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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

It's really interesting how back in the 50s-70s, programming was considered boring, clerical women's work and the architecture side of things was considered men's work. The attitude at the time was that the men did the real work by writing flowcharts and the women were doing menial labour by turning those flowcharts into computer instructions. A lot of these women in the footnotes seem to be a footnote because of this consideration.

The Computer Girls is another interesting article about this attitude and how programming became masculised:

http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/files/ensmenger-gende...

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This reminds me of RMS:

"I find it bizarre that people use the term "coding" to mean programming. For decades, we used the word "coding" for the work of low-level staff in a business programming team. The designer would write a detailed flow chart, then the "coders" would write code to implement the flow chart. This is quite different from what we did and do in the hacker community -- with us, one person designs the program and writes its code as a single activity. When I developed GNU programs, that was programming, but it was definitely not coding.

Since I don't think the recent fad for "coding" is an improvement, I have decided not to adopt it. I don't use the term "coding", except if I were talking about a business programming team which has coders." - https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Because in those days big part of "coding" was actually transcribing program logic into codes and then punching holes in cards for those codes. It was tedious and boring process. What we today call code monkeys is super-creative position compared to that.

This is a revisionist and false narrative, and I believe it may be inspired by the "just world fallacy": you may be inclined to believe the world couldn't actually be unfair to women, so you search for another reason why their contributions would actually have been less important.

Your narrative is historically incorrect. Women invented many of the things that made software engineering _less_ tedious, such as debuggers (Betty Holberton, 1945), subroutines (Kay McNulty, circa 1947), assemblers (Kathleen Booth, 1947), linkers (Grace Hopper, 1952), and compilers (Grace Hopper, 1954). Programmers have always strived to make their job easier. If you don't see these inventions as creative effort, I don't know how to help you.

Even the parts of programming that were tedious were still important. If you saw someone tediously programming in assembly code today, you might celebrate the effort.

The flowcharts that these women were handed by their managers were not "program logic". There were many difficult details to work out about how to implement a program given the limited computing power of the time. You would not describe a manager today who draws a flowchart as having "written a program".

You jump to conclusions and project your own anger/frustrations that have absolutely nothing to do with me. First of all I totally agree with you that to women it was much harder to succeed in those times, there's no need to explain that to me. Second I never even mentioned gender issues anywhere, I was talking about the difference between what was called "programming" and what was "coding" back in those days. And of course women invented a lot of great stuff, but as you said yourself it was programming. And the coding part on the other hand was boring as hell, in order to write and run a program you had to do a lot of manual labour. It's just not comparable to anything today. You mention assembler, but imagine doing asm using only pen & paper, and then you give that program to someone else to turn it into holes on punched cards. And then you had to reserve some time to run that code on mainframe (where operator would run it for you and hand you back the results) and there was a usually a long waiting list for that, so if you've made any mistakes it would take days to get a chance to re-run it again. It was very different than coding today, involved more steps and more people.

> considered boring

It was boring though. Programming 50's is nothing like programming in 2019. They were doing tedious data entry.

No, they weren't doing "tedious data entry", they were writing the entire program. And I'd say it would be less boring than programming in 2019, which is easier and pre-existing libraries solve most of it for us.

You are doing exactly the thing the article describes.

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