A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design

Most programmers know that women have been involved in the design of many programming languages. Not to cast shade at Lovelace, but Grace Hopper is particularly well known in Govt, Defense, atmospheric & climate IT, as well as compiled languages given the extensive usage of COBOL and her creation of the compiler, which is more important arguably than the creation of a singular language. That is akin to inventing operating systems in general.

I can’t help but think this is one of those fraudulent & ridiculous papers intended to trick reviewers and make a gotcha moment!

I read it. All of it.

At best this seems like a proposal for a paper rather than a paper. In fact, the authors continue to talk about things like "Our paper also aims to explore such diversification" 80% of the way though their work. I'll save you the suspense, they never create an actual "Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design".

Having read it all I don't see "A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design". I see a descriptive rant that qualitative == masculine == bad and that it is not "fair" that top journals don't publish quantitative, ethnographic, diary based research. There seems to be nothing about feminism here either other than it being the self appointed champion of all diversity. Really this paper could exist almost as is with any modern topic grafted onto it as it is so generic.

Ill give the authors kudos though as do point out that many aspects of computing have their beginnings based on the works of women or women dominated fields like knitting and the incredible works of Admiral Hopper but that only seems to diminish their arguments.

All in all, I can't believe this was published by a peer reviewed journal.

It's not surprising that numerals in Arabic script (or other human scripts) aren't handled in most languages. Languages are developed by people for some community. If a language is developed in an American-English community for developers within its context, what is their purpose for adding other communities?

We're seeing the network effect in action. Programming languages influenced by other perspectives will need to interoperate with operating systems written in the dominant paradigm (C, assembler that assumes English opcodes and ASCII - English hexadecimal) until that other perspective writes all the foundational software. That's quite expensive in time and money.

As far as feminism is concerned, it's not clear that it's a _feminist_ perspective that's helpful, as opposed to _being thoughtful about other people's experience_. Retaining the contributions of women to the state of the art is necessary, for sure, and that can affect the entrance and treatment of women in the field.

Worrying about feminism when 99% of all programming languages use latin script, analytic grammar and English keywords is funny.