Valerie Barr

I’ve been around for a while. I graduated from college before most schools (certainly most small colleges) had CS majors and CS degrees. I’ve been teaching CS in full-time post-secondary positions for 30 years. I’ve seen a lot of change in that time, and I’ve seen the way the CS community responds to change. I’ve seen the dominant introductory programming language change many times (Pascal, C, C++, anyone remember Modula 2?).

Concerns about representation in computing within the U.S. have driven numerous activities to broaden participation. Assessment of the impact of these efforts and, indeed, a clear assessment of the actual “problem” being addressed are limited by the nature of the most common data analysis, which looks at the representation of each population as a percentage of the number of students graduating with a computing degree.

By Valerie Barr Communications of the ACM, November 2022, Vol.