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Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Mar-2023 08:12:12 JST Adrian Cochrane
in reply to
- Mara
@Mara How terribly unsupportive of her parent!
Sounds like exactly the sort of thing which discourages women from programming... Combined with the stereotype that it's a masculine career...

In conversation Thursday, 16-Mar-2023 08:12:12 JST from floss.social permalink
- Mara (mara@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 16-Mar-2023 08:12:13 JST Mara
  
  "programming is serious and not a game [..] stop with the outfits and princess programmer stuff"
  I think we should all start writing software and giving talks while wearing princess dresses. 👸👗👩💻
  In conversation Thursday, 16-Mar-2023 08:12:13 JST permalink
  Attachments
  1. AITA for being honest with my daughter regarding her coding ability. I (36M) am a web developer for many years now and have a lot of experience. About a year ago my daughter (9F) suddenly decided she wanted to learn coding. She asked me to teach her. I declined and explained that it is complex and I don't have the time and would burn out from doing that after work as it is tough but that she was free to learn on her own. We have a white list of sites she can access on her laptop so we were not afraid of her searching the web. She did teach herself some C++ which is not a language | have used in years and is a bit outdated and not the simplest to pick up. It's been a year and she calls herself "princess programmer" and it is a little cringy and she likes to wear a nice dress or skirt while working on some simple games she makes. Recently she overheard one of my work meetings and learned what code reviews are and asked me to do one on her newest game while claiming that "princess programmer" wrote it very well and expects it to be very good. I noticed many issues like bad variable naming conventions, code duplication, using if condition,return instead of just returning the condition.
    https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/110/029/259/301/425/626/original/b0e39972439818f8.png
  2. I told her the quality sucked compared to anything that could be production code and that it would be easier to rewrite than fix it. I told her if she wanted to learn more she could rewrite it with my advice and that programming is serious and not a game and she should stop with the outfits and princess programmer stuff and maybe try an easier language than C++. She cried and threw a tantrum and is upset at me and says I was too mean. And my wife is now also upset at me and says | should have lied and said her work was good and told her how to make it better. My wife did do coding in college but she doesn't do much of it in her job these days. AITA here? EDIT: Ok fine, I get it I am TA. I'll apologize and make it up to her and focus more on the parts I was impressed about. Her game was decently complex and everything did worked and the program did not crash and she seemed to have understood pointers well, I can focus on that and tell her she can be princess programmer.
    https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/110/029/259/545/189/236/original/5d61884c5fb60ccb.png
  Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
- Frazell Thomas (logicalapex@thelounge.network)'s status on Thursday, 16-Mar-2023 08:13:12 JST Frazell Thomas
  in reply to
  - Mara
  @Mara We all definitely should!
  This parent is so toxic and condescending I can only hope this is fake for karma farming.
  The best programmers are those who started out doing it for the fun of it. Like this kid. I remember learning how to program by writing a calculator in Visual C++ to help me pass my math class and learn programming in my teens.
  We need more underrepresented groups in the field. I hope she keeps her fire.
  
  In conversation Thursday, 16-Mar-2023 08:13:12 JST permalink

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