[Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL

[Chuck Allison]

Hello Laura,

Saturday, October 8, 2005, 5:01:16 PM, you wrote:

LC> Why females shy away from math and science is no big mystery.  It is
LC> deemed 'not useful' by them.  See many posts by Anna Ravenscoft on the
LC> subject here in edu.sig archives.  These days she is 'Anna Ravenscroft
LC> Martelli' having married Alex Martelli.  (Hi Anna.  cc'd to you so as
LC> to not talk behind your back, and in case you want to comment.)

I met Anna and Alex at PyCon this year.

LC> I'm a mutant.  I think that mathematical beauty is _the most important
LC> cool thing_.  All things I love share in it, including wine-making and
LC> gourmet food preparing.  The same burning fire I get in me when I get
LC> a perfect bite of the best food perfectly matched with best suited
LC> wine -- I get when I get a new mathematical insight.  And they feed
LC> each other.  I write new mathematical ideas down on restuarant papers
LC> because I get them because the food has stimulated me in interesting
LC> ways.  Mentioning sex sounds crude, but my poor lover has had to put
LC> up with countless versions of the 'Eureka' principle -- I need to leap
LC> out of bed, not bath, naked screaming that 'I have found it' -- and to
LC> write it down before it is gone again.

Ahem. Well, you are unique :-)!

LC> But most women are not like this.  They want concrete usefulness.
LC> Here at Chalmers in Sweden the women students outnumber the men in all
LC> the Chemistry departments.  Chemistry is presented as concretely
LC> useful.  When I offered a night-course of three weeks at the Chalmers
LC> computer society (all chalmers students are automatically members) on
LC> compiler design, pypy, and how to hack ...  only got 4 takers, and all
LC> male.  A different 4 week course -- 'how to build a bot to take care
LC> of seeing if your favourite websites are announcing the things you
LC> want to know about -- NO PREVIOUS PROGRAMMING SKILLS NECESSARY' got me
LC> 57 takers, 35 of which were women.

LC> Women are not programming because they do not see it as Art, Joy,
LC> and a worthwhile selfish pleasure.   But also because they do not
LC> see it as useful.  I have no idea why this is a mystery to the
LC> educators.  They must not speak to many women.

I find this very illuminating. To be frank, I've suspected some of this
but we dare not say things like this in public because of the inflamed
rhetoric of feminists. We are skewered if we suggest that there is a
difference between men and women.

Keep the insights coming!

-- 
Best regards,
 Chuck