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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35412 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer. I really don't know what it is at the root of this. My superficial intuition is that a certain aspect of becoming a good programmer is just relentlessness. Sometimes you need to try out 100 different bug fixes and read through 50 stack overflow and obscure forum posts to fix a certain problem or get something working. Men in my experience are much much more willing to swim through the stack overflow and debugger sewers than women.

I think Dr. Lawrence Summers shed some light on that matter in 2005 but it didn't go over well. I think 70+ years ago women may have been more represented in programming because either programming was easier compared to today or they were not actually doing programming as it's understood today. Probably a mix of both. Coding today has many more parts...more complexity in terms of interconnectedness, hence steeper learning curve. A Node.js trading platform or app is way more complicated, more moving parts, than anything produced in the 60s.

My personal observation is that all good programmers I know show signs of high intelligence but not everyone who shows signs of high intelligence shows programming aptitude proportional to their intelligence. I am not entirely sure if its a "wordcel vs shape rotator" issue, the dichotomy isn't as obvious as is with Electrical Engineering for example.

IQ is one of those things that's necessary but insufficient.

Programming is hard. Teaching it is also hard. Beginner tutorials tend to have an order of more magnitude views than advanced tutorials.

Most people are not learning how to actually program but learning how to follow instructions for a tutorial, which are related skills, but making the leap from tutorials to deeper or fundamental understanding is harder. If as soon as you deviate a little too much from the tutorial you get lost again, means you never understood it well to begin with.

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