original cynk

Ruminating over this fantastic comment/explanation by “ahoyhere”, aka Amy Hoy, in the Y Combinator forum titled “Startup boot camp Y Combinator illustrates dearth of women in tech“. I think it’s dead-on accurate:

“It’s not the programming syntax I think so much as the teaching of it.

Programming books, classes, etc., are led by people who ‘just get it’ – and therefore taught badly – and therefore can only be understood by people who ‘just get it’. And those people tend to look down on people who can’t ‘just get it.’

I, on the other hand, am a girl, and an extremely visual/verbal girl at that… an excellent designer and accomplished writer. I was doing all of that basically from a young age. I also learned BASIC.

When it came time to learn more complex programming, though, I got stuck, and nobody could explain it to me in a way that helped. I ended up teaching myself to draw loop diagrams, and procedural diagrams, and object diagrams, to visually THINK OUT the code, what it was doing. For a long time, I had to do this every time, or I was completely incapable of getting any traction on the coding problem at hand.

The thing about programming is that you have to actually BUILD AN INTERPRETER in your head. Some people seem to be born with the ability to do this. They are almost all – but not entirely – male.

I, on the other hand, am now an excellent developer. I know many developers who can write much tighter individual lines of code than me – but most of them can’t analyze and break down a problem, and architect as well as I do. And my lines of code are still very good.

So, I started out with a ‘disability’ but now I’m really great.

That’s because I read programming books, and went to programming classes, and instead of thinking ‘ZOMG I’ll never get this’ I thought to myself, ‘I’m really smart – this class is shit!’ And proceeded to nag everyone to answer my questions about my visual diagrams, until I got it.

That’s why I write and teach code in a visual way.

And amazingly, I have a much higher percentage of women readers and women course attendees than the general coding population… and also many, many grateful men who come from non-traditional backgrounds, like history majors, artists, designers, musicians and linguists.

Comp Sci problems aren’t men vs women, they’re super-crazy-almost-too-left-brain vs normal-or-right-brain.”