My notes on a talk by Felienne Hermans.
Wow. I don't know much about programming language design, but I was still blown away by Felienne Hermans' talk about it. It was really about much more than just programming language design.
By the way, I, right now, am programming this web page in a programming language called HTML. I'm not too good at it yet, but getting there.
Wait, sorry to interrupt... I've just learned that HTML is not a real programming language. Oh well.
Anyway, Felienne Hermans is pretty cool. I'm going to have to read the paper, and look at more of her work.
Here are some notes I wanted to keep.
What counts as a programming language?
Personal background: A lifetime of Felienne banging her head against the wall of this unfolding, distinct sense that for some reason her work—doing research developing useful, valuable new programming languages—was not really welcome nor at home in the programming language research community, no matter how she tried. She couldn't understand why. This made her feel depressed.
How to understand her problem? Therapy, or science?
Try science first! Lol.
But how to do science on social problems like this?
Friends suggested feminism.
Wait.. feminism? You mean where we say "We need more women programmers!" and stuff, and equal pay and stuff? That didn't feel related to the problem Felienne was having.
Well, turns out that's just liberal feminism, and there are other kinds of feminism. For example, feminist epistemology.
Paper: Glaciers, Gender, and Science. Science has always been defined by what is manly, men-like, etc. Hard, challenging = value. Easy = no value.
Dijkstra quotes. "I intend to present programming as a mathematical activity"; it was made mathematical, it wasn't inherently that way. Math/men
Lots of stuff about the CS research community, and history of how computer work got socially re-constructed as manly. I really want to rewatch this to take better notes but I'm too tired right now.
PL is about people interacting with computers, right? But all we focus on is the computers. "The people will figure it out. Or they won't—I don't care."
Types of papers that can exist, and types of papers that can't exist; how qualitative research isn't published, or only rarely/fringe, not enough to sustain a career.
"Why do people love Rust so much?", and "When type systems cause problems: An observation study"
What should we do? Don't know the answer! But we have to add space for these kinds of papers to live a full life within the research community.
There were some really great questions too, after you get past the first goofball who decided to start rambling on his own junk with the mic...
Why do you think math itself is coded as male?
Not even sure that "math" itself, really, is. But the part of it that we recognize as officially math, is. So like, knitting is very mathematical. But the parts of math we recognize are parts that remove any stuff about people from them. And women tend to be more likely to care about people (whether that's nature or nurture, doesn't matter either way).