Recently, I have thought a lot about the programming languages community. The story is both very long and very short, and the short story is that I went to SPLASH 2023 to present my work on the localization of programming languages, and I was surprised by the type of pushback I received. Of course I had received such feedback before; the type that is diverse in nature but ultimately boils down to: why should we do work to make programming easier, if that work is not as fun as doing other things—this is why this story is also long—but I think I am now old enough to be able to see this from a distance, and reflect on the deeper mechanisms at play.
Another important difference is that this time, I was so clearly arguing on behalf of other people—my native language is a Latin one—so I was really doing the work for others, which made me angry on behalf of others, and I can tell you anger on behalf of others does not consume you half as much as arguing for “yourself” as when I am arguing for women in the field of PL. This freed up more mental space to reflect too.
Anyway, over the last few months I have done little else than think about feminism in PL, and I will use this page to organize posts, papers and further reading!
Videos
Here is a 10 minute talk where I explain the basics. For even more you can also watch a 40 mins conference talk.
Podcasts
I was interviewed by Dutch radiostation BNR about the work!
The lovely people of Future of Programming did an episode on our paper!
Paper
Update: A paper on feminism and PL has been accepted at SPLASH! in the Onward! Essays track. In this post I give a bit of an intro into the paper.
Further reading
- If you want to read more about the different types of feminism, this book is a great start.
- If you want to read more about how household technology (from bread making to washing machines) has failed to take women into account in their design, this book is amazing. If does not talk about digital technology, but the parallels are clear.
