What Happened to All of the Women in Computer Science?

[jeff47]

14. Yes. It's unlikely you'd use anything more complicated than division.

And the vast majority of the time you'd not use anything more complex than addition and subtraction.

We're at the point where writing software is about writing the concept of the software, instead of the gory details about how that concept is enacted. Those details are dealt with in libraries, operating systems and compilers.

Here's an example of a web server written in Python:

from BaseHTTPServer import BaseHTTPRequestHandler,HTTPServer

class Handler (BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
  def do_GET(self):
    self.wfile.write("Hello, world!&quot

if __name__ == "__main__":
  httpd = HTTPServer(("", 80), Handler)
  httpd.serve_forever()

If you run that, and then point a web browser at the computer running it, the page on the web browser will say "Hello, world!"

That took 7 lines of Python. It would take hundreds of lines of C++. Because instead of having to write a web server and the gory details of what it does when a request comes in, I can just use a library (That's what HTTPServer is).

Today, software developers aren't doing math. They're assembling Legos. What makes it difficult is there's an inifinite number of Legos to choose from, and you have to know good ways to put them together. But that knowledge is pretty easy to build up over time.