If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged.

[winterkoninkje]

All you hackers should read this. True to form, I came to hacking late, much despite a strong interest in mathematics as a child. (For those who may not be aware, mathematics does not have the same gender inequity problems CS does.) These sorts of privilege contests have always pissed me off, not just because of the machismo involved but also —though I did not have the words at the time— exactly because of their brandishing of white male privilege as virtuous and ideal.

Comments

Machismo and Privilege

[http://comonad.com/reader/]

I was granted that privilege because I grew up as the only white kid in my neighborhood in urban Detroit, and my mother was afraid of how many fights I was getting in when I left the house. I hacked on the computer because it was safer than going outside. If you want to call that machismo, so be it. To me at the time it struck me as the only reasonable course of action. I think attacking those who had those opportunities is the wrong answer, and perhaps a more constructive focus would be on exposing similar opportunities to more people -- the OLPC initiative springs to mind.

I was treated to this privilege because my mother worked 3 jobs to raise two kids and put herself through college. It was very much a privilege, but after the initial computer purchase, I had to pay for my own equipment. This drove me to write shareware, run paper-routes, etc. and motivated me in a way that is difficult to describe to feed my computing addiction.

I am terribly appreciative of the fact that she went out of her way and spent money she could scarce afford to make that opportunity for me. To this day, she teases me that she is jealous that I get to do something that I enjoy for a living. I appreciate that others lacked those opportunities, but I'll be damned if I'm going to apologize for making the most of it.

And for the record, I was 7. ;)

-Edward Kmett

Re: Machismo and Privilege

[winterkoninkje]

The machismo I was referring to isn't the privilege. Rather, it's the way that that privilege gets flaunted in pissing contests in order to perform one's masculinity.

If it were just privilege, that's one thing. I come from more than enough privilege. While my programming career only began somewhere between highschool and freshman year, I did have access to computers from a very young age, and I was certainly encouraged to learn to program them rather than just play with them. That I didn't start earlier is probably due to the fact that C++ was the language suggested by my father, a database programmer with the USPS. (C++ makes absolutely no sense. But once I found Perl I was done for.)

While programming wasn't my thing growing up, I did have the privilege to go to CTY for four years to study college-level mathematics (and biochem) over the summers of middleschool and early highschool. Because of this, and a mother who was supremely willing to combat public schooling administration on my behalf, I got to graduate HS a year early. I've only recently begun to truly appreciate the fact that she played a far more significant role in the process than did my own eduction or intelligence. E.g., were not for her, they would have placed me in remedial schooling in the third grade, due to boredom— rather than sending me to a magnet program for gifted and talented students. After graduating early, I got to go to a private liberal arts college that specializes in (mostly white) kids who are too smart for their own good. To this day I'm certain that at any other college I would have failed out for boredom. I wouldn't be where I am today were not for this privilege heaped upon privilege; even despite the fact that I was disowned halfway through Reed and had to pay my own way for the rest of it, as well as for PSU and JHU since then.

The point of discussing privilege is not to apologize, it's to acknowledge the role it plays in shaping all our lives so that we can overcome the biases induced by our failure to recognize how hard life is for others. Privilege will always exist, regardless of resources; acknowledging it is an act of compassion, not repentance. Noone's asking you to give up the opportunities your mother made for you. Debasing ourselves does not serve to help others. But we must recognize the sources of our power if we are to use that power to do good rather than harm.

But that wasn't my point here nor, I think, the point of the OP. There's a certain ritual that male geeks perform in order to enact their masculinity and to set up the pecking order. Part of this ritual is bragging about how early they started programming, whether that's our generation's age-based bragging or the previous generation's technology-based bragging (punch cards, anyone?). The way they go about this is aggressive and exclusionary, the same as rituals of machismo among non-geek men like talking shit or exaggerating sexual prowess. These acts of machismo are one of the reasons why women are so rare in our field. Consider, for instance this article or this paper on how the masculine environments of stereotypical (male) geeks causes women to distance themselves from any interest in computer science. Certainly, opportunities should be extended to women and minorities in order to counterbalance lack of privilege; but if systemic issues in geek culture are not addressed, then they will have little desire to follow up on those opportunities.

[lindseykuper]

Thanks for the link. I commented over on Geek Feminism, but one thing I forgot to mention there is that sometimes, with those of us who started hacking late, it turns into a reverse pissing contest -- sort of a "Look how good I am at this now, with only n years under my belt -- if I had been doing it as long as you have, I'd obviously be better than you!" thing. I've certainly been guilty of that kind of bragging.

[winterkoninkje]

Yeah, you get that too. That's part of the reason I don't tend to bring up how long I've been programming for, let alone how long I've been doing type theory/category theory.

I bring up beginning with Perl more often because I think that's actually relevant. I started from Perl and have been working my way down towards the CPU (and pure theory) ever since. I think starting with a high-level language like Perl is best, because it encourages you to think with high-level abstractions instead of getting hung up on low-level implementation details. All the folks in my undergrad classes who started with C (or C++ or Java) had a much harder time grasping the algorithms at stake because they couldn't see the forest for the trees. If I were designing intro curricula, I'd be torn between teaching Perl vs teaching Haskell. The pure/strong-typing and lambda-calculus of Haskell are really important to learn early, but Haskell tends to have a lot of low-level datastructures which can distract from the basics. Perl is great for writing how you think and ignoring low-level details and paradigms, but it's also an untyped nightmare. C et al. are the worst of both worlds (low-level and no types worth mentioning), whereas untyped functional languages like Erlang and Scheme lay somewhere in between (lambda calculi, but still no types).

[lindseykuper]

I actually think C has something important going for it as a beginners' language: minimalism (small and internally consistent and not overengineered). But it's too low-level, and I would be nervous starting with C because I wouldn't want anyone to get the mistaken impression that C's types are, you know, types. I want a first language to be high-level, minimal, and functional (so you can relate it to the math you already know), which is part of why I think Scheme is great as a first language. Python's not bad, either. For a second language, some ML-family language seems like a great idea to me, but Haskell isn't necessarily the best choice, in my opinion -- I still want minimalism at this stage. For a third language, learn C along with learning to understand the machine and the OS. For a fourth language, learn a language designed for working on large distributed projects, as well as the tools that go along with it, and at the same time, learn how to work on large distributed projects.

[winterkoninkje]

C is definitely a language everyone should learn at some point. This is one of those rare times when I agree with Joel on Software: the two hard things every CS major must learn are pointers and recursion. But since pointers are evil, everyone since C doesn't give you actual pointers; instead they protect you from yourself via references of some flavor or 'nother. So if you want to learn pointers, then you have to learn C. It's a shame really. Though the typelessness of C should put you in the right mindset for really learning what CPUs are munching on, and why pointers matter.

As for Haskell, it is a very minimal language. Far more minimal than OCaml or SML/NJ, that's for sure. Let's see here: ADTs, parametric polymorphism, typeclass polymorphism, and laziness. That's about it really. There's some syntactic sugar here and there (user-definable infix operators, do-notation, list comprehensions, guard patterns), but those really are mere syntactic sugar for writing the same thing another way. The trick is, Haskell chose its primitives to be orthogonal to one another, thereby simplifying the language and also getting the most power for your buck.

But there's also the problem of being too minimal. The untyped lambda calculus is Turing complete and all, but jiggering around with it obfuscates your code away from the actual task at hand just as badly as C does. This is why I'm no fan of Scheme. Sorry, no. Not everything is a list; no more than everything is an int, C to the contrary. Besides, with the wide assortment of different macro systems, making math primops into folds, and yet distinguishing other functions as being regular functions vs fold functions, having side effects, multiple types of equality,... you can hardly call Scheme a "minimal" language in this day and age.