Comment by noosphr
3 days ago
In the 80s, 90s and 00s that's what they thought about coding.
Then when the salaries got good every pretended to have always been a nerd and really into everything nerd. With the result that they kicked all the nerds out.
That was the second iteration of that. Most of the programmers were women until the mid-70s when the nerdy men kicked the women out.
If you consider what assemblers and compilers do programming, sure.
But men didn't kick them out, technology did. Von Numan famously forbid the Eniac from ever being used for assembly when you had a perfectly cheap secretary pool to do the assembly by hand.
Low creativity repetitive work requiring great attention to detail is what the early female programmers did and what was automated first.
If we ever get deterministic AI the same will happen up the chain. I'm not holding my breath for the current generation of models, or the upcoming ones I've seen in papers.
That's underselling their role. One of those ladies doing the assembling for Von Numan was Grace Hopper, who then used that expertise to develop the first compilers.
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