this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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The majority of "programmers in the past" should be women actually, but our meme formats are still too patriarchal to express that in 2025.
No, I don't think so. It's true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.
In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today's programming were from Grace Hopper's era in the 1950s.
In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.
That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.
Depends how far you go back. The top half is pretty representative of the professional dev team I was in in 1992.
"Creates a whole game in assembly" is probably referring to roller coaster tycoon, which was written by a man. (lots of other games were written in asm, like many NES games, but I'd wager RCT was what they were alluding to)
That was my immediate thought. There were many that came before RCT, but it has the distinction of being (possibly) one of the last in an industry that had already moved on to higher-level languages to do merely half as much.
We need to bring back 2010-2012 rage comic memes. All we needed was a badly cut-out blonde wig to trans Derp's gender.
The glory days of Derp and Derpina
Obligatory Grace Hopper
So were "computers". It used to be a job, delegated mostly to women. The JD is doing calculations day in and day out.
The moon landing by hand wouldn't have been as funny without the over the top body builders first.
"too patriarchal" no one was thinking of "furthering the goals of the patriarchy" or whatever your delusions tell you.
It's just people making memes, and most people who make memes who are guys will make memes with guys in them, because they identify with them the most.
Your brain dead take is pure cancer.
I agree with you: I never intended to imply explicit anti-diversity intentions or even awareness of the biases embedded in our culture.
Source
The large initial percentage of female coders was due to computer having been a female job, because secretary was. Their role within companies didn't change, what changed is that they were using machines to do the computing instead of doing it by hand.
We're kinda lucky to have the woke trifecta (Ada, Grace, Alan) (first programmer (woman), inventor of compilers (woman), absolute unit (gay)) to keep the chuds at bay. Even if we weren't all socially inept nerds (or pretending to be so to bosses) there's only so much you can do, culturally, if the population is growing exponentially. Uncle Bob (yes I know he's a chud) did the maths at some point IIRC it was something like the number of programmers doubling every two years. Which also means that at any one point in time roughly 2/3rds of programmers have no idea what they're doing, which explains the javascript ecosystem.
You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.
At first I thought this was the Wicked Witch of the West's actress and thought she must have been multitalented. Then I looked it up to verify. Nope, same name, different women.
If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:
So many great points in a short comment. I love your high bandwidth writing style!
Dude. Chill. Ain't nobody giving a shit about your take on someone else's take.