Researcher question – what's the point of semicolons and curly braces?

Chris via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed May 4 12:15:11 PDT 2016


On Wednesday, 4 May 2016 at 15:46:13 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

[snip]

>
> Verifiable fact: My sister paid considerably less than I did 
> for each year of college even though we came from EXACTLY the 
> same economic background, exactly the same city/town, exactly 
> the same ethnicity, nearly the same age (and yet she's slightly 
> younger, so if anything, increasing tuition rates would have 
> worked AGAINST her), and one of our respective colleges was 
> even the exact same school. And her pay now is (considerably) 
> higher than mine, and she works in a field that's known to pay 
> LESS than my field.

There are groups in Europe and the US (and elsewhere I'm sure) 
who try to draw attention to this issue, like these guys for 
example http://www.avoiceformen.com/.

> Anti-female systems in place? Bull fucking shit. Anyone who 
> claims there are: put up REAL fucking examples instead of 
> parroting vacuous rhetoric or shut the fuck up forever.

My experience with computer science and related fields is that a 
lot of young women are into computers, just not into programming. 
They are drawn to computers because of multi-media stuff, digital 
design, creating videos, creating games (often educational games 
for kids) with easy to use frameworks. The closer you get to the 
machine, the less women you will find (mind you, this does not 
mean "no women at all"), to give you a _rough_ scale of 
increasing complexity: multi-media and social networks (e.g. 
blogs) > app development > Python > Java > C/C++ > compiler 
programming / assembly ...

I know from my own experience that no matter how much you 
encourage and support women (who have a degree in CS or related) 
to code their own stuff, they often don't want to and prefer to 
use drag-and-drop frameworks and let the lads (for Americans: 
this means "the guys / men") do the nitty-gritty stuff.

Now, one can argue whether all this is down to biological (i.e. 
evolutionary) programming, which has in turn been perpetuated by 
social structures, or whether this is a purely social artifact. 
Either way,  we should provide everybody with equal 
opportunities. While women should not be discouraged from doing 
anything they want to do, they should not be pampered either, 
because this would be unfair to men and indeed sexist, 
perpetuating the view that women are delicate flowers that have 
to be protected and cannot stand up for themselves.


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