Re: Effect of Gender in Learning Ada

[Preben Randhol <randhol+news@pvv.org>]

Robert C. Leif wrote:
> 
> Is there any data on the relative grades of males vs. females in 
> learning Ada or other programming languages? A real problem exists in
> the decrease in the proportion of female programmers and/or software
> engineers. 

Decrease? I thought the number was increasing?

> If there is any dimorphism between the genders, I would
> suspect that woman might have the advantage. At least in US society,
> organization, neatness, and capacity for verbal and written
> expression are not preferentially associated with college age males.
> However in US society, risk taking and impatience are associated with
> college age males. I have a gut feeling that the use of C and its
> dialects for the introductory programming language may turn off the
> ladies.

It is stupid to use C in any introductory programming course IMHO.

There has been studies to show that female students was more practical
in relations to computers. I mean they don't care how much RAM, Hz etc.
but that the job gets done. I heard once a story from a university where
the male students mainly  chose to use C while the female chose lisp or
some other high level programming language to solve an assignment. The
female students got the job done fast and on time, while the male mainly
didn't make the deadline or they couldn't deliver solutions to the whole
assignment. However one should of course never generalise these things.
How the situation is now I don't know, but you should be able to find
social / anthropological studies of these things I think.

In my view C has the same problems as premature optimisation of source
code.

> I should note that the purpose of this posting is neither to start an
> argument nor to propose a hypothesis. It is a request for data.

And please turn off HTML when you post to usenet.

-- 
Preben Randhol                    http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/