A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design (2024)

It is satisfying to read the engaging and curious reflections, like your own. Let us hope for more of these.

I'll add that if people want a historical perspective on the dynamics, CS Professor Ellen Spertus long ago wrote the paper "Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists?" It helped me see a lot of the things I might have otherwise been inclined to dismiss: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040

It is absolutely an invalid point to claim that this is due to gender, that men are doomed by biology to care about technical excellence while women are doomed by biology to care about UX. We are not living in 1825!

I guess my criticism of this is that it reduces both men and women to what amounts as little more than stereotypes, which leaves me rather uneasy.

I also find it somewhat of a distraction as to the actual issues. For example one of the topics is that all programming languages only accept Latin numerals (0-9) and often only support English in many keywords. It's not hard to see how this might exclude people, sure.

A counter-argument to this might be that having a single Lingua Franca enables a global community of people from very diverse backgrounds to communicate and work together. Just today I accepted two patches from someone from China. Thirty years ago even talking to someone from China would be a novelty, let alone casually cooperating. That's kind of amazing, no? If we'd both be stuck in our exclusive world of "English" and "Chinese" with out own languages and counting systems and whatnot, then that would have been a lot harder.

All things considered English probably isn't the best, fairest, or more equitable choice. But it is what it is, and it's by far the most practical choice today.

You can of course disagree with all of that, and that's fine. But reducing it to "technical excellence" vs "social impact" or "male perspective" vs. "female perspective" just seems reductive and a distraction.

People use different programing languages for different reasons. Python is easy to read, it's used more by people who come from non-cs backgrounds. Lower level languages are used by people with lower level needs.

It's like saying that "trucks are masculine" when, sure, I'll grant you that, but the point of a truck is to haul a bunch of shit, often to a work site, and there are plenty of women who need to do that. It's like saying that a "Prius is feminine" because it's built around a social cause (climate change)... I mean, sure, I guess. I still think literally millions of men drive Priuses because they actually care about social causes and want to save money on gas.

The concept between the aggregate outcomes of all masculinie and feminine coded things being driven by and arbitrary culture and not an actual random distribution of needed functions (men are more likely to work in hard labor than women, hence more likely to use a truck for work), just seem like the tail wagging the dog.

All of this, and yes, I consider myself very committed to the values of equality that feminism espouses.

If we are trying to define programming languages tailed toward children as being feminine, and then "real" languages used in the trade as being masculine, are we not devaluing the hard work of everyone involved? It seems to carry a very high risk of causing the opposite of an positive impact. Languages that are meaningfully easier to learn are a good thing, and like reading and math, seems like a good idea to teach children at an early age. The essay seems hopeful that this would decrease gender segregation in the work force, through they don't bring much to support it.

When I studied programming language during my university time, this was really focused on formal approaches, so it is true there. But that is how this field of studies defines itself, and that should be considered their right.

Once you look outside of this narrow field, you can easily find a lot of projects and endeavors that cover exactly what she is requesting in that article.

* The rust compiler focuses a lot on more understandable error messages (a topic specifically covered) and even recommendations that make picking up the language easier.

* C++11 standardization also focused a lot on usability and how to improve hard to read error messages.

* Scratch is explicitly designed to look for alternative approaches to programming.

* Programming in other languages has been around for a long time.

In school we were taught a German version of Logo. I don't buy her argument that her language research was dismissed purely because it wasn't hard enough. We simply have anything we need to understand how we could do a programming language in another language. Replace a few lexer definition, and then re-define the whole stdlib in another language. There is simply nothing novel about this. I really hope her research on language covers a lot more than just this.

She also does a very bad bait-and-switch when she suddenly replaces the meaning of the word "hard" in the middle of the article. Initially she clearly used "hard" to refer to difficult, then later she suddenly switches hard in the sense of "hard" sciences, i.e. sciences based on formalisms and empirical research instead of discussions and opinions.

I agree with her a lot of research is missing from non-technical hard sciences (I would consider large parts of psychology a hard science, although it lives at the border of the two worlds). There is some research on the psychology of programming, but this is definitely under-researched. Also usability studies of programming languages are not well established.

In a lot of cases, however, I don't think this is actually something we can really do research on. I have a strong background in psychology, and I don't think we actually could study the impact of different paradigms. If you pick participants that already know programming, they will be highly socialized with the dominant paradigms. If you pick novices you will have to control what they learn over years until they become fluent in the studied paradigm. This isn't feasible and raises sever ethical concerns. Or you don't control it, make short time studies, in which case the results will just not carry any meaning.

Overall for me the article raises some really valid concerns about programming language research and CS in general, but I think she took a really bad turn in describing these as gender based issues. What I would see as the reason for these issues lies in completely different areas and are only very remotely related to gender.

Having said that… I don’t know why your comment is flagged but I can tell you that your first sentence is written in a way that already makes it difficult to understand what you want to express.

It also feels a bit snarky to me.

Feminism is an ideology for the advancement of the female sex.

Particularly where they have been oppressed by the men.

They loved programming as a kid, but they feel that the current state of PL research deprioritizes people. This seems coherent to me.

Of course it does not matter for "a straightforward computer error message", in cases where the error is a simple type mismatch or a missed semicolon, but if those were the majority of the problems we encounter as programmers, our work would be trivial.

It's not difficult to imagine a situation where structuring a compiler in such a way that it keeps more state and perhaps has to perform more analysis is worthwhile, since a more useful error message saves the user time in understanding and fixing a problem.

An example that comes to mind is when in Rust I tried to create a dynamically dispatched trait, where the trait in question contained a function an argument of which was generic over a different, statically dispatched trait. Since the compiler did not know at compile time the exact object which would be instantiated, it was incapable of inferring the exact type of the second, statically dispatched trait at compile time, thus failing to compile.

The error was presented to me in a clear way that pointed out the problematic relationship between dispatch types of the two traits allowing me to understand and fix the problem quickly. If the error message was far simpler, such as "can't dynamically dispatch trait", I would have figured that out too, but it would have simply taken more valuable time. Most importantly, having to track down the issue from a minimal error message, would not have been an honorable test of my intelligence and emotional maturity, it simply would have been inefficient.

Honestly I still don't get it, I guess its just one of those first-world problems people invent to occupy their time with outrage.

But there is infact a large captive population of SWE's invested in these topics.

(have not yet read the article beyond the first few paragraphs, where this is mentioned).