I think a lot of parents don't know how to effectively parent and make up for that with enthusiasm. Too much involvement, not enough parenting. I am guilty of this.
My preferred argument in favor is that depression can render government form-filled disability bureaucracy into an unnavigable hellscape and since it's one of the most common disabilities, a lot of human misery could be spared by making a living income automatically accessible.
I think you're right. I also know technical people who obscure gaps in their own knowledge with jargon. So clarifying questions that might expose the gap are responded to with increasingly technical rambling. Bad habits all around, feeding off each other.
In my experience, kids recognize the brightly-colored sanitized tools as "not real" programming. The moment they hit the overwhelming UI or unfriendly error messages of many environments, they feel under-prepared for "real" programming and take a hit to their confidence.
I tentatively agree with them. If I can take a stab at what "real" programming is, it's when you can't expect everything to just work out of the box. You can screw it up in unexpected ways. Sure, that's demoralizing. But you either win or you learn, and I wonder if winning too much, too early prevents cultivating the mental ruggedness it takes to really program.
I feel like the author doesn't understand the design part of OOD. Yes, you can inherit yourself into rigidity. OOP doesn't prevent you from making design choices that turn out to be bad, or are bad in the first place.
You can't reuse a class without reusing the whole world? That's the purpose of dependency injection and depending on interfaces instead of implementation. Decoupling.
Diamond problem? Okay, granted. But this still solvable in most languages with interfaces.
I'm not really drinking the OO Kool-Aid here. I lean functional when I get the chance, but this article reads like someone who's against rope because they hanged themselves.
Their job isn't just to be attractive. Their job is to help schmooze people who don't seem to be having fun. There are social skills involved, whether or not you value or believe in them.
But you're presupposing a problem. It's possible that women don't enter CS due to personal preference. Not because CS is hostile to women but because the subject matter isn't interesting to them.
I heard somewhere that there are just as many women in undergrad math as men, but the ratio dramatically decreases in graduate math because so many women leave... to teach.