"Deidre L. Calarco" wrote:
> BTW, I've been with the same guy for eight years (we're not married, but we
> own a house together). He's even more technically oriented than I am. I
> think he would have a lot trouble relating to a woman who wasn't into
> computers, although he does have many other interests. We met in a computer
> engineering class - Data Structures II - and interestingly, I've backed off
> of programming partly because he was much more advanced at it than I was
> when we first met, and now he's better at it than I could ever be (He's been
> working in the field for 8 years, I've been doing other things). I want to
> stay off of his turf. I don't want to put myself in a teacher-student
> situation. Once I'm working as a structural engineer, if I find things I
> want to do that I can't do on a spreadsheet or with existing software, I'll
> get back into programming. Still, I feel as if I'm guilty of what I was
> talking about above, only at a higher level.
It's a bad reason to give up programming. In 1993 I was programming
little utilities in BBC BASIC on Acorn Archimedes and I reckoned I was
probably as good as I would ever get. A male friend who was *much*
better at it than me more or less pushed me into C programming (and even
wrote a GUI library for RISC OS to get me started). This happened again
with my colleagues in Eidos where even *I* ended up doing some codec
work, and is still the case now with my partner Kira, who is on the
Linux kernel core team.
If the atmosphere and the relationship are right it can be incredibly
stimulating. It does to a certain extend depend on the intellectual
generosity of the other person, but in my experience the better a
programmer is the more they enjoy imparting those skills. Those who
hoard their skills often turn out to be hoarding surprisingly little.
There will always be someone who's better, otherwise what do you have to
aim for? In the meantime I've exceeded that first friend's skills (he
got himself mired in MS technologies, I'm still trying to rescue him!),
and I'm a *way* better programmer than ever I expected to be in 1993.
--
Rachel
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
