Comment by miav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miav | Hacker News Reader

Guys, the author presents an overall reasonable argument and I think it's more useful to engage with it in good faith than going "so it's all my fault just because I'm a man?" - no one's implying that.

At its simplest, the point is that much of programming language design is done with a masculine perspective that values technical excellence and very little feminine perspective that focuses more on social impact. Most, including myself, have a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss this argument since at first glance it appears to trade off something known useful for something that's usually little else than a buzzword, but upon further reflection the argument is sensible.

The theme of forsaking technological perfectionism in favor of reaching whatever end goal you have set is widely circulated on this forum and generally agreed with. Those of us that work as software engineers know that impact of your work is always valued more than the implementation or technical details. It's thus reasonable that when building programming languages, the needs and experience of the users should be considered. Not override everything else, but be factored into the equation.

I know if I were to write a programming language I'd probably focus on pushing the boundaries of what's technologically possible, because I find it fun and interesting. But I would have to agree that even if I did succeed in doing so, the actual impact of my work would probably be lower than that of Hedy - the author's language. Hedy is not novel technologically, but the fact that it makes it meaningfully easier to learn programming for significant numbers of people is real, undeniable impact.

Lastly, I want to note that the author's argument for underrepresentation of women in PL cannot be reduced to "those nasty men are keeping us out". Humans are tribal and any group of humans is bound to form complex social structures. Those are going to affect different people in different ways, linked paper investigates the effect on those structures on specifically women because the topic is close to the author. Whether you care about low numbers of women in PL design or not, the dynamics that have led to that being the case are worth investigating and are quite interesting on their own.

> At its simplest, the point is that much of programming language design is done with a masculine perspective that values technical excellence and very little feminine perspective that focuses more on social impact.

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.

It is absolutely a valid point that user experience, helpful error messages, ease of use are extremely important and historically neglected in programming language design, as contrasted with technical excellence.

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 agree with this.

It is IMO very backwards and counterproductive to just gender-box mathematics/quantitative research vs peoples/qualitative research. Women are very capable of doing quantitative/mathematical research, and men are quite capable of doing qualitative/UX/anthropology research. Why must we be so narrow minded, _especially_ when we're talking about how we want to see the future?

The author may be totally right in suggesting that PL academic research needs more diversity in research, and that there might be a lot of status-quo bias, elitism and groupthink at play. The over-reliance on mathematical "purity/elegance" (like the monad meme someone mentioned below) instead of usability when it comes to new languages is something even I have encountered as an end user of programming languages.

However, claiming that there's some inherent gender based tendency to engage in one kind of research over another defeats their own purpose IMO. If they said that PL academic research could learn some tricks from fields X, Y and Z on how to engage in more end-user research, it would have made their point so much more convincing.

It just reductionist nonsense. The idea that valuing technical excellence is a masculine trait is just absurd. The idea that valuing social impact is a feminine trait is also nonsense. Yes, we could have an aggregate noticeable difference, but the idea that this creates causal outcomes in something like programing languages... it makes no sense.

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 programming languages have masculine or feminine perspective, then I would like to know which culture lens this is being painted with and for what purpose. Is there any more than to dissect Charles V quote, "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse", and asking if speaking French would increase the number of women in a specific field.

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.

Thanks for saying so.

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

The bulk of low-effort hostile responses to her article in male-dominated spaces like HN really just illustrate her point over and over again.

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

I would rather dismiss her point on the basis, that from my perspective this may be true for a small niche of academics that focus specifically on programming language formalisms.

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.

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