This post actually started out as a submission to hubski last weekend, a follow-up to my conversation with caelum19:
Is it just me, or is he implying that there are less women in computer science because it's too hard for them? He's also implying that high level languages were harder to learn than assembly, but that's a whole nother issue...Last year this graph went around the internet, showing how the number of women programmers began to drop off in the mid-80s
I was recently struck by a vague correlation: that's around the time we stopped programming in assembly!
Perhaps it's not accidental that that was when the demographics started to shift at the top of the funnel? Perhaps there was something about high-level languages that added an extra layer of complexity early on, and made programming harder to learn.
Sorry I wasn't clear. I'm not saying anything permanent and immutable about either men/women or high/low level languages. Rather I'm thinking about the path by which people learn, and claiming that the way we teach has, by historical accident, favored a very narrow subset of personality types with specific initial cognitive strengths. The others might well have become just as good or better programmers in the end, but they drop out very close to step 1, because of a format ill-suited to them, before they have a chance to find out. When we say someone is a more visual or linguistic learner we aren't claiming they can't understand pictures or that their verbal GRE score is doomed to be low. We're just saying that they lean on one side/lobe of their brain more heavily than the others at the most initial stages of learning. I was speculating in similar vein.
This looks like it could be emulated well by a two shell windows (or tmux) with a script that runs a unit testing script when files in a folder change on the right and just your standard editor on the left. Cool idea though, and it'd be great for this to be automatically setup for new programmers!
Yeah, the 'motor control' section could be emulated by tmux+inotify. But you'd still have trouble writing tests that "the screen looks like this when you type this", and so on. It's also hard for learners to grok tests and code at the same time, so they currently learn testing later and not as well, or not at all.