanks to DARPA money, everybody had access to terminals that were connected to VAX machines where you could store and execute your programs interactively.
It is here: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-answer-is/#comment-3044965
(On my browser that link lands 1/2 screen too high. It's the one that looks like simple_pseudonymic_handle is replying to simple_pseudonymic_handle with the picture of the big IBM computer room with the woman in there.)
Though I was an electrical engineering major, my co-op job in college for two semesters was programming demonstration military sonar displays in FORTRAN, forty hours a week for a major aerospace company. I was the lone female out of maybe four other co-op engineering students who were also assigned to programming the displays. I don’t think any of us were CS majors but I could be wrong. I found it mind-numbingly boring and was so annoyed with the assignment I didn’t even apply to that company for a job after graduation.
The first programming language I learned was BASIC, way back in high school in the early 80s, and my college required a programming course in APL for all freshman engineers as one of the weedout courses. I used to ask the CS majors for help when I got stuck since their minds tend to work differently than engineers but once you get the hang of a new language it’s fairly easy. I like the discipline of programming – it forces you to be ruthlessly logical – and believe most everyone could benefit from taking a programming course but I definitely enjoyed the variety of tasks I worked on as an electrical engineer much much more than programming. If I was younger, I think cyber security would be an interesting field to go into but overall I still think it’d be pretty dry stuff and I’d still prefer engineering actual things.
Whites in Trailer parks cannot code.
They are lazy, indigent and stupid.Many H1B guys marry or date White girls(I am one of them) and more and more white girls are now open to date Non White men and bear children of color.The real war is being won by Immigration and Miscegenation and the White Supremacists can do nothing about this.
We Asians will rule the world.
End of White race is near and am not at all sad.
Even Mr. SAILER admitted that Hapas will be the future elite of America.Refute me if you can.Replies: @fish, @epochehusserl, @Anon1, @nebulafox, @J.Ross, @Chris Renner
Worst sock puppet ever Tiny…..that tells you something right there.
Also, freedom tends to increase such discrepancies as often as it lessens them.
Let’s hear it for unicausal explanations!
I find that hard to judge. The algorithms involved were arguably simpler, but there is much more established knowledge now so much of the complexity can simply be looked up or hidden in libraries. Also, the excess of compute power and memory available now permits much inefficiency which was not practical years ago. I would be interested in other opinions on this.
I think the greater attention to detail required by less interactive programming (e.g. punchcards vs. compiled code vs. interpreted code) and less capable debugging environments would be a bigger factor.
I don’t know if this is accurate, but I have noticed that many computing pioneers did not major in computer science but fields like electrical engineering or physics. This was back when hardware was underpowered so you didn’t have fancy programming languages and the prestige job was building the machines. Programming was probably a simple skill you were expected to have, not something you would specialize in.
Good one Joe. And I think your reaction to TDs response is exactly right. You should feel privileged that TD responded. Very few of xir comments are responses to others. Though that seems to have been changing lately. Perhaps someone else has taken over the account.
Quite the opposite in fact. Those programmers had to worry about lots of low-level issues that are now handled automatically by sophisticated compilers and interpreters. Also, no internet to search for help and examples.
Its like these execs who come on business news at a, “women and blacks in tech” conference with a full write up from diversity and legal to regurgitate and then head back to the office in the afternoon and get on the phone:
“Get me infosys stat! I need a room full of H1 goons here by noon Friday or were toast. I gotta an update to push ”
Carnegie Mellon’s efforts were remarkably successful. Only a few years after these changes, the percentage of women entering its computer-science program boomed, rising to 42 percent from 7 percent; graduation rates for women rose to nearly match those of the men. The school vaulted over the national average. Other schools concerned about the low number of female students began using approaches similar to Fisher’s. In 2006, Harvey Mudd College tinkered with its Introduction to Computer Science course, creating a track specifically for novices, and rebranded it as Creative Problem Solving in Science and Engineering Using Computational Approaches — which, the institution’s president, Maria Klawe, told me, “is actually a better description of what you’re actually doing when you’re coding.” By 2018, 54 percent of Harvey Mudd’s graduates who majored in computer science were women.Replies: @snorlax, @Peripatetic Commenter
A local high school has figured out how to improve graduation rates among minorities.
Just employ a minority teacher who passes them all regardless of work and grades tests really easy.
Does wonders for minority graduation rates.
Yes, this is what is wrong with immigration. Not what you say. What is wrong with immigration is that it puts natives out of work, lowers wages (even in the coding industry),
People need to understand The Way. The Way of the World is like this: If someone has something of great value, OTHERS will try to take it or partake of it. That is the problem of greatness. It is a double-edged sword. Your stuff comes to be admired by the world but also acquired by the world.
If you something of low value, it may not be much, but then, you need not worry about others taking it from you. Who robs a house to steal a piece of brass or clump of iron?
If you have something of great value, it’s great to have it, but then, everyone else wants it too. This is why anyone who finds gold better be very quiet about it or make legal claim backed up by guns to keep the gold for himself. Otherwise, there’s gonna be a gold rush.
Because white nations are the best in the world, Mass-Immigration-Invasions are essentially the White Rush. “Let’s all rush to white nations and grab the white gold.”
Jews understood this because they experienced it. They created the most powerful and profound concept of God(at least accessible to most people, as Hinduism may be more profound but is exceedingly confusing and complex). With every passing year, the pagan gods seemed sillier(just superhumans with lots of flaws) whereas the Jewish God seemed infinitely mysterious and meaningful. So, naturally, there was the real danger of goyim trying to take this God for themselves. And so, Jews came up with the Covenant, a spiritual-legal contract between God and Jews. Jews told goyim, “Yeah sure, our God is the one and only God of all, but He has a special contract with us, so you guys stay away.” Now, that’s good thinking. But then, a bunch of renegade Jews managed to smuggle the concept and reformulate it for universal acquisition. Jews must still be pissed because Google never runs Easter doodles.
Jews also mastered the law because they amassed great fortunes. The Way of the World is for have-nots to grab stuff from the haves. It’s been that since time immemorial. So, Jews needed the power of law to back up their claims. (But then, Jews also mastered the law to justify their taking of stuff from other peoples, such as land from Palestinians.)
Now, Anglos found the bestest land in the world. It’s hard to think of better land than North America. Western Europe is nice but small. Russia is vast but much of it is either too cold, too dry, or desolate. China is huge but relatively lacking in natural resources for such a huge chunk of land. South America is vast but hot and jungly. Africa is huge but hotter. Australia is huge but mostly useless. North America has prime land for agriculture and has tons of resources of all kinds. It has great natural beauty. It has everything.
On top of that, it was settled by the most advanced and talented people of the time with good genetics and sound culture. And these early Anglos and Northern Europeans knew what they had. It was like Eden come true. Take over the territory and populate it with their own kind, and it’d be the greatest power. And the prophecy came true. It wasn’t long before the US became the most powerful nation(and Canada became essentially US-lite, the 51st state).
This is why the Founders were race-ists. They understood the US needed a racial contract between whites and the land. Otherwise, others would try to come to the US and take the great stuff from whites. Why? Because people flock to greatness and want it to take it or partake of it.
Jews have a great eye, having worked as pawnbrokers and jewelers forever. They know how to assess value, and they never saw anything like America. Great land, great resources, and managed by talented Northern Europeans. So, how could they take over? First, by flattering the white goyim. Assure the Anglo elites that Jews and immigrants are oh-so-very-grateful to assimilate into Anglo-America. Put forth the notion of the Melting Pot, the idea that immigrants would simply and happily melt into existing America and become good Americans…. except that when more and more ingredients are added to the pot, it goes from the new ingredients melting into the old to the old elements losing to the new, or from new people assimilating to White America to White America assimilating to the World. The US now looks like hapless Uncle Sam surrounded by a gang of gypsies pickpocketing him from every angle.
If you have something of low value, you need not worry too much about keeping it. I don’t think the Congo has to worry too much about being inundated with mass immigration fro Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and other parts of Africa. But if you have something of high value, you better have a powerful contract or covenant with the possession on legal, political, and emotional grounds because OTHERS will try to take it from you. If you don’t stake it, others will take it.
Israel and Sweden are nice nations. So, black Africans head to both. Israelis knows black Africans are coming to take from them, so they build walls and invoke the special covenant between themselves and the land. In contrast, dumb Swedes listened to weasels like Barbara Specters and pulled out the stakes holding down their national tent. Without stakes, Swedish tent is blowing in the wind. Nice places come under heavy pressure of migratory winds. This is why nice civilizations always built walls to keep out the barbarians.
Just like a house will fall apart if all the nails are pulled out, a nation(esp a nice nation) cannot hold together without a contract/covenant that nails down ownership to a people based on race, culture, and history.
He immediately launched into a spiel about how, "Trump cut H-1Bs, we need more, we need to bring those people in," etc.
Yes, folks, even in the defense industry magic visa/passport/dirt theory is an accepted fact by many.
I think this individual buys into it because he has an adopted daughter from China. Thus, he is universalizing his positive experience with her to all potential immigrants.Replies: @snorlax, @J.Ross, @Clyde, @The Alarmist
We have Chinese H-1Bs working in defense?!
but what do those indian and chinese women do in IT? jobs that american women should be doing instead. and that’s it. it’s all a scam. no indian or chinese woman ever did a single important thing in computer science. this is simply another front in the great replacement.
over 20 years of experience with indians here. they’re nearly useless, a couple guys here and there are worth anything, over 90% of them are nothing but great replacement coolies, and inferior ones at that. worse, they bring in all their third world scams and schemes. it’s rarely just straightforward libertarian style ‘you need a worker, i am a worker’ stuff.
and the worst, maybe half the indians are clear cut outside agent foreign nationals who are against america, and work against the US when put into positions of authority or power. indians really don’t like you. that’s the surprise for most people who see these polite, innocuous, brown skinned background people who are anodyne and seem harmless. they’re not. they’re working to take your country away from you, like most outside groups.
indians aren’t openly hostile to your face. but they hate you. don’t get it mistaken. all you need to do is witness these extranational tech industry executives in action. extreme overt hostility to historic america. even the CEO of pepsi now. branching out into other industries.
The problem is the number and quality of Indians that have been let into the country post-1995. Earlier, you needed to be strong academically, snag an assistantship to come here. All those quality filters went out the window when Mr. Gates and his colleagues figured out a way to import cheap code coolies.
The overwhelming majority of Indians in Silicon Valley, men and women, do trivial work. Not the turbo geniuses the tech lobby would have you believe.
America didn’t need a single Indian or Chinese ‘genius’ to put man on the moon.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/02/14/trump_looks_to_end_numbers-only_bias_theory_governing_american_life.htmlReplies: @Anonymous, @res
That could be important. And the article having a quote from Amy Wax helps make it on topic in iSteve.
This is an interesting angle on the Kavanaugh choice:
And the comments are even supportive of the article. Did this come from some kind of alternate reality? What is RealClear Investigations?
Even trained male programmers vary wildly in productivity. Some can write only fifty or so lines a day. Others write hundreds of lines. And with GitHub and the amount of code recycling, it can be hard for bosses to assess output. Which is how so many bad H1B programmers hide in well paying jobs. I suspect at least half of H1B programmers could be shed without harm to the bottom line.
Food for thought:
https://newtheory.com/2-21-of-indian-graduating-computer-programmers-can-write-correct-code/
I'd be wary of trying to measure productivity by way of "lines a day". That "fifty or so" guy may well turn out to be a far more productive programmer, as long as he comments his code appropriately.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Anon
And who were the other contestants?
While many girls may like spending a lot of time talking to their friends, we should pay more attention to the outliers, since programming is an activity for outliers, not the general population.
I believe everyone here has been exposed to more than one "little miss know-it-all" in grammar school and high school. They don’t have many, if any girlfriends, they don’t think of boys much in the romantic sense, because they know they have little chance in anything happening, and don’t like being frustrated or embarrassed. They will nod to you in class so you know your answer is right in a surprise written math quiz. They are self-contained little shits who enjoy being right.
Girl Nerds.
These girls are potential programmer fodder. If you look for 'em, you'll find 'em right under your nose. "Selling" the idea to them in a way that they'll "get it," probably isn’t a waste of time.Replies: @Peripatetic Commenter
Dream on.
While many girls may like spending a lot of time talking to their friends, we should pay more attention to the outliers, since programming is an activity for outliers, not the general population.
Statistically, there are more outliers among males than females. And the ratios are large at 3 SDs.
Also, in my experience, East Asian females are better programmers than white females.
For us who are closer to the North Pole than to the Equator…
The answer is:
https://dms.licdn.com/playback/C4D05AQGbw03MQPN0dw/cf3430b9f0394d0aa289bf931ece3e84/feedshare-mp4_3300-captions-thumbnails/1507940147251-drlcss?e=1550221200&v=beta&t=jiWL_HjD_5xxsVP390w96cjOMTbCtJVupX0rA5rkZE8
He immediately launched into a spiel about how, "Trump cut H-1Bs, we need more, we need to bring those people in," etc.
Yes, folks, even in the defense industry magic visa/passport/dirt theory is an accepted fact by many.
I think this individual buys into it because he has an adopted daughter from China. Thus, he is universalizing his positive experience with her to all potential immigrants.Replies: @snorlax, @J.Ross, @Clyde, @The Alarmist
I think it was under Clinton that Raytheon located a cruise missile component factory in the PRC, which recognizes no right to secrecy and makes you divulge all your designs and processes as a condition of using their workers.
The answer is:
https://dms.licdn.com/playback/C4D05AQGbw03MQPN0dw/cf3430b9f0394d0aa289bf931ece3e84/feedshare-mp4_3300-captions-thumbnails/1507940147251-drlcss?e=1550221200&v=beta&t=jiWL_HjD_5xxsVP390w96cjOMTbCtJVupX0rA5rkZE8Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Does it matter? They get all their tools from Harbor Freight anyway. Even after multiple markups, it’s still cheaper.
Typists. The analogy was with office typing – low status work. When computers came along, entering data into them was also seen as “women’s work”. This attitude changed, permanently, in the 1970s.
Its not about the nail.
Father, if you are a real priest I can set you up with a “date” with Tiny Duck.
India Wants To Use Flesh Eating Turtles To Rid The Ganges Of Decomposing Bodies (HBO) [VICE News]Replies: @J.Ross, @anonymous, @Alden
India is the Florida of the world.
“I find that hard to judge.”
for the 1960s business environment, giant room filling computers, and punching stuff in COBOL, yes, average programming was much simpler. what about programming an atari 2600 game in 1980? extremely difficult. most good programmers today could not do it. the guy who programmed the atari version of donkey kong spent weeks just deleting 1 or 2 characters per day from his code, so the game would fit into RAM. none of the other developers working with atari could even program donkey kong on the 2600. they were baffled this guy was able to do it.
as pointed out, extreme advances in CPU cycles and RAM capacity means that absolute hacks can program stuff today, with massive slop left in the code that the power of the computer just absorbs. this is what lead to the inception of bloatware.
you would think most software like a kernel would be getting increasingly better over time. smaller, more efficient, faster, more and more bulletproof. down towards some lower limit, where it just can’t get any better, like a glock handgun – barely improved in almost 40 years despite a dozen companies all trying to beat it. now every company just makes their own version of the glock.
instead, most stuff gets bigger, stupider, slower, clunkier. this is due to hack programmers, who don’t have to worry about maximum efficiency.
although, we could run out of room now with that stuff, since moore’s law has clearly ended. there will be no sloppy way to make a realistic human female sex simulator program in 2025 if you assume you’ll have 3nm 10 GHz 64 core CPU with 16 terabytes of RAM, so each polygon of her boob can be a sloppy 100 GB VRAM file that the computer dynamically renders, et cetera. computers with that kind of capability are not on the horizon in 2045 let alone 2025.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1916/07/trans-national-america/304838/
He suffered from birth defects and died at 32.Replies: @ATBOTL
The sickness of affluent WASPs was already quite bad even by the time Kallen and Bourne came on the scene. Look up Felix Adler and his Society For Ethical Culture. This was an even earlier Jewish lead cultural marxist style movement that influenced a lot of elite WASPs, especially wealthy Puritan descendants.
As with so many things, the real reasons are complicated despite everyone’s attempts to oversimplify. It’s a combination of:
– Programming becoming an elite and highly-competitive profession, the type of environment where men always outperform women.
– The job itself changing from highly repetitive low-level tasks to projects requiring high degrees of planning and abstraction.
– Gender studies and similar fields sucking up all the marginally-talented white women in academia.
– Progressive bellyaching over “sexism” in the industry; an undeserved image problem that turned off a lot of women.
– Professional freedom – there are simply more careers available to women today and when given the choice, they prefer people-oriented work.
– The eventual dilution of former high status by H1s and soylibs, with most women realizing that the work won’t put them around the kind of men they want to be around (which is 95% of the reason women want to “work” in the first place).
Whites in Trailer parks cannot code.
They are lazy, indigent and stupid.Many H1B guys marry or date White girls(I am one of them) and more and more white girls are now open to date Non White men and bear children of color.The real war is being won by Immigration and Miscegenation and the White Supremacists can do nothing about this.
We Asians will rule the world.
End of White race is near and am not at all sad.
Even Mr. SAILER admitted that Hapas will be the future elite of America.Refute me if you can.Replies: @fish, @epochehusserl, @Anon1, @nebulafox, @J.Ross, @Chris Renner
It won’t be good for the country because non-whites have no respect for limited government, private property or freedom of speech. If we have better javascript programming but lose freedom of speech it won’t be a better country.
He immediately launched into a spiel about how, "Trump cut H-1Bs, we need more, we need to bring those people in," etc.
Yes, folks, even in the defense industry magic visa/passport/dirt theory is an accepted fact by many.
I think this individual buys into it because he has an adopted daughter from China. Thus, he is universalizing his positive experience with her to all potential immigrants.Replies: @snorlax, @J.Ross, @Clyde, @The Alarmist
You are working the defense industry. You import in Chinese and Hindu H1Bs so are vulnerable to Chinese technology theft. More likely explanation is that your boss of bosses does not give a shit because he sees none of his peers giving a shit. This is awful short term thinking but they don’t care.
Sad how reading comprehension levels on this site are in decline.
Steve, someday you will fully understand why we hate the Bush family so much.
The 1990 H1B visa. Started seeing Mexicans everywhere in Tennessee in 1990, started a useless war in 1990 after baiting Hussein to take Kuwait, Breyer on the Supreme Court……..all the neocon junk really got its kick off with Poppy, not W. When he wanted Reagans microphone turned off in 1979, I was a child…….but knew a ratfink when I saw one
Obviously someone programmed the programs and the operator just punches in the appropriate verb/noun combo to run the pre-programmed routine.Replies: @Autochthon
You know who’s often shitty at drawing blood (i.e., phlebotomy) and administering injections? Physicians.
This crucial point is too often hand-waved. A lot of self-described people who are “good with computers” or even “[Web, database, etc.] designers or administrators” are adroit with using software like Office, FileMaker, Dreamweaver, WordPress, etc.
That’s s skill, sure; but it’s not programming.
If you aren’t working from the terminal or IDLE, etc. you’re not a programmer.
Mocking up wireframes or refining specificationa is similarly bologna (“I’m an idea man!” “Yeah? I have an idea: let’s built a starship and travel te galaxy. What’s that? How? How do i know – I’m an idea man!”).
A related problem is lack if granularity precisely because so many people are ignorant about computers. Even people who’ve never swung a hammer or turned a screw in their lives seem to understand “construction” isn’t a useful description of work except in very general terms: helpers running back and forth with tools or holding a pipe in place are not at all comparable to master plumbers, carpenters, masons, electricians, etc.; who themselves in turn usually have no foggy idea how to operate heavy equipment, and even the average expert controlling the backhoe has no business operating a crane for a high-rise project. And on and on.
People don’t know “coding.”
They know langauges and platforms: Python, Ruby, Swift, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, AngularJS, Django, Flask, Selenium, Spring, etc.
They don’t (for practical purposes) know about “databases or even SQL: They know PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.
Knowing the foundations underlying databases and concepts like variables, sets, integers, text, etc. makes mastering specific things easier, and knowing one language or system absolutely makes it easier to learn another, especially if its forked from the same original system, as it were.
But plenty of goons with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and SQL would have you compare them to full-stack developers expert with six languages, five frameworks, every popular flavour of database imaginable. It’s silly. It’s like comparing your aousin who did four years in the infantry to a grizzled, decorated gunnery sergeant, or your brother who can beat everyone in town at hoops to Kobe Bryant.
There’s a huge dearth of meaningful distinctions and details of just what is being referred to in all this rhetoric about “programming jobs” or “the computing sector” and it really makes most of the commentary meaningless for lack of context.
The bare metal guy and the gal who’s a wizard with Word, and every one in between, cannot meaningfully be discussed as “programmers” or even “computer experts.”
And by the way, I have blown the minds of brilliant electrical engineers – guys who design integrated circuits – by doing slick things with software. So these skills are not a nested hierarchy, but rather overlapping circles on a Venn diagram. You don’t want the dude at Synopsys or Cadence perfecting software for testing and validating chips
to start designing your commercial Websites, nor vice-versa, and often the back-end guys are best left tweaking APIs and databases while some dude with eons of success designing interfaces (maybe even one with a background in industrial or graphic design, collaborating with the programmers) refines the front end.
Employees love the H1-B. The H1-b holder is an indentured servant. No exaggeration. Essentially, the employer holds the H1-B hostage. It is extremely difficult for the H1-B to move to another position. The employer also holds out the implicit promise of getting the H1-B permanent residence. Back in the 90s two of the biggest abusers were United Parcel Service, and AIG insurance, though these two by no means exhaust the list of scoundrels.
The Chamber of Commerce hates you. They wish to do you harm. They are your enemy. The RepubloCrats/cucks hate you. They are your enemy. They wish to do you harm.
That aside, learn to program Clojure (essentially LISP). Clojure is the coolest, hippest and smartest language to come along in a long while (although in essence it dates back to 1958). At least you will have fun with it.
As always, the Newman doctrine applies: Do they look good in a bikini?
OFF TOPIC
It was a dark and stormy evening some years back when the Kaus and the Carlson parted ways.
Mickey and Tucker have a past, see. Tucker blocked Mickey from hammering Murdoch and his mob when they needed hammering.
Mickey don’t like no mug getting in between him and some business that needed to be done. Tucker said with a shrug it sounds like fun but I got business with the Murdoch mob and what they say goes.
Mickey got riled up and left the joint. Tucker got a big show with the Murdoch mob and some mugs say Tucker was right to cool the jets of Mickey. Kaus was right to do what he did, I says.
He immediately launched into a spiel about how, "Trump cut H-1Bs, we need more, we need to bring those people in," etc.
Yes, folks, even in the defense industry magic visa/passport/dirt theory is an accepted fact by many.
I think this individual buys into it because he has an adopted daughter from China. Thus, he is universalizing his positive experience with her to all potential immigrants.Replies: @snorlax, @J.Ross, @Clyde, @The Alarmist
I took a flight the other day from Europe to US on one of the routes favoured as the connector from Mumbai, and upon arrival was again, as always, confronted with a couple dozen wheelchairs on the gangplank, each dutifully attended by a South Asian waiting dutifully for an elderly South Asian to disembark to the land of good and plentiful medical care and other bennies. Your boss and others like him have no grasp of the externalities they are inflicting on American society, because when you import an H1B, you’re getting an entire village.
Nothing stops a woman from writing the code for her own original app and uploading it to Apple Store or Google Play. How many of the 100 apps most-downloaded from these sites were written by a woman? How many of the 500 apps most downloaded? How many of the 1000 apps most downloaded?
Father Coughlin was a famous anti Jewish priest from the 1930s who was forced to be silent by the Vatican in the late 40s. He had his own radio show.
Reminds me of the “Bolivian Tree Lizard cleanup plan.”
More on the fake “wall funding” “compromise”
A huge amnesty, a big new magnet for child-migration, more low wage guest workers that will never leave, and the 55 mile wall funding is all fake!
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/5-insane-provisions-amnesty-omnibus-bill/
Can anyone reconcile these phenomena?
a) Up until 50 or 55 years ago, employers were reluctant to hire women, for the practical reason that they would likely leave in a few years to start families, and the company’s investment in training would be wasted.
b) A major complaint against Silicon Valley HR practices is that they milk their new hires for a short career, only to replace them with younger, cheaper workers, whether foreign or domestic.
c) Phenomenon b would seem to encourage the hiring of women under the logic of Phenomenon a. But this isn’t happening.
Companies no longer invest in training newbies, assuming that’s what all that student debt is supposed to cover.
Want to hire Kumar for pennies on the dollar? Make sure he (more to the point, his agency) indicate he is fluent in Obscure Programming Language X98a, then add that language to a list of the required qualifications in the requisition to fill the position and any accompanying adverts. Likewise for steering clear of the ADEA or the mere hassle of employees with actual skills (and therefore backbones) and who dare to occasionally need time off for their families or actually use their medical insurance – drat! the forty-something and fifty-something geniuses capable of being the CTO just so happen to not be proficient with X98a. We'll have to hire Joe, who is twenty-two (by coincidence, of course!).
All the better if it's Kumar who is twenty for the double whammy.
Most of that shit has moved to legal, to a lesser extent marketing.
@isteve seemed previously optimistic about the valley boys shakin it off, but seems it was more insidious ?
What do you tell people who have been pushed out of jobs as computer programers? Learn to Code?Replies: @Anon1
-Social media influencer
-American soldier
-Coffee shop owner
-Uber driver
-SAT tutor
-Blogger
-Create and sell apps
-Day trader
Whites in Trailer parks cannot code.
They are lazy, indigent and stupid.Many H1B guys marry or date White girls(I am one of them) and more and more white girls are now open to date Non White men and bear children of color.The real war is being won by Immigration and Miscegenation and the White Supremacists can do nothing about this.
We Asians will rule the world.
End of White race is near and am not at all sad.
Even Mr. SAILER admitted that Hapas will be the future elite of America.Refute me if you can.Replies: @fish, @epochehusserl, @Anon1, @nebulafox, @J.Ross, @Chris Renner
Curried duck.
Nothing went wrong.
Just aks Alexa.
She just did today some fine algorithm-tunning on her cyber-mudsharking (yes, Alexa is a huwhite, blonde, and with low self-esteem) preferences, so she could share with us that her perfect Valentine’s choice is Idris Elba.
Because:
“He’s a DJ, and I play music for people all the time.”
Not to mention that:
“Idris’ voice is amazing, and I’ve been told my voice is my best asset.
And we’re both A-list actors.
Well, at least my name starts with an ‘A’.
It’s a match made in heaven…or at least in the cloud.”
https://home.bt.com/news/showbiz-news/alexa-reveals-idris-elba-is-her-celebrity-crush-ahead-of-valentines-day-11364336050890
***************************************************************************************************************
“Alexa, what’s your favorite #MeToo match made up with Haven?”
https://www.cio.com/article/3305761/careers-staffing/where-in-the-world-are-the-women-software-developers.htmlReplies: @Anon1
According to that survey, India has the highest percentage of female coders of any nation in the world. China is in 4th place. America is in 11th place.
Hate to be rude, but back at ya.
He’s obviously using “new” in the sense of “newer” and “more compatible with present-day software engineering practices.” None of the languages he mentioned are “new” in the sense of “recently created” — Python and Java are now older than C was at the time they were released.
BTW, 13 years is an eternity in the computer industry, particularly in the early days when Moore’s Law was running 4-8x faster than it is today, and the fundamental building blocks of software engineering were still being created.
And C is actually even older; it was a modestly updated version of B from 1969 and created by the same guys.
No; unlike C, Java and Python, COBOL only supported procedural programming. It had no concept of functions that returned a value, or took parameters by value (copy). In C terms, instead of being able to write this
int add(int a, int b) {return a + b;}
you had to write everything like this
void add(int *result, int *a, int *b) {*result = *a + *b;}
Batch processing, i.e. a human inputs some data and the program spits out a result, can be reasoned about entirely in procedural terms. A client-server design, where two different programs (possibly running on separate computers) communicate with each other, makes no sense without functions—the programs are separate and can’t read each other’s data, so they need functions that pass copies of their data from one to the other.
He was an adult when Unix was commercialized and a significant contributor to it; he wrote the first version of the popular glob(3) function in the POSIX C library.
https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0131103628
A little expensive, but still , the book.
a) Up until 50 or 55 years ago, employers were reluctant to hire women, for the practical reason that they would likely leave in a few years to start families, and the company's investment in training would be wasted.
b) A major complaint against Silicon Valley HR practices is that they milk their new hires for a short career, only to replace them with younger, cheaper workers, whether foreign or domestic.
c) Phenomenon b would seem to encourage the hiring of women under the logic of Phenomenon a. But this isn't happening.
Companies no longer invest in training newbies, assuming that's what all that student debt is supposed to cover.Replies: @Autochthon, @Alden, @rufus, @rufus
You answered your own question: employers no longer provide any training. If you cannot already do every single thing they want done, they deem you unqualified, even if you’ve a demonstrated record of genius making it clear you could master very quickly and easily the things you’re not just now experienced with very. Indeed, this anal retentive approach only bolsters their thirst for foreign helots, as they reinforce that by contending no American applicant had every single one of the needed skills.
Want to hire Kumar for pennies on the dollar? Make sure he (more to the point, his agency) indicate he is fluent in Obscure Programming Language X98a, then add that language to a list of the required qualifications in the requisition to fill the position and any accompanying adverts. Likewise for steering clear of the ADEA or the mere hassle of employees with actual skills (and therefore backbones) and who dare to occasionally need time off for their families or actually use their medical insurance – drat! the forty-something and fifty-something geniuses capable of being the CTO just so happen to not be proficient with X98a. We’ll have to hire Joe, who is twenty-two (by coincidence, of course!).
All the better if it’s Kumar who is twenty for the double whammy.
India Wants To Use Flesh Eating Turtles To Rid The Ganges Of Decomposing Bodies (HBO) [VICE News]Replies: @J.Ross, @anonymous, @Alden
That has the makings of a pretty good ’70’s horror flick: “Night of the Testudines!”
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance, natch.
-American soldier
-Coffee shop owner
-Uber driver
-SAT tutor
-Blogger
-Create and sell apps
-Day traderReplies: @anonymous
-Party motivator
Mr. Joe, “they” Are Tiny Duck.
“To mark the arrival of Valentine’s Day on Thursday, Amazon is also providing inspiration for partners who need help to write a romantic card.
It follows research by the company showing that almost half of people believe a heartfelt Valentine’s Day card is the best gift they could receive.”
https://postimg.cc/qgqkkFMF
There’s more to it. From the article:
“Even getting the program into the IBM 704 was a laborious affair. There were no keyboards or screens; Wilkes had to write a program on paper and give it to a typist, who translated each command into holes on a punch card. She would carry boxes of commands to an “operator,” who then fed a stack of such cards into a reader. The computer executed the program and produced results, typed out on a printer.”
Many of these ancillary menial jobs get lumped into the statistics of that era, which distorts the supposed gender ratio. But then…
“As one of the world’s first interactive personal computers, it would be a breakthrough device that could fit in a single office or lab. It would even have its own keyboard and screen, so it could be programmed more quickly, without awkward punch cards or printouts.”
But then again a lot of modern “programming” jobs are probably little more than tweaking pixel padding in CSS.
Whiskey, I am an old man and may be the only one on Unz who listened to Father Coiughlins hour long radio program broadcast Sunday afternoons. Father Coughlin was very popular in the then isolationist circles around the Mid West, and his radio program was on in our home. Not only was he ant-Jewish, he detested FDR. The isolationist America First party was active at the time and Charles Lindbergh was one of the guiding lights. World War II changed all that.
COBOL coding was simpler, and you could make a lot of aspirants COBOL coders.
Today much of the coding in client server. You are serving up or receiving web pages, and some of these web pages are on your phone. There are protocol issues (are we running TLS1 or TLS2?, what level of SSL?, are we doing two stage authentication?, is the browser up to date?, etc.), database issues, and connectivity issues. This stuff is hard to debug.
That was all handled by the true geeks (nearly all male), the systems programmers or 'sysprogs', who created the environment in which your Cobol code ran. Generally very bright people.
But your code had to be far more efficient in the days when storage and processing power were scarce resources. Gone (mostly) are the days when people worried about word boundaries. And if (say) you needed a subroutine/utility that would be accessed a lot, by many different programs, you'd find yourself writing assembler programs.
"you could make a lot of aspirants COBOL coders"
If they were high school maths teachers, yes. Not so much if they were checkout operators.
The purported drop in female computer programmers began in 1985 (see graph here: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding), while the modern H-1B was created by the Immigration Actg of 1990. This suggests that other factors, like changes in COBOL in COBOL 85 and general changes in the usage of COBOL, the introduction of the Commodore 64 home computer in 1982, and the growth of object-oriented programming in the form of Smalltalk and Objective-C in the early 1980s, need to be considered.
For example COBOL was a procedural language written to look like English (Fortran was a prodedural language written to look like math formulas). Object-oriented languages are much more abstract. A different sort of person would excel at OO programming.
I took Fortran in high school in the late 1970s, when we wrote out programs in pencil and the LA Unified School District computer staff keypunched them for us and returned printouts a few days later. At UCLA as a math major circa 1980 I took Engineering 1 (beginning programming), and I don’t remember any women in the class. We keypunched our own Hollerith cards in the 24-hour, 7-days-a-week computer lab and then fed them into a card reader to be processed by the IBM 370 mainframe, with the results printed on wide tractor paper. I loved the class, and it was intense. I stayed up to the wee hours of the morning in the dorm writing programs with pencil and paper then trekked down to the computer lab to keypunch and run them. We programmed in PL-1.
The next quarter I signed up for the following class, Engineering 100. This was the weed-out class. I don’t remember any women. And I weeded myself out on the last day that we could drop it, two weeks in. I really, really wanted to take it, and those two weeks were fun, but it was obviously going to take a lot of time, and I had another class in my major that was important to me that was going to take a lot of time, so reluctantly I dropped E-100. Those two weeks involved the writing of an assigned program, in PL-1, a second version in ALGOL-68, and a third version in low-level assembly language (the article Steve linked to described assembly).
Nowadays I think undergraduates would have already been assigned object-oriented programming by that point, probably JAVA in an educational setting. OO is a big, big jump, leaving COBOL far behind. Later in life I programmed my own web sites in PHP (with MySQL), probably the set-up that Ron uses here. PHP got some OO extensions and I picked up a big book on object oriented programming and the model-view-controller framework. This was a major shift in thinking. I bailed out of this before writing any actual code.
OO is a big step into abstraction. It makes programs more bulletproof as they grow larger and more complex. I’m sure that this need for more robustness was realized when business-critical COBOL programs grew into hundreds of thousands of lines of spaghetti code and had to be modified and debugged. I think this step into abstraction may be part of the reason why fewer non MtF trans women are working as programmers these days. I suspect that the a big proportion of female programmers are dealing in non-OO areas like JavaScript user interface programming. Of course, women can do anything, but we’re talking about why, proportionally, more men choose to do this kind of work.
The Commodore 64 with its 8 bit 6502 CPU was mostly reliant on assembler programming for any useful application programming: there were compilers but mainly used by schools and hobbyists as far as I know.
Don Lancaster, a famous "hoodoo guru" (influential for a little while and then vocally wrong for the next three decades) wrote:https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/programming/6502assembly/Assembly_Cookbook_for_the_Apple_II_IIe.pdf
This also meant that when the 6502 (a processor Wozniak only chose over the 6800 Motorola because Motorola shortsightedly priced it ridiculously high) was replaced by the x86 ( if you bought a PC) or the Motorola 68K (if you bought a Mac, an Atari ST, an Amiga, or a workstation pre-RISC) the entire code base was instantly and totally worthless. When you wrote in high level languages you had some portability. Donzi never quite understood that and he went from being a leading pundit to an obscure crank advocating the use of PostScript laser printers as general purpose computers.
NeXT illustrated this well: by release 3.3 it ran on four different CPU families and you could make any and all programs written on any of its provided environments (if you used NeXT Developer) run on any of the four with "fat binaries". NeXT died because Jobs stupidly spent most of its capital on building a plant to build beautifully made and elegant workstations with inadequate CPU power, then abandoning hardware for software only releases: but to get his hardware out the door he licensed huge amounts of outside code in the OS and therefore could not sell the OS at a price anyone would buy it. Had Apple not bought NeXT he woud have been out of business and broke.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
This whole business will go much more smoothly if you play along and quit thinking Bad Thoughts.Replies: @Mr. XYZ
But society can never advance if people refrain from ever thinking Bad Thoughts!
India Wants To Use Flesh Eating Turtles To Rid The Ganges Of Decomposing Bodies (HBO) [VICE News]Replies: @J.Ross, @anonymous, @Alden
No need, the Holy Water purifies and disinfects the corpses and their germs viruses and bacteria doncha know.
The article is true but way exaggerated. She was a high level mathematician and worked with Babbage it’s true.
She was the wedlock daughter of Lord Byron and his wife Anne Milbanke
Read Tech Insurgent for the low down on the low life H1-B scam.
That crazy crazy Seattle city council critter, the curry socialist Ksama Sawant came to America on a HI B spouse visa.
Her most noteworthy activity was closing down the freeway on behalf of the Gentle Giant Mike Brown. She’s done absolutely nothing for her district but wins much publicity for daily denouncing Trumpisn whatever that is.
a) Up until 50 or 55 years ago, employers were reluctant to hire women, for the practical reason that they would likely leave in a few years to start families, and the company's investment in training would be wasted.
b) A major complaint against Silicon Valley HR practices is that they milk their new hires for a short career, only to replace them with younger, cheaper workers, whether foreign or domestic.
c) Phenomenon b would seem to encourage the hiring of women under the logic of Phenomenon a. But this isn't happening.
Companies no longer invest in training newbies, assuming that's what all that student debt is supposed to cover.Replies: @Autochthon, @Alden, @rufus, @rufus
Companies don’t train but they’ll hire any non White with a bogus resume falsely claiming applicable experience
Figured he was long dead ?
There are three streets in Paris named after US presidents, but as far as I know, none after the Lindberghs. What more evidence do you need that the Parisians hate us?
a) Up until 50 or 55 years ago, employers were reluctant to hire women, for the practical reason that they would likely leave in a few years to start families, and the company's investment in training would be wasted.
b) A major complaint against Silicon Valley HR practices is that they milk their new hires for a short career, only to replace them with younger, cheaper workers, whether foreign or domestic.
c) Phenomenon b would seem to encourage the hiring of women under the logic of Phenomenon a. But this isn't happening.
Companies no longer invest in training newbies, assuming that's what all that student debt is supposed to cover.Replies: @Autochthon, @Alden, @rufus, @rufus
now yur jus pandering to @ isteve
a) Up until 50 or 55 years ago, employers were reluctant to hire women, for the practical reason that they would likely leave in a few years to start families, and the company's investment in training would be wasted.
b) A major complaint against Silicon Valley HR practices is that they milk their new hires for a short career, only to replace them with younger, cheaper workers, whether foreign or domestic.
c) Phenomenon b would seem to encourage the hiring of women under the logic of Phenomenon a. But this isn't happening.
Companies no longer invest in training newbies, assuming that's what all that student debt is supposed to cover.Replies: @Autochthon, @Alden, @rufus, @rufus
ummm the diversity rackets operators ?
Most of that shit has moved to legal, to a lesser extent marketing.
@isteve seemed previously optimistic about the valley boys shakin it off, but seems it was more insidious ?
From flipping switches to typing (punching cards).The former could get lenghty and complicated; for later, PLENTY of details. In essence, when toggling, you work with digital electronics. Can't get more "detailed" than that.Not...... quite, especially the later.
O.K.
If....IF...you really want to understand how all that REALLY work(ed), I strongly suggest taking a good look at any homebrew computer project.
Try this, for example:
http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
Good luck!Replies: @Anonymous
The easy and best thing is to get one of those trainer boards that had a 6502 or 6800 processor, a hex keyboard and some seven segment LEDs and go through the book provided doing these exercises. You could build a replica PDP-8 or -11 but thet’s more an exercise in soldering and electronic assembly then programming. The old trainer boards are still available as originals or repros. You can take a scope probe and follow every bit through the whole machine.
You could also get an Apple II real or emulated) and do some 6502 assembler.
At the other end of things, there are mainframe and minicomputer emulators running on 64 bit Intel hardware, everything from CDC Cybers and Burroughs B series, the VAX and its VMS operating system, to the IBM 370 and its earlier operating systems, to the geek favorite of all time the Symbolics Lisp Machine.
So for those with the urge, the tools are there. You just have to get off your ass and do it.
Especially:
BTW, 13 years is an eternity in the computer industry, particularly in the early days when Moore's Law was running 4-8x faster than it is today, and the fundamental building blocks of software engineering were still being created.
And C is actually even older; it was a modestly updated version of B from 1969 and created by the same guys.No; unlike C, Java and Python, COBOL only supported procedural programming. It had no concept of functions that returned a value, or took parameters by value (copy). In C terms, instead of being able to write this
int add(int a, int b) {return a + b;}
you had to write everything like this
void add(int *result, int *a, int *b) {*result = *a + *b;}Batch processing, i.e. a human inputs some data and the program spits out a result, can be reasoned about entirely in procedural terms. A client-server design, where two different programs (possibly running on separate computers) communicate with each other, makes no sense without functions—the programs are separate and can't read each other's data, so they need functions that pass copies of their data from one to the other.He was an adult when Unix was commercialized and a significant contributor to it; he wrote the first version of the popular glob(3) function in the POSIX C library.Replies: @Anonymous
The book:
A little expensive, but still , the book.
I thought crops were rotting in the fields under Trump. Now this guy on Quora says they’re rotting in the silos instead, thanks to Trump:
https://www.quora.com/Has-serving-in-the-U-S-military-shaped-your-political-views
How did these crops get from the fields into the silos?
"Well,if I don't do programming, what else could I do?" If you are a Malasian or Indian woman (his examples) programming is an incredibly lucrative occupation, compared to other, female choices. Of course you will choose programming.
But as Sweden has discovered, if you provide other, traditionally female occupations that are just as lucrative as male occupations, women gravitate to them. And that is the Swedish Paradox: The more occupational choices you offer women, the more they gravitate to female jobs.
The flip side of this article (conspicuously omitted) is how many professions are now overwhelmingly female that once were male? Psych? Soc? And how many new "female" degrees have been created since 1950: Interior design, fashion merchandizing, etc.Replies: @Marty, @mmack
Image the response if Steve wrote an article that was published in a nationally noticed magazine or website titled “What Happened to Male Teachers?” Further, imagine he pointed out (and cited data in Worldbank.com) that as of 2015 87 percent of primary school teachers in the United States were women, and posited women forced men out of teaching, and we need to rebalance male / female ratios in primary school teachers.
Whites in Trailer parks cannot code.
They are lazy, indigent and stupid.Many H1B guys marry or date White girls(I am one of them) and more and more white girls are now open to date Non White men and bear children of color.The real war is being won by Immigration and Miscegenation and the White Supremacists can do nothing about this.
We Asians will rule the world.
End of White race is near and am not at all sad.
Even Mr. SAILER admitted that Hapas will be the future elite of America.Refute me if you can.Replies: @fish, @epochehusserl, @Anon1, @nebulafox, @J.Ross, @Chris Renner
>H1B is good for the country.
Well, as far as “the country” goes, it’s great for Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the politicians they support. Anybody else, not so much. Certainly not national interests as a whole, which for smart and serious countries, is the only real criterion in deciding governmental policy.
The idea that there are not American coders who can’t do the majority of coding work that the H1Bs take up is corporate propaganda that both parties (for different, though equally venal reasons) choose to swallow, hook, line, and sinker. Most of their work is typically not template metaprogramming and crunching stochastic PDEs for a fintech firm that you need to pick up a Russian or Indian or Chinese former physicist for-because that’s not the majority of coding jobs, period.
>Whites in Trailer parks cannot code. They are lazy, indigent and stupid.
You are not wrong, but you can say exactly the same thing about underclass blacks or underclass Hispanic migrants. Somehow, I get the impression that you wouldn’t be so eager to say that.
Affluent whites (and blacks and Hispanics) aren’t nearly as stupid, but they are still pretty lazy on average compared to their East and South Asian and Slavic counterparts. Of course, that’s a generalization: you can find plenty of hardworking “legacy” Americans, and you can find plenty of lazy kids of Chinese and Indian billionaires. But generalizations tend to have a kernel of reality at the core.
>Many H1B guys marry or date White girls(I am one of them) and more and more white girls are now open to date Non White men and bear children of color.
And I, a white coder, am currently dating a Woman of Color. Your point?
>The real war is being won by Immigration and Miscegenation and the White Supremacists can do nothing about this.
White supremacy is for losers, but America’s increasingly fanatical elites are delusional if they think non-bien pensant whites are going to accept “identity politics for me, but not for thee” if current economic, cultural, and sociological trends continue into the following decades.
>End of White race is near and am not at all sad.
Eh, no? Whites are declining as a share of the populace, in the USA and Europe, but they aren’t exactly going away, especially in the higher socioeconomic rungs. Whites who can’t make it to those rungs are going to have an extremely rough time in the future, but the gentry and oligarchal classes are making sure that *they* are fine.
Considering that upwardly mobile Asians and Mexicans are more likely to intermarry with whites and have kids that are more likely intermarry with other whites or half-castes, the likely ruling caste of the future is going to still be perceived as white by the non-white underclass. Adding fuel to the fire is that most self-loathing SJWs cannot hack it in the modern economy and will be declassed.
>Refute me if you can.
No, that’s the job of Leonard Pitts, Turcluckens.
https://www.quora.com/Has-serving-in-the-U-S-military-shaped-your-political-views
How did these crops get from the fields into the silos?Replies: @snorlax
They’re rotting in the silos because it was a bumper harvest at the same time as the Chinese have been massively culling livestock due to disease outbreaks. Obviously Trump’s fault.
Interesting that the article points the finger at a “cultural” shift, implying that rise of video games (which could be played on personal computers, also available at the same time) is largely to blame.
But this logic doesn’t make sense. Video game companies were big back in the 70s and 80s, big enough to figure out that if their product appealed to girls more than boys, they would obviously choose this more lucrative route. The author leaves it at that handwaving and expects us to make the leap to “companies would purposefully decide to make less money in order to be sexist.” By ignoring the fact that video games are inherently competitive, they conveniently omit the connection Damore’s statement “that several qualities more commonly found in women — including higher rates of anxiety — explained why they weren’t thriving in a competitive world of coding.”
It’s almost as if Damore’s reasoning for why more women aren’t in coding makes sense when you juxtapose it next to the article’s reasoning for why more women aren’t in coding.
No offense, but to have listened to Coughlin live and remember it you’d have to be a nonagerian, as he was squelched in 1939. I’ve heard off air disk recording transcriptions of him: that people did this reflects the esteem in which he was held by many at the time. The blanks were expensive.
Whites in Trailer parks cannot code.
They are lazy, indigent and stupid.Many H1B guys marry or date White girls(I am one of them) and more and more white girls are now open to date Non White men and bear children of color.The real war is being won by Immigration and Miscegenation and the White Supremacists can do nothing about this.
We Asians will rule the world.
End of White race is near and am not at all sad.
Even Mr. SAILER admitted that Hapas will be the future elite of America.Refute me if you can.Replies: @fish, @epochehusserl, @Anon1, @nebulafox, @J.Ross, @Chris Renner
I've worked in HR for 4 different software companies, been heavily involved in college recruiting, hiring, retention, aptitude testing of candidates, hack-a-thons, code challenges - you name it.
That occasional strong American female programmer who can hold her own with anyone in app development does exist but does NOT want to continue doing that for very long - they usually stay in software but move into Project Management, Consulting, QA Management or the type of middle management 6-figure $$+ paying roles that are still lightly technical but don't require your nose to be in the keyboard for all 8 hours of your day, pushing out code in hands-on fashion.
Of course, H-1B Indian females are an exception, they still on the technical side for much longer but still have less stomach for it over time in comparison to Indian males.Replies: @nebulafox, @Anon
>Of course, H-1B Indian females are an exception, they still on the technical side for much longer but still have less stomach for it over time in comparison to Indian males.
In cultures like India where deeply rooted sexism on a level which most American and European feminists couldn’t contemplate in their worst nightmares exists, and where women genuinely still can’t afford to screw around with whatever chances they get for a better life than their mothers and grandmothers, you’ll find more women in STEM. In the West, by contrast, it is a choice: and women who choose it, while they exist, tend to be in the minority.
It helps if there simultaneously exists a strong cultural respect for science and technology, unlike in America. Women are less prone to being bipolar or autistic then men, and that’s almost a condition for making it in theoretical physics these days in terms of the sheer focus and lack of regard to economic or mental self-interest that it takes to continue on to tenure-track level, at least in things like particle theory.
I think the big issue in academia as well as coding tends to be, as always, parenting. Most women-a decreasing percentage in advanced Western societies, but still the majority- eventually want to have their own biological kids and are generally inclined to, you know, spend time with them. In academia, you’ll find plenty of PIs who are reluctant to take married female postdocs solely because of this. Some couples deal with this by taking turns at the PhD, but that doesn’t work if both parents are in a field like physics.
One reason I’m interested in how Israel manages to keep a lot of women in STEM is because they are the big exception to the rule here, both in terms of being a generally non-sexist culture and in making it possible for female scientists to have families.
Whites in Trailer parks cannot code.
They are lazy, indigent and stupid.Many H1B guys marry or date White girls(I am one of them) and more and more white girls are now open to date Non White men and bear children of color.The real war is being won by Immigration and Miscegenation and the White Supremacists can do nothing about this.
We Asians will rule the world.
End of White race is near and am not at all sad.
Even Mr. SAILER admitted that Hapas will be the future elite of America.Refute me if you can.Replies: @fish, @epochehusserl, @Anon1, @nebulafox, @J.Ross, @Chris Renner
White guys can do that too, numbnuts.
How much were Smalltalk and Objective-C ever commercially used? I always thought the interest in Smalltalk was primarily academic and that Objective-C was primarily used in the NeXT universe, which was mostly a few financial firms and some hush-hush government work.
The Commodore 64 with its 8 bit 6502 CPU was mostly reliant on assembler programming for any useful application programming: there were compilers but mainly used by schools and hobbyists as far as I know.
Don Lancaster, a famous “hoodoo guru” (influential for a little while and then vocally wrong for the next three decades) wrote:
https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/programming/6502assembly/Assembly_Cookbook_for_the_Apple_II_IIe.pdf
This also meant that when the 6502 (a processor Wozniak only chose over the 6800 Motorola because Motorola shortsightedly priced it ridiculously high) was replaced by the x86 ( if you bought a PC) or the Motorola 68K (if you bought a Mac, an Atari ST, an Amiga, or a workstation pre-RISC) the entire code base was instantly and totally worthless. When you wrote in high level languages you had some portability. Donzi never quite understood that and he went from being a leading pundit to an obscure crank advocating the use of PostScript laser printers as general purpose computers.
NeXT illustrated this well: by release 3.3 it ran on four different CPU families and you could make any and all programs written on any of its provided environments (if you used NeXT Developer) run on any of the four with “fat binaries”. NeXT died because Jobs stupidly spent most of its capital on building a plant to build beautifully made and elegant workstations with inadequate CPU power, then abandoning hardware for software only releases: but to get his hardware out the door he licensed huge amounts of outside code in the OS and therefore could not sell the OS at a price anyone would buy it. Had Apple not bought NeXT he woud have been out of business and broke.
How surreal.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/14/poetic-injustice-and-performative-outrage/
That’s right. Simply Simon is 90 years old. He’s the oldest person who posts here, regularly.
I’m skeptical that the H1-B program is large enough to make that much of a dent, but my Googling fails to come up with any numbers that make the case one way or the other. Anybody know what percent of software developers are H1-Bs? What percent if just restricted to bigcorps?
Well, we’re glad to have him and I hope he is able to post for many more years. It’s very interesting to learn from someone who can actually remember 1939! Actually any more it’s great to hear from anyone who actually remembers 1959.
This is Whiteshift on Adler:
When I went into Computer Science at the start of the 1990’s, I estimate less than 20% were women.
I think the early 1980s were the aberration and now the gender ratio has stabilized to the norm for engineering fields, which usually have less than 20% women.
People to seem to think something went wrong, which caused women’s involvement to drop from 40% to 20%. I think women just went into other fields, like medicine, which are more people-oriented.
I’m not sure what was different in the 70s and early 80s, but maybe it was various odd factors, such as the tedium of the punch cards. Also, maybe women fell into the job, as a result of on-the-job training. Also, the rise of the home computer encouraged a surge in men’s interest in the 1980s.
In my home, we got a home computer in 1980, which my brother and I used a lot, but my sister did not, though she was great at math. Also, in some colleges, computers were part of the math department, and so maybe women got involved in that way.
I know many stories though, which illustrate the gender difference. In my first class, I heard a woman sigh to herself while in the computer lab and say “I don’t want to spend all day in front of a computer.” She never came to the lab again. I know one woman who was at a programming job, who then switched to marketing, and now she delivers flowers.
At the University of Illinois, there’s been a major push to get more women into Computer Science. This year’s freshman class is about 50% women, which I heard is due to some special treatment for women (but I’m not sure what). My guess is that the % of women will go up in computer jobs in the years ahead, but how long will they stay in these jobs? And will pushing women into these fields, result in men getting pushed out or will the men just study technology at lesser schools?
https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2016/08/30/illinois-urbana-champaign-women-computer-science.html
Meanwhile, here are some other stats:
https://www.dol.gov/wb/occupations_interactive_txt.htm
— Women are 1.6% of “pipelayers, plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters”.
— Women are 98.0% of the “preschool and kindergarten teachers”.
What is going on? It’s like some industries are sexists against women and others are sexist against men.
I work in Silicon Valley. Approx 75 percent of the technical staff is foreign born. Note that percentage includes older staff too, so younger staff is much more foreign born. The most common progression is either direct H-1B, or OPT (3 years) while applying for H-1B. The 65,000 number is new additions per year, not the total number of employees, and there are probably 1 million H-1B s in the software industry. So yes, it’s had an enormous impact on the software industry in the United States. Regarding gender ratios, my experience is a) most American women engineers who apply for jobs don’t have enough experience. Not stupid at all, btw. The issue with that is the people with no experience are being hired in India, where they are cheap (and the good ones not stupid at all either). The Indians spend a couple of years at large multinationals being seasoned in India, and when they apply here, because they can, due to H-1B, they are just more experienced than many locals. Inexperienced American men engineers still make it in to jobs due to obsessesiveness, i.e. spending all day on algorithmic puzzles til they get a job. And this behavior is different than most women I’ve seen. H-1B has absolutely harmed American women going into software.
I know it's per year, but the program covers much more than the software field. This would mean most of them are staying much, much longer than the nominal time limit (3-6 years). Do they just end up getting renewed indefinitely in practice?Replies: @XYZ
“The 65,000 number is new additions per year, not the total number of employees, and there are probably 1 million H-1B s in the software industry. ”
I know it’s per year, but the program covers much more than the software field. This would mean most of them are staying much, much longer than the nominal time limit (3-6 years). Do they just end up getting renewed indefinitely in practice?
Today much of the coding in client server. You are serving up or receiving web pages, and some of these web pages are on your phone. There are protocol issues (are we running TLS1 or TLS2?, what level of SSL?, are we doing two stage authentication?, is the browser up to date?, etc.), database issues, and connectivity issues. This stuff is hard to debug.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
“There are protocol issues (are we running TLS1 or TLS2?, what level of SSL?, are we doing two stage authentication?, is the browser up to date?, etc.), database issues, and connectivity issues.”
That was all handled by the true geeks (nearly all male), the systems programmers or ‘sysprogs’, who created the environment in which your Cobol code ran. Generally very bright people.
But your code had to be far more efficient in the days when storage and processing power were scarce resources. Gone (mostly) are the days when people worried about word boundaries. And if (say) you needed a subroutine/utility that would be accessed a lot, by many different programs, you’d find yourself writing assembler programs.
“you could make a lot of aspirants COBOL coders”
If they were high school maths teachers, yes. Not so much if they were checkout operators.
over 20 years of experience with indians here. they're nearly useless, a couple guys here and there are worth anything, over 90% of them are nothing but great replacement coolies, and inferior ones at that. worse, they bring in all their third world scams and schemes. it's rarely just straightforward libertarian style 'you need a worker, i am a worker' stuff.
and the worst, maybe half the indians are clear cut outside agent foreign nationals who are against america, and work against the US when put into positions of authority or power. indians really don't like you. that's the surprise for most people who see these polite, innocuous, brown skinned background people who are anodyne and seem harmless. they're not. they're working to take your country away from you, like most outside groups.
indians aren't openly hostile to your face. but they hate you. don't get it mistaken. all you need to do is witness these extranational tech industry executives in action. extreme overt hostility to historic america. even the CEO of pepsi now. branching out into other industries.Replies: @MG
No, Indians don’t hate America or Americans. They just know that America provides far better material living and working conditions and financial rewards than India. If you want to finger enemies, you should look at the Chinese.
The problem is the number and quality of Indians that have been let into the country post-1995. Earlier, you needed to be strong academically, snag an assistantship to come here. All those quality filters went out the window when Mr. Gates and his colleagues figured out a way to import cheap code coolies.
The overwhelming majority of Indians in Silicon Valley, men and women, do trivial work. Not the turbo geniuses the tech lobby would have you believe.
America didn’t need a single Indian or Chinese ‘genius’ to put man on the moon.
I know it's per year, but the program covers much more than the software field. This would mean most of them are staying much, much longer than the nominal time limit (3-6 years). Do they just end up getting renewed indefinitely in practice?Replies: @XYZ
The 65,000 per year doesn’t include H-1Bs with advanced degrees from the US, another 20,000 per year, or H-1Bs that work for universities or research labs, which there isn’t a cap. So although H-1B can cover many fields, the 65,000 per year is overwhelmingly software. If an H-1B applies for a green card in time before his/her visa expires, then yes, they can stay as long as the green card process is underway, which could take years, and there are hundreds of thousands of those people in the US. Many are my co-workers. So I do see many articles comparing 65,000 to the size of the US workforce in an attempt to mislead and minimize the impact of the H-1B visa. Adding a million technical workers into the software/IT industry, which itself only has several million technical workers at most nationwide, radically transformed and distorted the industry. And yes, that is a big reason, not the only one of course, for the lack of American women in software.
A direct consequence of this flood can be seen in Silicon Valley where the quality of life has plummeted for EVERYONE except the very well-off.
I’ve linked to this in previous threads here on this topic:
I’m An Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader And I’m Sick Of Our Approach To Diversity!
We must stop fucking it up for the amazing women in tech!
https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i-m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999
50-something Indian woman programmer, probable ex-H-
I’ve linked to this in previous threads here on this topic:
I’m An Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader And I’m Sick Of Our Approach To Diversity!
We must stop fucking it up for the amazing women in tech!
https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i-m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999
50-something Indian woman programmer, probable ex-H-1B, who was involved in (trying to) hire women at Google, but couldn’t find any, went startup, hired women, fired women.
https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i-m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999
She taught her kids to code. The boy keeps asking for more problems to program. The girl wants to learn Photoshop. Mom says she can do it after she reaches a certain skill in coding.
So in one woman’s experience we have both ends of the problem:
1. Google and startups can hire women coders because the pipeline is empty.
2. The girls at the other end of the pipeline don’t want to enter it.
I remember when lots of women were coding mainframe computers. It was considered repetitious “grunt” work where attention to detail was a primary skill.
The same thing occurred in the electronics industry. Years ago I had business with defense-related electronics facilities in California where the shop floors were populated primarily by young (Asian) women. Same consideration: attention to detail with the ability to assemble extremely small electronic components with their delicate hands.
Can you believe this! I once worked for a defense company that had a shop exclusively “manned” by women, of all things, braiding cables linking electronic components.
Suspect that over the years robots have taken over a lot of these jobs where women excelled with special skills that men could not perform.
Look at any assembly line photo of TVs or Fender guitar amps being made in the fifties.
Most of these women are aware they could make more money by moving up to the technician level but do not want to do that, they prefer the assembly side of the house. It's a big coffee klatsch they get paid to attend.
I have been in dozens of electronic plants and worked as a field tech, repair tech, component engineer, PCB layout artist, and production planner, seen the pattern over and over. The female techs were never assembleresses and the female engineers never techs, unlike the men who sometimes started in mechanical assembly (bigger stuff needing male strength), and went through vo-tech then to college and eventually became engineers or managers.
The people who set up the pick-and-place machines, wave soldering, et al , can be either male or female and either can do well, but men make poor component level assemblers, they get bored and quit or get sloppy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HgS6gvokEI
If the Sepoys are so good at coding, why hasn’t India developed an operating system to take on Windows and Apple?
Home run, Steve! I know you aren’t holding your breath while waiting for Our Betters to admit it.
Nowadays, white men’s unconscious bias is enough to deter women from jobs in coding. Obviously there was a time when women were not such snowflakes as they are today.
Why continue to ask the question when that great philosopher, Gary Sheffield, already explained why tech wants Hindus and Confucians instead of Americans?
http://www.espn.com/mlb/news/story?id=2891875
Food for thought:
https://newtheory.com/2-21-of-indian-graduating-computer-programmers-can-write-correct-code/Replies: @HA
“Even trained male programmers vary wildly in productivity. Some can write only fifty or so lines a day. Others write hundreds of lines.”
I’d be wary of trying to measure productivity by way of “lines a day”. That “fifty or so” guy may well turn out to be a far more productive programmer, as long as he comments his code appropriately.
I used to ocassionally tell my boss that I didn't write 50 LOC that day, but I did delete 50 LOC.
I have been (unjustly) accused of having a strange sense of humor.
You could also get an Apple II real or emulated) and do some 6502 assembler.
At the other end of things, there are mainframe and minicomputer emulators running on 64 bit Intel hardware, everything from CDC Cybers and Burroughs B series, the VAX and its VMS operating system, to the IBM 370 and its earlier operating systems, to the geek favorite of all time the Symbolics Lisp Machine.
So for those with the urge, the tools are there. You just have to get off your ass and do it.Replies: @peterAUS
Pretty much.
Especially:
Actually we don’t. Not sure where you and others concluded that from my post.
Sad how reading comprehension levels on this site are in decline.
The Commodore 64 with its 8 bit 6502 CPU was mostly reliant on assembler programming for any useful application programming: there were compilers but mainly used by schools and hobbyists as far as I know.
Don Lancaster, a famous "hoodoo guru" (influential for a little while and then vocally wrong for the next three decades) wrote:https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/programming/6502assembly/Assembly_Cookbook_for_the_Apple_II_IIe.pdf
This also meant that when the 6502 (a processor Wozniak only chose over the 6800 Motorola because Motorola shortsightedly priced it ridiculously high) was replaced by the x86 ( if you bought a PC) or the Motorola 68K (if you bought a Mac, an Atari ST, an Amiga, or a workstation pre-RISC) the entire code base was instantly and totally worthless. When you wrote in high level languages you had some portability. Donzi never quite understood that and he went from being a leading pundit to an obscure crank advocating the use of PostScript laser printers as general purpose computers.
NeXT illustrated this well: by release 3.3 it ran on four different CPU families and you could make any and all programs written on any of its provided environments (if you used NeXT Developer) run on any of the four with "fat binaries". NeXT died because Jobs stupidly spent most of its capital on building a plant to build beautifully made and elegant workstations with inadequate CPU power, then abandoning hardware for software only releases: but to get his hardware out the door he licensed huge amounts of outside code in the OS and therefore could not sell the OS at a price anyone would buy it. Had Apple not bought NeXT he woud have been out of business and broke.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
IBM promoted their VisualAge Smalltalk heavily in the 90s, and I can tell you for a fact that many companies world-wide, whose names you would recognize, are still running large Smalltalk systems.
In these cases, generally company B forces company A's users to use company B's software. Company B did just that, until there was such an outcry from company A's users in the field that they went back to using company A's Smalltalk system.
OO languages are unmatched in their ability to accommodate change, because as long as you keep the APIs the same, the internals of the objects can be easily changed.
Java stole a lot of its good ideas from Smalltalk; they just didn't steal enough of them and then they kept that ghastly C-- syntax.
Dolphin and Pharo Smalltalk are both free. Check it out if you are interested in a pure OO language. Smalltalk books are here: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.htmlReplies: @Anonymous
I'd be wary of trying to measure productivity by way of "lines a day". That "fifty or so" guy may well turn out to be a far more productive programmer, as long as he comments his code appropriately.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Anon
Refactoring is a big thing in OO languages. It means that, from time to time, you go back and rewrite some code with the goal of making it simpler.
I used to ocassionally tell my boss that I didn’t write 50 LOC that day, but I did delete 50 LOC.
I have been (unjustly) accused of having a strange sense of humor.
I know of a company A that was bought by company B. Company A’s system was written in Smalltalk and the users in the field, who brought in the business, loved it.
In these cases, generally company B forces company A’s users to use company B’s software. Company B did just that, until there was such an outcry from company A’s users in the field that they went back to using company A’s Smalltalk system.
OO languages are unmatched in their ability to accommodate change, because as long as you keep the APIs the same, the internals of the objects can be easily changed.
Java stole a lot of its good ideas from Smalltalk; they just didn’t steal enough of them and then they kept that ghastly C– syntax.
Dolphin and Pharo Smalltalk are both free. Check it out if you are interested in a pure OO language. Smalltalk books are here: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
I've worked in HR for 4 different software companies, been heavily involved in college recruiting, hiring, retention, aptitude testing of candidates, hack-a-thons, code challenges - you name it.
That occasional strong American female programmer who can hold her own with anyone in app development does exist but does NOT want to continue doing that for very long - they usually stay in software but move into Project Management, Consulting, QA Management or the type of middle management 6-figure $$+ paying roles that are still lightly technical but don't require your nose to be in the keyboard for all 8 hours of your day, pushing out code in hands-on fashion.
Of course, H-1B Indian females are an exception, they still on the technical side for much longer but still have less stomach for it over time in comparison to Indian males.Replies: @nebulafox, @Anon
One woman I have seen in the media went from coding on a product to travelling to customer sites in order to diagnose problems and possible improvements relating to the soffware to her current position as travelling outreach person giving TED Talk style speeches to girls encouraging them to enter programming, a job she notably hasn’t done for quite a while. And get this. She does fashion design for her own small line on the side.
I am reminded of the elusive black corporats attorney. Blacks go to law school snd then end up in some side profession rarher than as a partner in a firm.
I'd be wary of trying to measure productivity by way of "lines a day". That "fifty or so" guy may well turn out to be a far more productive programmer, as long as he comments his code appropriately.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Anon
Yes, of courss, but he is referring to the Mythical Man Month phenomenon, well documented at IBM.
In these cases, generally company B forces company A's users to use company B's software. Company B did just that, until there was such an outcry from company A's users in the field that they went back to using company A's Smalltalk system.
OO languages are unmatched in their ability to accommodate change, because as long as you keep the APIs the same, the internals of the objects can be easily changed.
Java stole a lot of its good ideas from Smalltalk; they just didn't steal enough of them and then they kept that ghastly C-- syntax.
Dolphin and Pharo Smalltalk are both free. Check it out if you are interested in a pure OO language. Smalltalk books are here: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.htmlReplies: @Anonymous
Good link.
http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/6_Smalltalk-80.html
also has some stuff on the original Mac implementation.
Good idea. They could call it Hindows!
The same thing occurred in the electronics industry. Years ago I had business with defense-related electronics facilities in California where the shop floors were populated primarily by young (Asian) women. Same consideration: attention to detail with the ability to assemble extremely small electronic components with their delicate hands.
Can you believe this! I once worked for a defense company that had a shop exclusively "manned" by women, of all things, braiding cables linking electronic components.
Suspect that over the years robots have taken over a lot of these jobs where women excelled with special skills that men could not perform.Replies: @Anonymous
Electronic assembly at the component level is almost entirely female. And has been since the 1920s.
Look at any assembly line photo of TVs or Fender guitar amps being made in the fifties.
Most of these women are aware they could make more money by moving up to the technician level but do not want to do that, they prefer the assembly side of the house. It’s a big coffee klatsch they get paid to attend.
I have been in dozens of electronic plants and worked as a field tech, repair tech, component engineer, PCB layout artist, and production planner, seen the pattern over and over. The female techs were never assembleresses and the female engineers never techs, unlike the men who sometimes started in mechanical assembly (bigger stuff needing male strength), and went through vo-tech then to college and eventually became engineers or managers.
The people who set up the pick-and-place machines, wave soldering, et al , can be either male or female and either can do well, but men make poor component level assemblers, they get bored and quit or get sloppy.
Early in the industry computer work was considered drudgery. When smart people chose to do computers instead of trying to get into one of the traditional prestige professions like medicine or law it was all over for the women.
I know a lot of housewives married to programmers who studied computers and other technical subjects when they were college students.Replies: @MarkinLA, @simple_pseudonymic_handle
That is good data.
I was in Berkeley. If in science and engineering the other students thought you were a vulcan. You were right there when the whole thing was exploding at time zero!
Soon there won’t be anybody left who knows what a punch card or a slide rule is. Like really really soon. Some people remember their prom or their big game. My big day was when IBM showed my class around their facility for an entire morning. I can still see those big tape drives zig zagging and hear the the printers clacking. Big iron.
The comprehension how all that really works stops at high level language for most. A minority knows a bit about compilers, even smaller minority gets assemblers.
And analog electronics....well..that's simply not in registered universe of today's "computer programmers" and "information technology" professionals.
And talking heads keep blabbing about automation...........
A game changer on both ends of shells trajectory.
Our Assembly language class programmed on a simulator of Knuth's Mixall machine run on the 360. The only actual computer we got to touch was the Intel 8080 teaching system in a lab.
By 1982, thanks to DARPA money, everybody had access to terminals that were connected to VAX machines where you could store and execute your programs interactively.Replies: @simple_pseudonymic_handle
Markin I replied to your comment but I misplaced it as a reply to me.
It is here: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-answer-is/#comment-3044965
(On my browser that link lands 1/2 screen too high. It’s the one that looks like simple_pseudonymic_handle is replying to simple_pseudonymic_handle with the picture of the big IBM computer room with the woman in there.)
I was in Berkeley. If in science and engineering the other students thought you were a vulcan. You were right there when the whole thing was exploding at time zero!
Soon there won't be anybody left who knows what a punch card or a slide rule is. Like really really soon. Some people remember their prom or their big game. My big day was when IBM showed my class around their facility for an entire morning. I can still see those big tape drives zig zagging and hear the the printers clacking. Big iron.
https://d2r9nfiii89r0l.cloudfront.net/dimg/800x600/dimg/us__en_us__ibm100__system_360__woman_at_360__800x593.jpgReplies: @peterAUS, @peterAUS
Soon there won’t be anybody left who knows that a computer program is just a LONG line of bits flying over buses into/out from electronic circuits.
The comprehension how all that really works stops at high level language for most. A minority knows a bit about compilers, even smaller minority gets assemblers.
And analog electronics….well..that’s simply not in registered universe of today’s “computer programmers” and “information technology” professionals.
And talking heads keep blabbing about automation………..
I was in Berkeley. If in science and engineering the other students thought you were a vulcan. You were right there when the whole thing was exploding at time zero!
Soon there won't be anybody left who knows what a punch card or a slide rule is. Like really really soon. Some people remember their prom or their big game. My big day was when IBM showed my class around their facility for an entire morning. I can still see those big tape drives zig zagging and hear the the printers clacking. Big iron.
https://d2r9nfiii89r0l.cloudfront.net/dimg/800x600/dimg/us__en_us__ibm100__system_360__woman_at_360__800x593.jpgReplies: @peterAUS, @peterAUS
My big day was when we switched from analog to digital battery computer. Suddenly, from engaging one target only we could….whoah…..blast multiple. Engage any of them, in instant, with different fires, different ammunition. Faster corrections, better accuracy ,everything.
A game changer on both ends of shells trajectory.