
Your Career in Computer Programming (2015) - benbreen
https://thecomputerboys.com/?p=717
======
RickJWagner
What's interesting is that she didn't go to college-- she got offers from
companies that had training programs.

I started programming professionally in 1990. This is how many of the older
colleagues I started with got their starts.

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noir_lord
Not that old but I started in the late 90s without a degree.

Hasn't hurt my career so far, the people my level are a mix of degree/no
degree.

Had to go back and fill in the theory I missed over time as I've needed it
occasionally.

I still hold that programming for the real world should be taught as an
apprenticeship, throwing people from CS into a software developer role is just
unfair.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> programming for the real world should be taught as an apprenticeship,
> throwing people from CS into a software developer role is just unfair.

Isn't this what junior software developer roles do?

~~~
noir_lord
Not in my experience, very little teaching seems to be the norm.

They just get thrown in with little oversight and support (unless they land on
my team then I do my best to protect them from that).

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yowlingcat
I'm sure someone here has a better explanation for a connection I've been
thinking about (and saw on twitter, for what it's worth), so I figured I'd ask
here.

I've never looked that much into knitting, but the instructions seem
remarkably similar to assembly language instructions. Beyond that, I did a
little bit of research into a jacquard loom works the other day, and realized
it operated using punch cards. This really fascinates me, because it seems to
precede Babbage's machine and yet I never have read particularly much
treatment of it in history of computing type treatises.

I wonder if, given some of the conventionally more feminine stereotyped gender
roles pertaining to knitting and clothmaking, any of this played into what
early conceptions of what a "programmer" was? Was there a point where people
reasonably made the inference that the closest analog for what early punch
card programming was would be jacquard loom operation and knitting? It is
fascinating how it the idea of the vocation of writing software flipped the
other way in terms of gender stereotypes.

~~~
grawprog
My girlfriend's into crocheting. One day I went with her to the craft store
and she got a few pattern books. I looked through a bunch of them and my first
thought was 'oh, shit, they're all a bunch of computer programs'. I'd never
really thought too much into it before, but my girlfriend explained how the
patterns work to me and they're basically lines of code. There's even
rudimentary loops and if statements.

Now I'm wondering if anyone's ever looked into making a Turing complete
'knitting instruction set' or ever looked into whether knitting was in fact
Turing complete and if not, how to make it so. Would make for an interesting
master's thesis or something. I'd read that paper.

~~~
slavik81
There are knitting machines for which you enter knitting instructions. As
different machines have different capabilities, you may wish to compile your
high-level knitting patterns to different knitting instruction sets. Some
compilers are better at optimizing than others, resulting in more efficient
knitting programs.

See "A Compiler for 3D Machine Knitting" and accompanying video.
[https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/machine-
knitting-c...](https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/machine-knitting-
compiler/)

~~~
grawprog
This is why I love hn. I post a random thought on the idea of a 'knitting
computer' on a comment comparing knitting and programming and someone comes
along with some detailed post showing exactly such a thing exists and
information explaining it. Thank you.

~~~
perl4ever
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knitting_machine#Knitting_asse...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knitting_machine#Knitting_assembly_language)

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troughway
>Given a complex customer problem, a female analyst/programmer will often
handle the problem better than would her male colleagues with equivalent
experience and ability. Not because businessmen are more lenient or show
favoritism toward the female of the species, but because the female is often
more sensitive to the nuances of a problem and to the complex interpersonal
relations that may be part of the problem. In a very real sense, every
computer problem with a customer is also a customer relations problem, and
this is where feminine tact, insight, and intuition, combining with solid
programming and analytical ability, can really pay off for the girl
programmer.

The book is "brilliant" because of quips like the aforementioned.

Now, lets flip the genders and see who gets to keep their head.

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dang
Please don't take the flamiest baitiest thing and start the discussion rolling
downhill like this. It's exactly the opposite of what we're hoping for.
Rather, you should comment on the most _interesting_ thing. If there isn't
anything interesting, or you don't have anything to say about it, please don't
post. The idea is curious conversation.

This is particularly important when a thread is new, because threads are
sensitive to initial conditions. You wouldn't spill oil in a lake or toss
litter in a park, so please don't do that here either.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
troughway
I disagree dang.

It's literally half the article, and the author is practically gushing about
it, in a time when as you yourself admit that bringing it up is the "flamiest
baitiest thing".

They could have chosen any other excerpt from the book. They chose this one.

Flag the article - don't flag my commentary.

