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Comment by southpawgirl | Hacker News Reader

Do we really need a genderised programming language? As a female programmer, I don't feel discriminated by current programming styles - I think they fit my brain as well as anyone else's. I am afraid of positive discrimination which puts any minority in a ghetto by highlighting differences who simply aren't there. Programmers come in all shapes, sizes, genders and sexual orientations: in fact, it's one of the charms of the profession. Privilege code quality over oneupmanship and more girls will come (and diversity in general will increase).

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There's nothing wrong with doing a research project to figure out what a gendered/feminist programming language would be like if it were to exist.

Perhaps a little nugget of wisdom might fall out like how men and women tend to navigate differently [1].

[1] http://searchengineland.com/human-hardware-men-women-and-how...

Hmm - what about researching how would be a programming language for black people? For lesbians? Does that makes you comfortable?

That's perfectly all right - you can have things specifically for only women, black people or lesbians. In fact you should have those and you'd better support them. Failing to support those kind of movements means your company probably isn't moral.

Of course, a programming language created specifically for white males would be both racist and sexist.

True. I'd also moot a programming language for left-handed people. What the heck, a programming language for left-handed people who had a difficult childhood. Or a goth period during their teenager years. Or who are Scottish nationalists.

Maybe it's me, maybe it's PCness gone full circle, but to encourage division doesn't seem the way forwards to me.

The differences in cognitive styles between men and women, both when it comes to sex and gender, are actually quite interesting as an area of research.

Just because they're being addressed from the angle of feminism and their focus on how many cultural artifacts reflect male dominance in subtle ways doesn't make it any less valid to me.

https://xkcd.com/624/

Lingua::Romana::Perligata is gendered. I don't see how it is feminist.

Small point of order: a feminist programming language would not be a genderised programming language. Men can be feminists too.

That's not a point of order. It's a point of information.

The article actually sounds a bit sexist. I honestly doubt that any woman who would want to learn to program would be stopped by the style of the existing programming languages.

I honestly doubt that any woman who would want to learn to program would be stopped by the style of the existing programming languages.

Where does the article claim that? Why would you assume that's even the point, when the author explains exactly what the intention is?

I simply cannot read any other point into this article. If you want to "create entanglements" in a language, that sound perfectly reasonable, but there's no reason to use the concept of a "feminist programming language".

By spliting languages in feminist, imperative, functional, object-oriented, and logic, you're telling me that the four traditional types of programming is somehow not suitable for a feminin mindset. Why else seperate them like that?

These seems like a project that has feminism tacked on to it's label for no good reason.

The idea is applying feminist theory, which (among other things) analyzes the way gender-normativity shapes intellectual constructions, to the field of programming languages, and see what would a programming language derived from that critique look like.

By spliting languages in feminist, imperative, functional, object-oriented, and logic, you're telling me that the four traditional types of programming is somehow not suitable for a feminin mindset.

I believe the idea of a feminist [X] is not that X is unsuitable for women, but that it was shaped by men (which is true in the case of most programming languages, and probably paradigms). Maybe this doesn't matter, and a programing paradigm made by women would look the same, but you don't know without exploring the possibility.

It's similar to Feminist Aesthetics[1], Feminist Epistemology[2], etc.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-aesthetics/

[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/

But how would comparing programming languages made by men versus ones made by women provide any useful info about what a 'feminist programming paradigm' is, might be, could be, etc.?

I was more than a little offended by the author conflating 'feminism' with para-consistent logic. Does no one else think that the idea of 'feminist' thinking embracing 'contradictions' smack of almost ridiculously self-caricatured sexism?

But how would comparing programming languages made by men versus ones made by women provide any useful info about what a 'feminist programming paradigm' is, might be, could be, etc.?

I don't think the idea is comparing existing implementations, but creating a new language, based on that analysis.

Maybe; I'm not familiar enough with the feminist critique of logic that the author mentions.

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