The computer boys take over: computers, programmers, and the politics of technical expertise (ensmenger, n.l.; 2010) [Book Review]

The book describes the origins of computer programming and the competing interests that shaped its practice. It is about the growth of a practice - of programming or of software engineering - and about differing views of it as a craft, a profession, or a technology, and about the periodic crises that seemed to characterize the activity and its products. It is also about the masculinization of an activity in which women initially had a large role. One of the strengths of the book is its showing how what we may take as "obvious," such as the basic character of computer science as an academic discipline, emerges from multiple claims to define the field. Indeed, it was not obvious at the start that there should be such a field - new technologies often don\´t give rise to new disciplines. Academics who worked in computing wanted an intellectual foundation for programming, employers wanted educational standards, and computing workers wanted their activity to have professional standards. The major academic computing organization, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), also had non-academic members, but when it developed the first computer science curriculum standard, it was heavily theoretical and mathematical, and in the view of many in computing occupations, gave too little attention to practical data processing. The book is not primarily about academic computer science, though in its discussion of the ways in which women became excluded from the programming profession, it might have added something on university departments.