a) In this particular case, the code was a very simple loop.
The lawyers depended on the Judge being ignorant of code to win an IP ruling which claimed Google copied code from Oracle to make Android.
and it was PRECISELY THE SAME CODE, letter by letter.
But the Judge ,who was a QuickBASIC programmer hobbiest since the 1980s, writing some sophisticated stuff for fun, thought that code seemed pretty simple.
So he looked at a JAVA book over the weekend, translated it into QuickBASIC and could see that all it did was validation of input.
Big deal. That’s stuff high schoolers learn and there’s not much variety in how to do it in code.
So for all the hub-bub, that’s all it was. The Judge is embarrassed whenever it comes up because he knows it wasn’t any big deal.
b) None of my nieces and nes were going into programming. It was just hobby kid stuff.
I didn’t encourage any of them to become programmers because it’s a full field with enough people in it.
But I believe programming is great to have as a hobby. I’ve both made money with it and also done it as a hobby and there’s value in being able to debug code sometimes.