"I often see the effects of coding manifest in his daily habits and tasks: the way he meticulously organizes his sock drawer and how he does the dishes using the least amount of water and soap yet somehow achieves the highest level of cleanliness."
"I commiserated with other women -- girlfriends and wives of computer programmers who told me how their partners often forgot to eat, drink or go to the bathroom."
I'm sorry lady, you're not married to a programmer, you're married to a robot.
"The task was to build a website in six hours. We were guided through the basic concepts of HTML and CSS during two morning lectures led by teachers from Vancouver's Lighthouse Labs, then we were let loose to start creating our own projects."
"Organizers told me 60 per cent of the participants at the HTML500 were women. Everyone had different reasons for choosing to spend their Saturday learning computer science:"
Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren't even programming languages!
> Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren't even programming languages!
If a kid gave you a crayon picture, would you throw it in her face for having a shaky hand and a poor grasp of anatomy?
Everyone has to start somewhere. For a complete newbie, HTML works as well as anything for teaching the basic idea of language grammar, and better than most for giving immediate positive feedback.
"If a kid gave you a crayon picture, would you throw it in her face for having a shaky hand and a poor grasp of anatomy?"
This analogy is awful, although I admit I was being a bit pedantic: my point was that learning to use markup languages isn't "learning computer science," although it does qualify as learning software development.
I also thought the idea of "spending a Saturday learning computer science" to be kind of funny. It's like if you spent a day making popsicle stick catapults and described it as "spending a Saturday learning physics."
I'm the king of the pedants over here, but mocking a newbie for making an honest effort at trying something new and not quite having the terminology down after her very first day is kinda lame. Yeah, her language is humorously awkward, but she's getting out there and trying. We need to encourage this, both as programmers and as scientists.
Well, to use Randall's words, isn't HTML using words and symbols to describe the way some points of light show up? Heck, CSS can even make those points of light change over time nowadays. So, why is HTML/CSS not 'computer science'. Is programming in C 'computer science'? (I'd argue that only the smallest part of our field is really 'CS', the rest is closer to engineering).
HTML is definitely a declarative programming language. Its a limited (i.e., not Turing complete) language, which makes it of limited value as a vehicle for most general computer science concepts, but its still a programming language.
"I commiserated with other women -- girlfriends and wives of computer programmers who told me how their partners often forgot to eat, drink or go to the bathroom."
I'm sorry lady, you're not married to a programmer, you're married to a robot.
"The task was to build a website in six hours. We were guided through the basic concepts of HTML and CSS during two morning lectures led by teachers from Vancouver's Lighthouse Labs, then we were let loose to start creating our own projects."
"Organizers told me 60 per cent of the participants at the HTML500 were women. Everyone had different reasons for choosing to spend their Saturday learning computer science:"
Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren't even programming languages!