Vestiges

Not all things age well, and it seems that culture, ideology and even temporal pragmatism age more like a glass of milk than like wine. Blame the early influencers of computing for the bad parts, their legacies for the perpetuation of those bad parts. "Nerd culture" in the computing industry was, in its prime, the vindication of repressed young people whose capabilities were eclipsed by their lowly social status. That framing of the industry persists, independent of its appropriateness, in much the same way as modern keyboards retain their awkward, staggered key alignment--a condition which owes to a mechanical constraint for typewriters whose physical levers demanded that compromise, but which serves no utility to contemporary typists aside from some familiarity of the convention. "Nerd culture" incurred a large social debt, which has served to deter women systemically from being represented in Computer Science, and more broadly has undermined efforts to better socialize computer scientists to cross-discipline commentary: "I entered this field so I wouldn't have to talk to anyone!"