Bill St. Clair

But it doesn’t—it comes, first, from the dumb bumbling luck of life and history, and then, forever, from pattern-matching,

Reinforced and amplified forever from the countless micro-adjustments to keep people in that pattern.

When you’re out of the pattern, you’re an anomaly, an exception that proves the rule (Must have gotten some of that pre-natal testosterone)

My mom ran punchcards in the late ‘60s. Computer engineering was full of women. Aside from being brilliant, Grace Hopper wasn’t an anomaly.

Did women at the time argue that men couldn’t do the work—that testosterone made them unsuited to the deliberative practice of code?

Nope, but when the money got better, you can guess what arguments started to emerge from the shadows.

But let’s say we set aside the effect of prenatal hormones on whether or not we like trucks, and consider this instead:

Is computer science really about “things”?