My mother taught me to program when I was nine years old. I still remember using my mom's homemade word processor and typing my first program in Turbo Pascal. It was a simple calculator program: a user entered two numbers with an operator and the computer printed the answer. It was a blissful, ecstatic, intoxicating, feeling of relief when I ran it and it worked. With my mom looking over my shoulder, I had written a program with if/else structures, a loop, variables, and pure logic. The logic is what drew me to computer science. If you did this and this, the computer would always give you that. I didn't go into computer science for the complicated games, the crazy graphics, or the cool programs. I chose computer science as my field for the thrill that comes by using logic to solve a puzzle. If more women were introduced to computer science with a bare bones editor, a simple puzzle, and a straightforward language more women would enter the field.
This is in response to DePalma, "Why Women Avoid Computer Science"
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