Tuesday

After a couple of days of syntax, it's time for us to get back to more general content about Web design and development. Specifically, today we're going to talk about the background of the Web. The Web has its origins as a military project called ARPANet, which sought to connect computers across the United States so they could transfer files and messages in time of war.

ARPANet wasn't the Web, though, it was just the birth of the Internet. Over time, the commercial and entertainment possibilities of the Internet demanded something with more structure than the Internet. A guy named Tim Berners-Lee came up with what became known as the World Wide Web, in which documents serve as destinations on the Internet, and contain internal links using HTML that connect pages around the world. That was in 1990, and our world has not been the same since.

There has been tremendous growth in Web content and supporting technologies, but unfortunately that growth has been needlessly narrow. This is a problem of demographics. Suffice it to say, computer science as an industry is struggling with demographics. The industry is dominated by men of White and Asian backgrounds, meaning that the voices of women and people of color more broadly are not much heard at the decision-making level. Technologists make what they like and presume that everyone else will like it, too. In some cases, that approach works well enough, but we're still leaving entirely too much information unused and that means the needs of the majority of humanity are not being adequately met because those needs are not given voice.

Whether you are Google or Apple or Tesla or some other tech giant - or even a small tech company - limits to diversity inside your office translate to limits to customer satisfaction beyond that representation level. We all use tech. So we should all have some say in how it is developed.

One of the great strengths of Princeton is its racial diversity. Increasingly, we're also gaining in cultural and linguistic diversity. But if you look around this room, you will see that (on average), this class has two male students for every female student. That's unfortunate for us, but downright grim news for the industry. Half of all consumers are women, and if we cannot get more women to look favorably on computer science education and career tracks, companies will continue to struggle to meet the needs of women consumers.

With that background out of the way, it is time to take a look at this week's Coding Challenge. We'll be doing these almost every week between now and the end of the semester, so it is good to form some regular habits regarding them.