Love it. They stopped teaching fortran the year after I took it in University. I stopped putting it on my resume years ago because I figured it was too dating
Your daughter's story makes me so very, very sad. I graduated EE as one of 4 in a class of 80 some in the late 90's. I'm now surrounded by polymaths and love the bizarre topics of daily discussion. Most hiring managers I've encountered are looking for people that can not only code but that have interests outside of computers and can hold a conversation. It's sad that these kids are being turned off before they even get started.
Bostonian - your story reminds me of my first day in the computer lab in first year. I had NO CLUE about computers, like none - hilarious considering where I've ended up. I was following the instructions line by line which walked us through using vi to write a fortran program (complete with escape :wq in the instructions). I was seriously in WAY over my head but doing my best not to show it. This guy walks behind me looks at my screen and screams "you're using vi? vi is for babies, real programmers use emacs!". Luckily it was obvious he was a complete dork so it was more entertaining than insulting. Luckily I have yet to encounter someone so..... um, special in my career.
I think it's a problem when kids feel they have to eat, sleep and breath one thing in order to be a success at it. The post secondary arms race probably isn't helping things - they are trained in high school to keep their eyes on the singular prize and maintain focus on it alone - interested in ..whatever..? Will it help you on your college application? No, well you need to find a better interest that does. All of the success stories of tech founders that came up with their big idea and started companies as teens or really young adults probably isn't helping either. They think they can be the next Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg/etc if they ignore all else and become a coding fiend. A little eccentric? Lack people skills? No worries as long as you can code or at least that is often the narrative in the media (although less so IME IRL). Never mind the failures, detours, timing, luck and/or genius that helped many of the success stories actually become success stories.... ok enough rambling but hopefully some useful tangents in there.
