Future of Coding - A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

In the academic field of programming language research, there are a few prestigious conferences that you must present at to advance in your career. These conferences are rather selective about which presentations they'll accept. If your research work involves proving formal properties about a programming language, you'll have their ear. But if your work looks at, say, the human factors of language design, you might as well not bother applying — and thus, not bother pursuing that work in the first place. Why is the formalistic, systems-focused work elevated, and the human-focused work diminished? And what are the downstream consequences, the self-reinforcing feedback loops that come from this narrow focus? In this episode we discuss a paper by Felienne Hermans and Ari Schlesinger titled, A case for Feminism in Programming Language Design. It applies the lens of intersectional feminism to reveal a startling lack of "Yes, and…" in academic computer science, where valuable avenues of inquiry are closed off, careers are stifled, and people are unintentionally driven away from contributing to the field, simply because their passions and expertise don't conform to a set of invisible expectations. Through heartbreaking personal anecdotes and extensive supporting references, the paper makes the case that there's a lot of high-value greenfield work to be done, and people who would love to do it — but we will need to collectively identify, understand, and then fix a few broken incentives before it'll happen. Notes $ Patreon Polypad, dubbed the "best piece of education software for smartboards" by published academic Luke Wilson Or is it Mathigon? "Looks like a nice Desmos", opines enterprise sales expert Ivan Reese. Market💡Facts.ca Welcome to the TALK BLOC: Felienne Hermans at Onward! 2024: A case for Feminism in Programming Language Design Ivan and Alex Warth at LIVE 2024: Inkling Lu at LIVE 2024: Arroost Lu at Onward! 2024: Dialogs on Natural Code Discovering Your Software Umwelt by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Allen Wirfs-Brock, and Jordan Wirfs-Brock A New Cognitive Perspective on Simplicity in System and Product Design by FoC community member and previous bonus episode guest, Stefan Lesser Redressing the Balance: A Yin-Yang Perspective on Information Technology by FoC community member Konrad Hinsen Foremost among the contributions to society by Icebergs are their inspiration of the meme Alex McLean as in Insane in the Membrane FOUR FOUR Mary Shaw, previous guest Zachtronics make some hard puzzle games. Define Define, a really great video about that. Oh, you question toxic masculinity, yet you live within the gender binary? ! Send us email, especially if you're an avid listener who happens to work for a placement agency and knows an AI thought leader who has advised 5000 startups and would be a great fit for our show, share your ideas in the Slack, and: Eats: Mastodon • Website Shoots: Mastodon • Website Leaves: Mastodon • Website See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/75Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's very simple. Steve Krauss is Tobey Maguire, right? Maggie Appleton is Tom Holland, right? I am Andrew Garfield. Wait, no, this is all wrong. Who's Kristen Dunst in this? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can I be Kristen Dunst? Yeah, wait. Who's the Green Goblin? Oh, no, wait, wait, wait. Who's the green goblin? Oh, wait, wait, wait.

Ivan is the green goblin. No, no, I wanna be cursed and dunced. I wanna be cursed and dunced. I'm Andrew Garfield. Jimmy is cursed and dunced. Wow. I've never seen Jimmy kiss somebody upside down. And I've never seen Ivan kiss somebody upside down.

I have photos. I don't want to see this. Well, maybe Philippa is Dr. Maybe she's. She's Dr. Octagon. Octagon? Yeah, Dr. Octagon, Doc Ock. Isn't it? No, wait.

Who's Dr. Octagon? It can't be, because then she'd be in the same universe as you. Oh wait, that's a rapper. That's why I know who Doctor Octogone is. No, because Doc Ock is in the Spider-Verse as well. So I'm Doc Ock. I'm Doc Ock. Because I'm in both.

And it's a man in one and a woman in the other one. Oh, that's good. Is it? Yeah. There's a woman Doc Ock? Dude, have you not seen Spider spite of us? I saw the first Are you I think it sounds like glue is saying glue is dr. Who? Jesus Christ I

Like that we're talking about this instead of the other stuff from the paper that I wanted to get into all right I said I was happy to go down the rabbit hole Yeah, I actually I should go record a bonus episode right now No, no, no, we have a bonus episode. So doctor who is All right, stop Why did smart boards never happen Wait a second. So I used a smart board like a decade ago and it wasn't the best thing in the world but it was pretty darn cool.

And I really saw the promise of, oh, once these things get good, I can imagine remote work. I just have a whiteboard. Back here, I'm standing at it. People in the office are standing at their whiteboard, and we're both drawing on it together. So the reason I'm asking you all, one of you, Lou, works on whiteboarding

software and Ivan works on inking stuff. Why hasn't this happened? Hey, the other thing is, I was a teacher and I, we used many, many, many smart boards. I can tell you why they didn't kick off, pick off, pick up, kickoff, kickup, HICKUP! Is because currently the biggest customer base for smart boards is schools. And schools have no money. So, you know, like building EdTech is really hard, as we found, as we discovered in that paper by Alexander Repening, right? Was trying to build EdTech and everyone loved it.

It was amazing, but there's just no money in it, apparently. I think it's like kind of like this chicken and egg problem, right? The smart board tech, like software that we had was so bad. No one was like, this is great. I want to spend all my life on here. It was more like, I'm going to use it the bare minimum because there was like years of lesson plans in this, like preparatory format for this old software.

So it's actually really hard to switch. Yeah, I guess, you know, I totally get the education use, but I just the more and more I do remote work, the more I'm like, I mean, I've always felt this, but the more I'm like, I just want to be able to communicate with my team by drawing and like, yes, I could do a tablet and you can share screens and all of that. But there's something so different about standing up at a whiteboard with that much real estate. This is something I realized, or like remembered again, when I was in Los Angeles that there's so much space in America in some

parts, right? I can't imagine putting a bloody smart board in my flat. It's that classic enterprise problem, right? The people buying the product are not the people who are using it. And so the incentives are aligned towards making a thing purchasable in bulk or integrate with an existing LMS, so a learning management system, which like all of these schools have. It's like Salesforce but for learning. And they're terrible and you have to work with them.

It just forces you to make bad product decisions. Yeah, and I totally get that. If you focus at education, you're gonna have all these bad incentives. And yet- Or the enterprise. That's what I totally get that. If you focus at education, you're going to have all these bad incentives. Or the enterprise. Well, that's what I'm wondering though. Like, you know, if you look at, I do a lot of remote calls now with people who are in office and they all have the fancy cameras that like zoom in on who's in the room and the mics that are directional, etc. And they have actually gotten better.

Like eight years ago when this they existed and they were, you know, people were using nice ones. They just sucked. And they were super awkward. And like now I still hate it compared to actually being in a you know, one-one instead of like them in a big conference room. But they've gotten way better and every one of these rooms has them. They all have these fancy setups and it feels like you could focus on the business world who do have money. So you get rid of that problem with education tech. Oh, they spend stupid amounts of money on these dumbass conference room things. You work for software companies. You don't you don't work for normal companies. Well I'm talking about fortune 500 you know

these big enterprises right that have lots of money. Most companies have way more money than people are willing to spend way more money than people think about. I have shed way too much blood trying to sell good software to companies and have... Too many times have I failed at that endeavor for reasons that are not on my side of the spectrum. Yeah, yeah, of course. I don't know what I'm talking about. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? So is it just a market fact or is there really like a technical limitation here?

That's what I'm asking. You laughing at market fact? Yes. Market fact is an oxymoron. Sure. So can we, could we do it if we set out to go build a smart, good whiteboard that was very good whiteboard, a good smart whiteboard, I guess is the right way of putting those adjectives. Um, yeah. What, what would stop us?

Uh, yeah, man. Like we do have a smart board in the teal draw office You know every time we use some of the like inbuilt software on them. We're like Goddamn, we could do this better. Yeah, you could white label it to all of the smart board companies So they have they don't have to keep building their own crappy software Yeah, but I think the best piece of education software for smart boards is poly pad Do you know do you know poly pad? No, I don't know poly pad or is it called math again? I think it's I know math again. I think it's poly pad which is made by math again It's just pure magic. I saw a demo at the future of coding meetup here in London and It had people like applauding looks like a nice Desmos.

Right, right, right. This is it. It's like the best kind of demo where you think you know exactly what it is when you see it. And then it just goes crazy. There's like programmable shapes in it. Then you switch to 3D and you can like make it interactive and whatnot. And like you can make sounds that follow your graph. I can't remember, but it was, it was bonkers. So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing if, if they could convince the market facts

to change in their favor. Well, maybe we should shift over to some different market facts. Like the time where women used to be the main programmers, but then the market pushed them out. No, no, I don't like that segue. Let's not have that be the segue. Let's try a different segue.

That's not true. That is a fake fact. I couldn't think of a way to actually connect up what really happened with my segue. Yeah, we went too far, of course. Jimmy took it for the team. Sorry. Sorry about that. It was a joke.

Okay. I just can't get over this MarketFacts website. They actually have the Stonks graphic with like the table of blue numbers with the swigly line and like a man in a suit Is there a market facts website market facts dot ca dot ca stock equity research report? 2020 since we started okay Did you google market facts and since you're Canadian it gave you bad results or did you just go to market facts dot ca? No, I searched for market facts podcast and it put me on this website. Oh podcast, okay.

I was like, if I search for Market Facts, I get Bloomberg. My goal is to become the top Google result when you type in Market Facts by the time this podcast comes out. We were at a much closer segue earlier. So we're doing a paper today and the paper... Listen, I got the segue. I got the segue. We were all in Los Angeles, right? I was really nervous when I was doing one of my talks

because I knew I was going to be after this amazing paper, this absolutely amazing paper by felina hermans Who i've seen speak before is this like incredible speaker and i was following it so i like i was really nervous about and it Completely delivered like the talk was without a doubt the best thing i saw there You know yours was good you know yours was good Ivan yours was good mine had more theater that's the one that's the one rope I'll hang

from feeling is reality feeling is reality is feeling is reality is reality. Is reality. Is reality. Yeah, this was such a good talk, and I already read the paper, I really love the paper, so I'm really pleased that we're talking about it today. That's the segue. Yes, we were all there. Well, okay, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I wasn't there for the live presentation of this talk. I watched the video. Jimmy, you were there a person, right? Yeah. Yeah. We both were.

Yeah. And the name of this paper is a case for feminism in programming language design. Yeah, I know of Felina's work from a few years ago. I heard about a project. Was it Heady? Yes, it is Heady. Yes. I saw you looking for the word there. Looking for the way to introduce it. Right. Oh, sorry. Well, you found it.

Yeah. Yes. It's one of those languages that came up again and again and again whenever I would ask for Hey computers are this really interesting weird thing that have sort of spread throughout the entire world like a fungus and Have you know reshaped society and have changed what it means to be a human being? What are the projects that are that people are doing on that level. Hedy is one of the ones that comes up because it did this really interesting thing where it's a language that you can, for one, it's targeted at beginners. So it's meant to be like an environment that does away with a lot of the incidental complexity,

a lot of the historical baggage and presents this nice, carefully designed environment for new programmers to learn in. And it is designed to be multilingual in a way that is very different from when programmers normally talk about language agnostic. In this case, it's talking about human language. It's designed for human users to use it in a way that feels familiar for them with their own, you know, non-English language. And so it's this environment that I haven't actually played with it or looked at it much, but it has come up again and again as one of these examples of somebody doing work in this space that is really out there and different and interesting.

I think one of the things that stood out to me straight away is the way this is written, right? This was submitted to Onward Essays, which does encourage, like, bending the normal expectations of what's in a paper, what's in an academic essay. And for me, the main weird thing about this is the heavy use of first person. For as long as I can remember, I have been in love with programming. And it has a little footnote by the first use of the word I. And if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you know, it explains. Wherever the first person is used in this essay, the first author, that is, Felina, is writing from their personal experience. The second author's contributions were in shaping the paper by developing the

argumentation, adding sources, and contextualizing the experiences of the first author. We should also shout out the second author, Ari Schlesinger. Oh, yes. Yeah. Another name that has come up in the past on our podcast. I think we talked about her work a little bit when we did the Lawrence diver, um, rules of code. Yes. She's another person who has done advocacy for feminism and computer

science and other, um, very important like factors addressing how much of a, you know, CIS hat, cishet male white privileged field computer science tends to be. It's hegemonic. And I think her work has done a lot to try and address that and improve diversity there. Yes. But yeah, the first person and the like overall writing style of this paper was, at times, to me, it just disappeared. It felt like, OK, it's taking us through this argument, and it's going to present its different aspects of the argument

one by one. But occasionally, it would dip into relaying personal experiences. And those were some of the most arresting moments to me. Certainly some of the most arresting moments that I've experienced in reading a paper. Like some of the things that it said were just like very bracing and painful

and emotionally effective in a way that I found very compelling. Like I think it was a good choice to use that sort of personal framing because it helped take this argument that some people might find a little bit, like a little bit hard to grapple with. And it gave it this additional immediacy that I felt was like I could personally imagine being in these positions so much more easily reading it as first person than I could if it was

just presented as like statements of fact. Yeah, the authors are very specific, right, about, I guess, personal experiences. So I think that's one thing that I really liked about the first person nature. And actually, like in the talk, that helped to make it really funny. Like the talk is really funny. It's kind of like really looking at the absurdity of some of these situations that Felina Hermans has been involved in. But there was like another part of the first person that I really, really liked about this. And it's the same reason I loved that Alexander Repening paper we looked at. It's because it's not just about these like isolated experiences. She was explaining her journey, learning what

feminism is, like, kind of rejecting it in some in some ways at a certain point, and then coming to where she is now is this is a real explanation of her process, like as an academic, I guess, which I think really helps to understand the viewpoint a lot more. Like I really, like, I'm never going to shut up about the fact that I love seeing like the process behind how a paper came to be, you know, it's super useful, I think super useful. Yeah, I think the way this paper is written is very refreshing. I think in general, I think actually, if you look at the papers, I tend

to lean towards there's probably more use of I than the average academic paper. And I think this is something, especially in computer science, right? It's all written in this like impersonal scientific tone, right? Where you're just conveying facts. But I think it's, it leaves out a lot when you do that, right? There's so much that is intuitive judgment or these kinds of things. And so what I think people end up doing when they write in this kind of like impersonal factual manner is they actually over exaggerate the amount of confidence or the strength of the argument that they're making. This is actually one of the things I find refreshing about like analytic philosophy is

dipping into the eye is not that uncommon. And just being like, yeah, well, this part I can show you like factually some things, which this essay does very well. But also like this other stuff like, yeah, this is more my feelings about this topic. I'm not trying to prove them to you. You might not relate with them. You might relate with them. I think that's an important aspect of argumentation. It's an important aspect of experience.

And so if we completely askew the eye altogether, I think we lose a lot of knowledge. And that's one of the topics as well in this paper. Right, right. Yeah, and you know, like this one really dips in and out of that really well, like, the essay itself is not afraid to take a side with SERP and say, we're gonna we're gonna define some things now. Right? Like it even, it even defines lens, right? Like lens is perhaps like one of the most, like the things we end up talking about a lot right on this podcast is Lens. The thing I really enjoyed about this paper is that it leaves no stone unturned, right? Like it's like I'm going to define Lens. I'm going to define Feminist. I'm going to define everything.

So yeah, it dips in between these different modes really well. it dips in between these different modes really well. It was super interesting for me to see the feedback that I got about our paper, which is also a weird format. It's like a, it's a dialogue, it's kind of like a stage play. And I thought people were going to hate that or like sort of think it was a bit silly, but all of the feedback we get sort of begins with, love the format, made it really easy to engage with. And

they you know, they might say disagree with you and everything else, but we love the format. You know, another one at Onward Essays that I just got reminded of from what you were saying, Jimmy was the Werfsprock and Werfsprock and Werfsprock one, which was three different members of the same family who wrote a paper together. Did you see this one at all? No, I, yeah, what is this one? Yeah, you should check this out. Okay.

So the paper or the essay is about three members of the same family talking about like their relationship to programming, like how they started, how they feel with it and like, you just gotta read the paper, you know, we could do that another time maybe. Oh yeah, discovering your software unwelt. Alan Wirfsbrock was actually our shepherd who helped us to write our revision and we discovered that his wife Rebecca Wurfsbrock was also I guess contributed to helping him to help us. Anyway yeah Onward Essays, yeah it's really really really good set of papers this year. So shout out to Stefan Lesser. Ah, yes, yes.

Who's always within the future of coding Slack. Previously appeared on a Patreon bonus episode about looking for new physics. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. He also presented at Onward Essays. He was at Onward Essays. There was also, oh yes, Conrad, Conrad Hinson, another frequent poster in the Slack. So yeah, great future of coding turnout.

Yeah, we owned Splash this year. Of all the communities, like there's the, you know, the Ink and Switch cohort who was there, but I think the future of coding cohort had the deepest representation, the deepest infiltration of the establishment. At the very least, it had onward. Onward, for sure. Seemed to be kind of the focus. Jonathan Edwards told us all to do it. I had another just, this is kind of skipping ahead a little bit, but it also fits in with thinking about the format of this paper. There's a section later on where it talks a little bit about a problem with a lot of

these academic conferences like PPIG, PX, Plateau, Paint, Programming, Popple, PLDI, Splash, a bunch of those ones are in there. They all participate in this system called core ranking, which is just basically a way of ranking all of these conferences and saying like, hey, how much will they help you advance your career if you present a paper there. And I read their list of criteria for like the rankings and it was just depressing to read. It was this like this very strange sort of like if you are accepted at this conference, you know, it will be a tremendous benefit to your career and you are expected to have a paper published there every year and if you Submit a paper and it gets rejected from one of the lower ranked conferences

You probably won't want to announce that publicly because that might be you know seen as bad It felt a little bit like pageantry almost or a little bit like it made me imagine that being an academic Would make me feel kind of like a show animal, where it's like I'm expected to conform to this very rigid kind of strangely projected set of expectations for how the work is supposed to take. And that, like learning about this ranking and about the way that these conferences interrelate and how seriously everybody takes them and how important it is for your career as an academic, seriously everybody takes them and how important it is for your career as an academic. I learned about that in the context of this paper that is taking a tremendous risk by not conforming with those expectations. And it's like, Felina here is having to basically risk advancing

her career. She's having to put her actual work that she's interested in doing, which is programming language design. She's having to put that aside to go and do the work of educating, you know, other people in our field about this problem and about the nature of this problem, you know, the lack of diversity and heterogeneity of the field. And she's, like, throughout this paper we're gonna see a bunch of cases where it's, she's almost has to knowingly self-sabotage in order to do this work in order to publish this paper and so it's to me there's this very like like reading this paper it was almost like accepting something that on the one hand I was really excited to read it and invigorated by it and pumping my fist and saying yes

Yes, yes this so much but at the same time I'm like I feel really bad that felina has to be the one to do this and I wish that like The time that she spent having to do this work She could get back to go and do the work that she got into academia to do not this additional labor that somebody has to do and that she stepped up to. Yeah. She said this in the talk, and I think it was like one of the funny moments, like

intentionally humorous moments where she's basically saying, why do I have to do this? I don't want to do this. Like, this is not the paper I want to write. Right? Like, I'm taking one for the team here. Because Hermans is saying time and time again throughout this that she is like a programming language nerd, a PL nerd, right? She loves making programming languages, right? That's like what she's thoroughly enjoyed before, what she wants to keep doing. But instead, she kind of has to pause that, because we only have so many hours in the day, and kind of address the real blocker to her continuing that work. Or like, at least in a way that feels productive, right? Like, I think this is like the

premise of the paper. I think the sort of the problem statement comes at the end of the first page. How come I, lover of grammars and parses, creating of a programming language, do not feel at home in the PL community. What are the dynamics that cause this feeling and who else might feel left out? And that's like in italics and I take it to be the kind of the research question because this is in the like the context of her explaining that you know Felina did not feel part of some of these communities. And in some cases, and I quote, she says, I tried to control surface aspects of myself in order to fit in.

No earrings, no dresses, no nail polish, and certainly no knitting. Even though knitting, like programming, uses formal languages and requires mathematical thinking and extreme levels of care and preciseness and would in theory be a fitting hobby. I thought things would be easiest if I would just be one of the boys. There's some more context and we can explain like what it actually meant in practice for her to feel not part of these communities but that's the premise and I

think the interesting thing about this premise is that it's like feminism is not part of this premise. Feminism was almost like the part of the findings. Yeah, she didn't start from a place of like wanting to look at programming through a feminist lens. She started from a place of recognizing that she wasn't getting as much out of her career in PL as she thought she should. Yeah. And it sort of pushed her out of that into an adjacent field, which was creating this educational focused environment. She, like, she started to have to present her work in, in venues that

weren't for like scare quotes, hardcore programming language theory. And she started having to present her work in like, you know, venues that are about programming education and programming for beginners and that sort of thing. That sort of like being pushed out of the part of the field that she was interested in participating in, eventually led her to trying to unpack, like, why did that happen? And why that happened may have been because

she was a woman and it ends up being much more than just that that she discovers as she went. But yeah, she didn't start from feminism. It was kind of like feminism eventually was something she learned about that helped her understand why this happened to her and why it continues to happen and how, you know, and as we get into like why feminism and what feminism is, we'll see it's not just something that affects her as a result of her being the minority gender. It also affects a whole bunch of other people, including straight white cis men who were in this field as well.

It negatively impacts them. It wasn't just that Felina was not thinking about feminism as the answer to this, or as part of the answer. She started from thinking that feminism was not part of this. I thought feminism was just about gender. How can gender, of all things, play a role in programming language design? Yes, programming languages are mostly made by men, but how can that matter? Feminism, as I understood it, concerned itself with inequality. It's gonna be hard to edit. Luluh! Feminism, as I understood it, concerted...

Oh for fuck's sake. Ivan, can you read it? Can you read it? No! No! That's gonna be harder to edit. Okay, fine, I'll read it. Third times the deep breath.

Luluh! Feminism, as I understood it, concerted... Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay, fine, I'll read it. Third times the deep breath. Feminism, as I understood it, concerned itself with inequality. It encouraged people to start women in tech groups and such. Things I did not think I needed.

After all, I had not needed anyone's permission or encouragement to study computer science. Feminism was something that others needed, not me. Embracing that would be embracing my gender, and I wanted to rid myself of it. I love how personal this is before it switches into some like really technical academic writing later on, but it starts from this very personal perspective. Yeah, earlier, Aarons had mentioned that she shifted from doing PL research to doing educational research and things like this and software engineering because of feeling excluded from this PL community.

And then we hear, when Air Months comes back, as I re-entered the academic field of PL in the early 2020s, now with some understanding of feminism, I started to see dynamics I could not see before. As I came to the field to talk about HETI, a multilingual programming language I created for programming education, it struck me that the types of question coming from the community centered around the hardness of my work.

Why is it hard to build a programming language in Arabic? Is that not trivial since English ones already exist? Creating one in Arabic would be in theory trivial. Why would that be worth your time? Initially, I went along with the questions explaining why indeed it was very challenging to build a non-english language. But I felt weird while doing it. along with the questions explaining why indeed it was very challenging to build a non-English language. But I felt weird while doing it. I realized I did not care at all about it being hard. Why wasn't I asked things that I did care about, about the emails I had received from teachers all around the world about how they used Heddy, or about the sense of belonging

I felt in the Heddy community of 400 plus people who volunteered to translate to run Heddy events, or about the day our website went down because 600 kids in South Africa logged in at the same time. Reflecting on the conversations I had in the PL space it became clear to me that my value systems were not aligned. PL I saw values work that is difficult, hard work, which is understood as mathematical work such as writing proofs or work that pushes the boundary of programming languages in ways that require difficult tools that not everyone can use. I think this is a fascinating contrast here where we get not only this feeling of personal

rejection that being a woman excluded everyone Mons from participating, but also that very valuable work was now being graded on this rubric that didn't align with the values that Air Mons herself held. And so it's not merely a personal like, you know, oh, dudes being dudes and don't include women. It's like, no, there's actually this larger problem where really important work in the field is being excluded because of this set of what we end up being told are masculine values around this value of hardness rather than looking at the impact that a work can have. Yeah, this was like the biggest head explode moment for me out of the whole thing. Like,

I'd never thought about this dimension of like hardness, trickiness of research and work. And like it immediately made me go back and think to all of the times where I've tried to say that something is really hard. No, no, no, no, to make spatial programming work in this way, it's really hard, you know, to try and prove myself. Ivan's nodding. I think he's done the same, right? Where it's actually like, I don't care, you know, like maybe enjoy hard challenges, like a puzzle, right? But like, in terms of the work I do, I tend to do what I think is important over what I think is hard. I don't know, I'm still like, reflecting on this, this has totally shifted how I think about like all the work I do. It's like a bit of a crisis to be honest,

which is a good sign. Yeah, a good paper should cause one to question how they've been living their lives and doing their work. Yes. Right, right. There's a quote in the next, under the next section, which is titled, feminism can help question values and priorities of programming languages. I highlighted, I started to see that the current state of the art in PL research and design prioritizes machines over people. There is a focus on programming languages

that are easy for the machine rather than easy for people. I love that. Yeah. Right? Like that's right in line with a common refrain on this show. We're here to meld with this old God that we've awoken that has the ability to reshape matter in the universe in our mind and in the world around us that is computation. And we're here to do that for us and as part of our being, you know, not in servitude to it and not to like mash ourselves into the mold that it currently is shaped in. We need to take what the computer is and figure out how to make it a part of ourselves. this focus on hardness is one dimension, but also we'll get into really quick here, like the focus on formalisms and the focus on rooting it in math and the focus on aspects that can be measured quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Those are all the dominant priorities of this field and they all suck ass. And I think it's maybe important to point out that it's about wanting to do both, right? Like I don't think this is saying that you shouldn't research how to make programming

languages that are easy for machines to deal with, right? Like that's got to be part of it. But it's about like an over prioritization of that, right? And I guess like missing the, missing the, missing the wood for the trees? Is that it? Is that the phrase? Is it that? I like that. It's missing the forest for the trees, but I like missing the wood for the trees even better. It's missing the forest for the trees. Which is, you know.

Listen, I'm a millennial. I know that all those forests are gone and it's just chopped down wood now. I live in a forest. Forests are real and I'm real. Forests are real. We continue on to find this, you know, one of the papers that inspired Hermanns in writing this was this paper called Glaciers, Gender and Science. This was crazy. This was sorry to interrupt, but this was crazy. I've told this fact to so many people now, right? Like, I'm like, did you know this thing about glaciers? Tell us the thing, Jimmy. Tell us the thing.

I'm just going to quote here. So, you know, I'm now quoting the paper that is quoting the paper. So, you know, in this paper, Carrie et al. write, most research and hence discourse and discussion stems from information with manly characteristics and within masculine discourses. Reading Kerry's paper, I was struck by similar undercurrents in the PL community valuing hard technical work over work done for the sake of helping others is a masculine discourse. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. I think this is one of the things that I I don't know enough. I did try to go read some on this. I think this is one of the things that I don't know enough. I did try to go read some of this glacier paper

and see kind of how they defined it. I think it's hard to talk for me about like masculine and feminine lines of discourse. I never know quite how to draw these lines in some ways whenever this is one of the things I found like just uneasy, not about like the paper expressing it, but me trying to think about it and understand it is like, well, what exactly is a masculine line of discourse?

What's a feminine line of discourse? Is this leaning into some sort of like masculine or feminist sensualism? Like what? I guess, you know, this is I think one of the questions that the paper does kind of give us more, but I think that's kind of an important thing. And I would imagine some listeners might be feeling that way. Like, well, doesn't what men and women like change over time? Aren't these socially constructed things? Yeah, I guess I'm interested in hearing your feelings on this language. Well, listen, we're three extremely masculine men. And, you know, I speak for myself.

But no, what I took from this, what I take from this is it's really talking about toxic masculinity. Masculinity spreading and infiltrating everything we do in a toxic way. Listeners may or may not be familiar with that term, but of course, there is nothing wrong with masculinity. You know, there's nothing wrong with being feminine. There's nothing wrong with being masculine. And we're talking about everyone here. We're saying that it's okay for a woman to be masculine. It's okay for a man to be feminine.

There's nothing like inherently wrong with one of those things. I mean, this is how I see it. I might be completely wrong. And like, if there's a listener that thinks I'm completely wrong, they like, please tell me. wrong. And like if there's a listener that thinks I'm completely wrong, like, please tell me. But it can become toxic when everything is viewed through one of those lenses. Like, if you only see everything through what our society deems as masculine, then you're going to get a skewed view of the world. And

you're going to end up being biased towards doing certain things, and you're going to be biased towards doing doing other things, right? Hey, like maybe like in some parallel universe there's like a there's a matriarchal society where there's toxic femininity, right? You know, like that, maybe that's paradise for some people, right? Just like toxic masculinity is paradise for some people as well. But the fact of the matter is we don't really live in that world, we live in a world that does bias itself way more to masculinity. So it has these blind spots for certain kinds of PL research, and it has

blind spots for certain glaciers, right? Like, it misses things. And from my understanding, this emphasis on what our society, like our Western society, deems as masculine, the glaciers that are harder to get to, are sometimes better researched and understood than the glaciers that are easy to get to. So like a glacier up a mountain is much more expensive to research but we know a lot more compared to like say a glacier in your backyard, right? Is that the general idea?

Can I actually, I read a little bit of the glacier paper and I highlighted some passages that I'd like to quote. So if if I could take like a minute, I'm just gonna read it. It's a it's long for a quote it's a couple of different passages, but I just want to like Read them because to me reading these passages addressed the question of like where and how does this masculine feminine thing come in to, in this case, the natural sciences, like, you know, measuring glaciers, right? It's frozen ice up in a mountain. What does masculinity and femininity, what does masque femininity have to do with that? And once I understood

that, it helped me even more deeply understand the role that this has in computing. So I'm just going to read a couple passages. Just bear with me here. So this is the paper, Glaciers, Gender and Science, a Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research by Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, and Jacqueline Rushing from the University of Oregon. It was published in 2016. Glaciers are icons of global climate change, with common representations stripping them of social and cultural contexts to portray ice as simplified climate change yardsticks and thermometers. Right? So we look at a glacier as like, oh hey, the glaciers are melting. That means we're seeing the effects of climate change.

They're just like an iconic representation of climate change. They've been stripped of their meaning beyond that. In geophysicist Henry Pollock's articulation, quote, Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts. I love that. Goddamn, what a banger. What a banger sentence. Yeah. This perspective appears consistently in public discourse from media to intergovernmental panel on climate change, IPCC, but the quote, ice is just ice, conceptualization contrasts sharply

with conclusions by researchers. Glaciers, after all, affect people worldwide by influencing sea level, providing water for drinking and agriculture, generating hydroelectric energy from glacier runoff, triggering natural disasters, yielding rich climate data from ice cores, shaping religious beliefs and cultural values, constituting identities,

inspiring art and literature and memes, and driving tourist economies that affect local populations and travelers alike. So there we go. We're starting to see glaciers aren't just a big wad of ice up at the top of a mountain. They actually have all of these downstream effects, if you'll pardon the pun. A critical but overlooked aspect of the human dimensions of glaciers and global climate change research is the relationship between gender and glaciers. While there's been relatively little research on gender and global environmental change in general, there's even less from a feminist perspective that focuses on gender, understood here not as a male-female binary, but as a range of personal and social possibilities, and also on power, justice, inequality, and knowledge production in the context of ice, glacier change, and glaciology.

Researchers in feminist political ecology and feminist geography have also called for studies to move beyond gender to include analysis of power, justice, and knowledge production, as well as quote, to unsettle and challenge dominant assumptions that are often embedded in Eurocentric knowledges. Given the prominent place of glaciers both within the social imaginary of climate change and in global environmental change research,

a feminist approach has important present day relevance for understanding the dynamic relationship between people and ice. What we have is glaciers are these very rich, multi-dimensional aspects of the natural world. They affect us in the level of scientific research and understanding climate change. They affect the economies of the regions around where the glaciers exist. They affect the social fabric of those communities. They have a religious significance for some people. They are not just things that exist in the world. They are also parts of our culture. And the way that we study them might only narrowly focus on them as a source of data, or it might only focus on them as this sort of quantitative subject. And that robs them of a lot of the richness that they represent and that they exist as, and that taking a broader perspective when studying them

means that we will more wholly understand what they are and how they interact with society and how they are a part of the world and the effect that their erasure as part of climate change is going to have. And so what you find as you start to unpack, well, why are we looking at them just as a source of climate data? Or why are we looking at them as, you know, as a, for another aspect of this is like they are high up in the mountain and far away and hard to get to.

And so for those who trek up the mountain and do this, like this big physical exertion to go study them, that's a triumphant thing, right? That is a very sort of masculine way to approach their study, as opposed to, let's look at, you know, like a cultural survey or something like that of people in the area and how the ice has affected them. That's a less traditionally masculine coded way to approach their study. One of those tends to be more valued than the other

in scientific circles. And so when you start unpacking that, you find we take a very narrow, limited lens without even recognizing that we're taking this narrow, limited lens. This glacier paper actually calls out to previous papers that have tried to do this sort of like, hey, let's use a feminist lens to more deeply understand the science that we're doing in other areas, including geography. And there's apparently this this growing kind of tree of taking feminism as a productive lens to reevaluate the science that we're doing that this this glacier paper is just part of. And this is really important because the way I see it is that this paper on PL is basically

doing the same thing as that paper but applying it to a different field, right? It's like we're going to reproduce this in this environment to see what happens. Maybe you're listening to this and this isn't a topic that you feel very fondly about, right? There are, I'm sure, are listeners who are thinking like feminism and programming language, you know, why in the world are we talking about this? And I think it's very easy to misunderstand some of the stuff in the glacier paper to be like, oh, well, then we just shouldn't study, we shouldn't measure glacier melt because that's masculine and

that's bad, right? And that's definitely not what is being said. It is not that, oh, well, you can't go do the work of measuring glaciers to track climate change. Obviously, we should and can do that. This is a yes and, right? This is saying, hey, the bad parts are when you say nothing other than what I do, nothing other than this hard work here counts.

Or you don't even realize that there's other work that could be done. And I think all of us, when we learn what science is, like the vast majority of people start out with a very like numbers centric systems centric way of looking at what science is and it is actually very much different from that if your interest is in understanding the world and gaining Useful knowledge that you can do great work with yeah and so a lot of this work that is going on in this Glacier paper is looking at qualitative work, and we see an equivalent call here, and I'll just quote here.

This brings us to a central point of this essay. The evidence standards of the PL community explicitly value quantitative work, making qualitative work much less likely to be published. There's like these two threads here that I think are very connected, but it's this idea of the fact that women and other people are excluded from PL work, but also the fact that as a consequence of that, qualitative work is excluded. And it seems like that is one of, like I mean, it says it's one of the central points here. I think that is one of the main things that even if you are like some, for some reason, which I don't think you ought to be, but you're some reason skeptical

of using feminist sources here to try to make this point, the argument can stand on its own without, you know, the baggage you might feel about this feminism, that we are missing a huge chunk of what is going on because we're so biased away from qualitative work. And this feminism is trying to help us understand why we're biased away from qualitative work, but regardless, we are biased away from qualitative work in the PL community, and so we're missing out on important factual things. Market facts, for example.

We're missing out on facts about the world that we could bring in and use to inform the way in which we design programming languages. It's true though. It's true. You know, like, okay, when I sort of entered the tech world, having been a teacher and I worked within special educational needs, so we were always being told like studies by scientists, you know, educational psychologists, which is why I first got into teaching in the first place. And it was like, hey, look at all these studies we did with people. We did this Foo statistics test and we came out with this bar response and that means we should pay attention to it.

And to be honest, coming from coming from that, I was very surprised when I first came into the programming language world and discovered that that kind of stuff is quite rarely done. Like, because I thought like the whole point of a programming language is to make it easier for a human being to program something. Like, is that controversial? I don't know if what I just said was controversial, but that's what I thought, right? I think it is controversial. Right, right, right, right, right. Because, you know, like, just write assembly, lol. Just write binary, lol. Easy. But, so I was surprised that there's not more like studies and like, hey, we removed this feature of the language, of a hypothetical language, and we studied whether

people made more mistakes or not in this simple task we gave them. We took industry software engineers, we gave them two made-up languages, we had a control and we had one where we put off flashy new idea. But it's not, that's not how programming languages get made, it's just like by some random wizard in a tower that comes down and says, hey, I made Clojure. You know, like, you should all use it and listen to me because like, trust me, I've thought about it really hard. I've come down from the glacier at the top of the mountain. And I've decided that I'm right, you know, like, okay, that's pretty, that's a pretty facetious way of putting it. But coming from my background of looking at human beings, I was just surprised. I don't know

if other people were surprised about that too, to be honest. I mean, I was surprised, especially reading this paper, to hear the myriad examples that I was reading this paper to hear the myriad examples that I was passively aware of but not conscious of in our field where that sort of biasing creeps in and actually there are more options for how to do this and some of the ways that we don't do are very good actually and we would learn a lot and gain a lot by doing them and this paper like collects a lot of those that I was going, Oh yeah, right. Yeah, I'm used to using N of one as a pejorative, but it turns out that actually that's harmful. That N of one being a bad thing applies only to certain kinds of science. And there's other kinds of science that we can do where N of one is actually valuable and has a lot to contribute. And so if we just like outright reject things because they don't fit a preconceived sense

of how the work gets done and the form that that work should take, we're missing out on a lot. So I think we've gotten to a good point of like kind of introducing some of this. There's so much in this paper. This paper is, I don't want to say it's like disorganized at all. It's very clearly organized, but it just has so many little good snippets and asides and points and all to like gather up this bigger picture. Rather than like a singular line of, you know, throughput line, it's like it's bringing in so many different ways. Like, oh, you didn't like that one.

You don't understand this thing. Here's another one. So it makes it a little harder for me to like, how do we get the thrust through? There's not one line of argument. It's like so many different supporting pieces of evidence all to make this point. Right.

Because we've talked a lot about the qualitative thing, right, which I think is like a really core part of the paper. But I think it's wrong to say that that's the point, especially like skipping ahead to the end where it covers lots of different, lots of other ways that a feminist lens can help. One of those is programming language diversity, moving away from the current monoculture we have. And it doesn't just mean doing visual programming and stuff like that. A lot of it is... So the examples it gives is non-English programming languages, right? Obviously like a

Western white male viewpoint, we're going to end up with lots of English languages, which obviously misses out quite a lot of people. Another one is, there's this wordplay example, which I don't fully get, but it uses an example that sees a programming language as a performance, just like an entirely different approach. But one thing I was thinking is this qualitative point. One of the questions after the talk sort of challenged this point in a really good way, and Felina said it was like a great question. Do you remember that? It was the, I think it was the second question, challenged this idea and was basically saying, you know, we can't just fix this by allowing qualitative work. Like, you know, the questioner said, you know, like, you're asking for more of a move towards like social science-y work.

But actually, those fields, despite being qualitative, still have like huge issues of diversity and not making room for women, women not feeling welcome in those communities. So maybe there's too much focus on qualitative. I don't really know an answer to that. But I thought that was like a really interesting point. Yeah, and maybe I maybe over emphasize this qualitative work. We do actually get a explicit thesis statement. Diversity in both the design of PL and the demographics of the community are limited because of the dominant culture that prioritizes to build a more inclusive intellectual and social culture in PL that will benefit the scholarship we create, the languages we design, and the experiences of all members of the PL community. Worry, I think a real concern a real, you know passion for The fact that like there isn't a whole lot of diversity

Not just in the demographics, but also in the programming languages themselves the fact that I mean Hey is great work. I'm not trying to diminish it. I think it's wild that it took this long for there to be a language like Heddy, right? Right, right, right. Like, why wasn't it way earlier that someone was designing a language that could be translated? Why are there no non-educational languages that can do that, right? Like that also seems beneficial. The fact that in professional development, everyone has to do English for their programming languages fields. And so there is this like lack of diversity. And I think one of the things I think

should be made clear here is this paper is very much focused at the academic PL world. Yes. And I'm not saying that industry is better. I'm just saying it doesn't at all talk about industry PL, right? It talks about academic PL. So when you hear like, you know, this valuing of formalism and mathematics, these are things I also like have a problem with, you know, for academic PL, where not only do they not care about, you know, users and doing qualitative work, they don't care about like, the things that people practically

use. So yeah, you know, Ivan, do you have any thoughts on how do you have some sections that you want to jump through some thoughts on what you where you want to go in this paper next? Yeah, I want to do a couple quick hits. There's a little section where it says what the structure of the essay is that I just want to call out a couple points from. The essay will explore how different factors of masculinity currently define PL design and research in three ways.

Number one, by constraining the type of PL research that is accepted and acceptable. So that's going to be a theme we'll hit on a bunch. This adopting a feminist lens helped Felina. And I want to come back to like, why am I calling her Felina and Jimmy is calling her Arman's? There's I think there's an interesting thing to talk about there. And I think it is good that we are both doing this, but we'll get to that. But yes, why, um, there's only certain kinds of research that is accepted. And there's only certain venues where you can present your work and those venues

have certain requirements for how you submit that work and those requirements constrain the range of things that you can do and advance in your career. Um, number two is masculinity affects PL design and research by creating structural systems of exclusion. And if you are a person who is familiar with feminism and is especially familiar with intersectionality, which is something that this paper talks a little bit about, what is intersectionality mean, how does feminism help with that short version of it is feminism is not actually like a women's lib sort of women's rights movement. It's broader than that. It's more about understanding power dynamics and the relationships between a, you know, people in a dominant position and those who are in

a dominated position. And that doesn't just have to be about gender. That can be about race. That can be about wealth. It can be about disability. It can be about class and nationality and all sorts of things. There are all sorts of reasons you could be in a dominating or dominated position. And it's not uniform either. You can be a mix and match of those things. And in some respects, you can have an advantage, and in other respects, you can have a disadvantage. And those things have an effect on you as an individual, and they have an effect on the groups that you participate in. But those effects kind of bubble up and form overall dominating cultural factors that sort of set the acceptable norms within a group or within a society. And that has happened in academia, and it has happened in PL academia specifically, and that those factors affect what kinds of

programming even exist. Because there might be people who want to do certain kinds of programming that are just not acceptable within the norms that exist as a result of these dominating factors. And so that work just doesn't get done. So that's, oh wait, I said the acceptable and accepted one again, the systems of exclusion. Well, that's, that's, that's another thread that's in here that we might get to. And then the third one is like limiting the stories we share on the contributions of both women in the PL field and what it means to create a programming language. And she has some, some great stories later on of like the history of women in programming and in computing and what role women are allowed to serve and how that has

changed over time. So that's kind of like several of the threads that are woven throughout this paper and they each get a kind of a major section as well. On that intersectional feminism point, I think one of the challenges of this paper, like I think one of the challenging things of writing this paper must have been the fact that like you're having to imagine that your reader knows nothing about any of this. Because like the, you know, like if you want to dive in and say like, hey, let's talk about type theory, right? Like I think you can kind of like, you know, hardly anyone knows what that is. But because of like the the cultural support

for like that sort of thing, you know, like types and hardness and theory and mathematicalness that this paper talks about. It's kind of the readers fault if they don't know that it's like if you don't know about some of these complicated mathematical things, then it's your job to go figure it out. But I feel like when you're bringing things like I'm going to talk about the difference between liberal feminism and intersectional feminism to you. Wow, like, the authors have to really explain what those things are, you know?

Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons we see this just like extensive reference list. Like, if you want some good references here, let me look, there are 133 references in this paper, right? And I think this is, and you'll see some things that like get sided with like eight references after them or whatever. Like it's like, and if you're questioning this, here's all of this research that's been done. Yeah, it is interesting that it has to, and this is one of the things even talked about in the essay, that when you're doing something outside the norm, you can't get deep on it, right? You can't talk about the deep theoretical things

because people just keep asking you very like baseline questions. Knowledge is not absolute and neutral. Knowing cannot and should not be separated from context from the knower who is doing the knowing. Citing 253750708083. the knower who is doing the knowing, citing 25, 37, 50, 70, 80, 83. Amazing. So good.

It's time for names. Like I'm calling her Felina, and I think I might have even said Felene by accident once. Felina. Yeah. And Jimmy, you were calling her... Hermans. Yeah, Hermans. So this is something that I talked about with my wife Janice.

This is actually like, and this is why I do this, is she, so my wife was art history professor and studied gender politics in Weimar Germany, but broadly gender politics and the way in which you know these gender issues have affected art historical practices. And there's a paper who the author, I can't remember, is like, why have there been no great female artists, is the paper. And it's written, you know, pointing out, of course there have been women who have made great art. It's that they haven't been considered great artists, right? So I've kind of like been involved in these kind of gender issues Just you know by osmosis through her, you know learning about her research, etc

and one of the like common things that happens in these dialogues is Women get called by their first name and not by their last name, especially in academic contexts. And this is like something that's been studied over and over again, that men will be called by their last name, that adds an air of legitimacy to them. And women will also often be called by their first names instead. And so like one of the things that has been ingrained in me, and I've brought it up before in past recordings, that like there is this tendency to do this for men to call women researchers by first names rather than last and male researchers by their last names.

And so I try to consciously, you know, use last names like I think I would for almost everyone that we've covered in this podcast. I think there's some people who you end up using their full name, like Alan Kay, you often say Alan Kay. Partially, I think, because of the fame of Alan Kay. Rich Hickey, another person. But in general, this is something that I I just from those conversations I've had with her and the way in which she's seen that in practice,

you know, play out where people do this. I try to do the opposite. When you first said that to me, like, I guess many months ago now, I had never heard of it before and I became so aware of how much I did it. But it is one of those small things that, like, once you see it, you can't unsee it. And it's not that, like, I think it's, like, interesting because it's kind of, like, one of the ways that these biases bubbles up and becomes visible. Because I think it's, like, it's the kind of bias that's so dangerous because it's sometimes invisible but in moments like that you can see it you know like you can clearly see the difference. I'm still like at the phase where I'm way overthinking so much of this

these things like I'm still like I guess like emotionally responding to this paper and talk as well. But yeah, God, I don't even know what to say. Like, I think another another aspect with Filena's name is that looking at the like the Western English centric aspect is that I heard like 20 different pronunciations of her first and last name. And I noticed like how privileged I am in a sense that most people like get my 99% of people get my name right immediately. And I think so much about trying to build a name for myself. Like I don't need to worry about that. Matthew 10 And if somebody gets your name wrong, like pronounces your name wrong, that's not going to negatively impact you. Matthew 11 Right. Matthew 12 Whereas I think that's not true of everyone. Like there are some people who will have a harder time gaining recognition as a result of their name being difficult to pronounce in English circles.

Yeah, I mean, like it's, it's, it feels really awkward to talk about. I'm not gonna lie, like, there are there are many conversations where I'm not the privileged person, right? Like, in regards to gender and things like that, sometimes I'm, I'm not the privileged person, right? Like in regards to gender and things like that, sometimes I'm not the privileged person, but sometimes I am. Those conversations where you are the privileged person can be so tricky and uncomfortable. It's like uncomfortable in a different way, right? Because when I'm the sucker, in a sense, it's uncomfortable in the sense that you don't want to cause a problem, you don't want to cause a fuss, especially in my Britishness. But when I'm the privileged person, I guess maybe it's the same thing, it's just a different kind of fuss. I'm just bloody British awkwardness. Bloody hell. Bloody, I don't know. I found this talk so inspiring because Hermans, Hermans, fuck. Hermans was putting to the forefront, like, her difficulty and her awkwardness, these awkward situations, these, like you were saying, Ivan, like, there's an element of self-sabotage. She knows that doing this is going to cause trouble for herself, but she's doing it anyway. And for me, I found that really inspiring.

For me, that's a kind of leadership, which is why it was so refreshing and compelling. On the name thing, I'm calling her Felina, which is as far as I can tell the best I can do to pronounce her name. I'm probably getting it wrong and that sucks, but that's, I'm trying to be consistent and at the very least it should be unambiguous who we are talking about here and how we feel about her work. And the reason I'm choosing to call her Felina and not Hermans is because I am in character right now. What? What?

Yes, surprise, surprise. When I am on this podcast, I am in character. And part of the character that I play on this podcast is that I possess a well-earned irreverent disrespect for all of this great work in the history of our field. One of the most prominent, maybe first cases of this coming out was Dougie, right? Dougie. Mr. Engelbart.

That was Engelbart. Wrote this paper called On the Augmentation of Fart or whatever it it is and made this video conferencing demo back in the 1960s and it was awful work. And as part of reflecting on that awful work, his name's Dougie. There's also Licky. There's a whole bunch of cases in the history of this show where my character is disrespectful towards people on the basis of their name, or at least uses playing with their name as a way of poking fun at them. There's also a sneeze response that I get whenever I see the name Dykstra. Sneeze response. For instance. So I am calling Felina Felina to try and very delicately thread the needle between being in character and wanting to be not disrespectful towards her on the basis of her name, but not...

I had to think about this a lot and try and decide like, where do I want to fall down between breaking character and being in character? One way I could have been in character would be to call her Fellini or something like that. But I haven't been doing that lately. I haven't been, I haven't been doing the Y suffix and that's not funny anyways here. The joke is no longer funny. No, no, no. I like, please carry, like, do you have more to say on names, sir? Please, ash and rotting flesh. Carry on. Um, the, so the way I came down is basically like, all of this is about rejecting certain dynamics and certain kinds of reverence and authority that I see as kind of hurtful and harmful. Like I, I'm, I don't like the use of a person's last name as a

way of kind of like deferring to them or genuflecting. I don't know what that means. It's like bowing down on a knee and like showing deference. I reject all of that shit. I am extremely against all of that in every context. I'm extremely against this sort of like putting people up on a pedestal kind of thing. I do not like doing that and I don't want to do it. And so I never call anybody by their last name if I catch myself doing it. If I do it on this show, like if I call K K instead of Alan or instead of Alan K, it might just be because that's the name that I'm used to hearing people use to

talk about them. But like, if I talk about Brett, I'm talking about Brett and everybody knows who I'm talking about. I never ever, ever talk about Victor. I talk about Brett. I might talk about Brett Victor. I might talk about Hickey because Hickey is a

more distinct name than Rich, but I would probably just say Rich Hickey. So my, my way of coming down on this is like, I want to be on a first name basis with everybody and only use the last name if I am not conscious of the fact that I'm doing it. And if I'm conscious of the fact that I'm doing it, I want to use the first name because that to me is a way of establishing like a sort of a uniformity among people. Like we are all people, we're all human beings, we're all on the same level and I want that to be the way that the world

works. At least when I'm in character in this show. Hey, you know there's someone else who does the first name thing a lot. Alex. See, it's not very helpful, is it? Anyway, Alex. Repning? No, yes again. Repner? No. McLean? Wait, wait, what did you say, Jimmy?

McLean. Yes, McLean. Alex McLean. As I've written, I read it somewhere. I think it's more like he says it consistently. He says, I like to use first names, right? And I think it's more like he he says it consistently he says I like to use first names right and and I noticed it and then I went back and looked at a lot of things he wrote and I was like oh damn you really do always refer to people by first names in like in everywhere. I will just say like I have a you know I gave my social reason for why I'm using Ahriman's last name here, but I will just say, like I'm intentionally making sure I do it because I do, like Lou said, I have this implicit bias that I didn't realize I had where I will do it for male

names like more automatically and not, and that's, it sucks that that's there, right? But I will say the distinction I make between referring to somebody By last name or not is not an authority distinction. It's a textual distinction when I'm referring to K I'm referring to the work that K has produced not Alan K the human being. Oh God, right fictional character K. Well I'm referring to this text, right? Like what is written here? K. 1974, right? Yeah, blah blah blah. It's the work, not the person. So whenever I say Hermans, I'm talking about this essay, not Fellina Hermans.

Yeah, I getcha. It's funny that you said Alex McLean right, because that is another person whose name gets pronounced wrong. I was there when this conversation happened. Right, right, right, because I used to say Alex McLean as in Lightning McQueen. But it's Alex McLean, right? As in in saying in the membrane. But he says he doesn't correct people because you know, because of various reasons. But I thought, well, I guess I know it now I should. Maybe I should say it. Who knows? I always use full names first and last except I realized that on this podcast I don't follow my own rule. Yeah, I would say I don't think you've ever called me by my full name.

Right, right. Nobody does. Like I have a friend John Ryan, that's his name. Right. That's yes, it's first and last, but that's not actually first and last. It's a it's a four four. If you're if you're actual god given name is a four four you're gonna use it yeah it's john ryan right like we're just gonna call him john ryan at any moment if i call him john it feels very weird. Like no he's john ryan well you know obviously i don't i don't i don't do it when i'm talking in second person i I don't say, great to see you again, Jimmy Miller. Actually, that's got a bit of a ring to it though.

Every time I refer to you, Lou or Luke, either is fine. That's how. So, Luke, you had three things you wanted to, almost got a spit take. You had three things you wanted to talk about. I did. Thank you, Ivan E. The first one, Mary Shaw, full name, right? Mary Shaw, who was there at Onward also presenting? Also a 4-4, great name. Right. And like as a little side, I was so starstruck. I tried to act cool. I think I did. But I'm like, I was like, oh my God, it's Mary Shaw.

I hope she didn't listen to our podcast episode about her. But no, that's not what I thought. It was one of the good ones. That was one of the good ones. One of the good ones. There was one day where like the lunch hall was very full. And me and Jonathan Edwards and some other people, including Mary Shaw, were like looking around for a seat. We couldn't find one anywhere. We all looked at each other. And there was a moment where we were like,

should we go get lunch somewhere else? And inside my head, I'm going, please, please, Mary Shaw, come please, Mary Shaw, please, Mary Shaw, please, please, please, please come along, please come along, please come along. I don't want to invite her and then be rejected by Mary Shaw like an idol. But she did, she did say like, is it okay if I join? Inside, I was like, fuck yes, fuck yes, fuck yes, Mary Shaw will come to life. But like, outwardly I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's fine. Anyway, we talked about Midsummit's Myths and Myth Conceptions. Myths. Great paper, right?

Myth Conceptions. It's a good paper. And I really saw some parallels from this paper to that. Like, I don't know if you saw that as well. but like with the moving away from this, I guess, obsession with formal thinking mathematical proofs towards facing the fact that all programs run in the real world for real people. Were made by real people. Right. Supposedly. That's one link I just wanted to point out. Like, do you agree with that? Or nah? Nah. Yah. I'm more curious about Jimmy, actually, because...

What is he? I think me and you are quite... we think the same way about that stuff. But, like, what do you think, Jimmy? You know, one section I do want to highlight here is this, you know, Ivan gave us these kind of like three things that this essay looks at. And one of them is about, you know, the ways in which like experiences shape who gets involved in PL. And so I do want to kind of quote here, a lifetime of different opportunities and experiences.

Simone de Beauvoir famously said, one is not born but becomes a woman, which seems to fit here. Girls are in various ways encouraged out of working with technology and programming. Recent work in Denmark has shown that gender-based preferences impact their choices in a CS context. When university students were given the choice between equivalent coursework, female students favored assignments around people, and male students preferred those around things, and high school age students show similar preferences. Critically, interest in behavior is malleable. Even in light of factors like gender, it has been observed that gender-based differences in interests

disappear in more demographically balanced and culturally inclusive settings. One way that I have seen this problem of diversity tackled is that we need to get rid of differences between men and women in terms of their interest. That there are these things where men and women are encouraged and discouraged differently at different levels, right? So you'll see like studies that show that young girls are often encouraged in math up to a certain point and then it's like, oh no, you're too old now to focus on math. You should be focused on this thing instead, right? English

or art or whatever it is. And there's some efforts, of course, and I'm not saying they're bad, I just thought this contrast was interesting of like saying, okay, well that's the point at which we need to fix all of this, and then the gender difference in programming will solve itself. Whereas this work is saying, it seems to me, at least to be saying, we have to accept the fact that this is the culture we are in. People are socialized in this way. Of course it can change.

Of course it should change, etc. Like, of course there's problems with how we teach people. But look, we actually have found that female students favor assignments around people and male students prefer assignments around things and we need to make it so that our assignments can be inclusive of this fact. This market fact, yes. It is actually though. It is if you think about it. Oh, I actually forgot about that.

Yeah, if you think about it, if you keep thinking about it. Oh, it's a market fact. You know, okay, there's a great moment in the talk where Elena Irmands is saying, what do we do? Question mark. You know, how do we do this? And her answer is, I don't know. I don't know.

And just being very open about that. And I love seeing research and work at this stage where someone has identified like the situation and they don't know how to fix it quite yet. So I think that's something to keep in mind with this essay is that it's focusing on identifying this phenomenon, this problem that does exist in our community. So there's, like we've talked about, there's like the structure of this paper is very broad and it follows a lot of different threads. And for each of them introduces, you know, some evidence or some arguments or some experience or something like that. Some of them are about unpacking the mathematical roots of PL or the fact that PL actually didn't start out as a mathematical practice and that math had to be kind of added into it at a certain point. Another one is like how we choose to study PL and

what kinds of things are accepted. Another one is like what aspects of PL do we study? There's like you know sections that do each of these things and a lot of them have just like painful examples. For instance later on there's one that that talks about this book where they interviewed the authors of a whole bunch of different programming languages and put together this collection of like, hey, look at this, the masterminds of programming languages or whatever. And all of them are men and all of them are written by and about men, except for one of them that was written by a woman, which is just this broad one saying, here's what a programming language even is. And it's like the other 40 or whatever it was are written

about the men who created programming languages. So it's like, oh, women are allowed to do this work or invited to do this work or demonstrated doing this work. That is sort of like a survey. But when it comes to the actual work of creating the languages, it seems like all of the examples are men. There's like just lots and lots of examples like that. There's a bit here looking at when math was brought into computer science and when computer science was made into mathematics that I just want to read a little bit from. Programming did not start off as mathematics. It had to be made mathematical. Programming started as an activity closely related to electrical engineering when programs were

created by connecting wires. Dykstra argued in the mid-70s, decades after programming languages were created, that it must be understood as mathematical. He also argued that soft sciences had no place in software engineering, that it required hard science. For programming to be a hard science, other sciences needed to be put at a distance. Dijkstra argues that the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous by claiming that they can contribute to software engineering. This is interesting in light of the large contributions made to PL by social scientists like Noam Chomsky. So that's just yet another example of a prominent figure in the field saying, it's the math and the hard science that is the part of computing that is

important and worth study and we need to take the soft sciences, which is a bullshit term if I ever heard one, but I understand what he means by it and how we commonly use that term, and put those people out of the picture. They're not welcome here. So that's yet another example of this. That was pretty eye-opening to me. I didn't actually realise, like, you know, like, I didn't realise that I extracted all of those things in the talk. I think I sort of like looked at the person next to me and we were like, what the fuck? What? That's crazy.

We didn't know. Anyway, the mathematical nature of programming was further stressed by explicitly disregarding experimentation as a form of gathering knowledge. This one hurts me personally because I'm big on experimentation. Turing award winner, if you know what I mean, Turing award winner Hartmannis argues in his 1994 award lecture that, in computer science, there's no history of critical experiments that decide between the validity of various theories, and The underlying mathematical model of digital computing is not seriously challenged by theory

or experiments. Such statements reinforce the mathematical nature of programming and limit what type of research is in scope. That hurts me so much. And it should hurt everybody who is in this future of coding community because it basically, well, because it's basically saying that there's no room to allow contributions to the field of computer science from experimental experimental work, from creating something or studying something in an experimental lens. And instead, the way that they want to permit work being done is this very formalism centric, theory centric approach of, you know, looking for facts about the universe or trying to prove

properties of a system very abstractly and not doing other kinds of work. And the glacier paper is what I think of when I think of this, where it's like, yeah, you just want to do the kind of computer glaciology where you're just drilling core samples and measuring them. You don't want to do the kind of, you know, glaciology work that is looking at all the other ways in which computers have manifested in the world. Or if you do want to permit that work, you want to push it out of the prestigious conferences and journals and say, yeah, that's soft science work that can go have its own less prestigious venue. Right. I'm just conscious that

there's two different meanings of the word experimentation. There's this sort of like, hey, I'm experimenting as in like, hey, I'm messing around, you know, I'm just seeing where things go. But I think there's also the like, scientific meaning of experimentation, right, where you have like a control and a and the other one I can't remember. This was a while ago. And I feel, is this, is this talking about just the scientific one or is it talking about talking about both or what? I would imagine it's talking about just the scientific one because I have a hard time imagining that the people like Dijkstra who take this very hard line position on only considering certain kinds of work as contributing value,

those people tend to be the kind of people who rule out play as a source of like valuable activity done by adults. Right. Fuck those people. I have no truck with these close-minded assholes and I think that the more that we can do to undermine them at every juncture, the better society will be and the more we will learn. It like wasn't even considered by them to be a thing you could do, right? Like, was it even worth dismissing? So unlike Ivan, I try not to play a character at all on this podcast. Yes.

Try. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's temptations, right? There's temptations to focus on the entertainment value rather than, you know, like be honest, my own thoughts, right? Ivan likes to throw out thoughts that he doesn't actually accept as a way to kind of poke and prod discussion or whatever, right? He'll act like he hates a paper just to reveal later that he loved it. So I just want to be-

What a shallow, narrow life you live where you are not multiple people at the same time everywhere and all the time. Yeah, so I just want to be honest and say that like, I don't personally like reading qualitative research. I don't like it. For example, right after this section that Ivan just read, it says, studies examining, for example, whether programmers prefer curly braces over intention, or whether programmers make more mistakes in an untyped language, which experiments could certainly help us with, are explicitly placed outside of relevant PL work. I'll be honest and say, like, I personally would not find those studies interesting.

I would not think that their conclusions bring me much. But that, I wanna make this distinction because I think some other people might be listening to this and feel the same way, that just because they're not interested in something means that it shouldn't be done or couldn't be done or couldn't be valuable to somebody. This is the whole point, isn't it?

Like the whole point is that we want to move beyond what current individuals, current members of this community find compelling. Because what is compelling is probably the hard puzzles in games, the Zachtronics kinds of things. I would read a paper about zachtronics, but is it is it helpful or important? Maybe maybe to some people but like yeah, there's there's gonna be stuff you miss if you're only focusing on zachtronics Yeah And when we look at the paper here and it talks about like the masculine discourse and the things that you know Are these masculine values? I find myself much more aligned with them, right? Just being frank, like I I enjoy

things because they're hard. I care more. I'm more interested in things than people Right, like these are the biases I have Yes, and I think this is why it was important that Lou made this distinction of like masculinity and like this toxic masculinity Right just because those are the things that I care about, the things that I'm gonna be interested in, doesn't mean I think I need to impose that on everyone else. And doesn't mean I think that like we wouldn't benefit more from a diversity of these values. And one of the things that was cited here

was this research at Carnegie Mellon that has a much better gender balance in its computer science group than a lot of other universities. And they looked at surveys from 1995 where they didn't have this gender balance and then today, when they do. And they found that there was this drift, not just of more women involved, but also the values that the men in this program held. That they became less focused on just programming languages and more focused on applications and vice versa.

That there was this like basically more uniformity in the kinds of values that people held. And I've seen this in practice in not the drift in values where I've worked at companies with a complete lack of diversity on a team, right? Where it's just all white men. Yeah. And I've worked on at companies with a lot more diversity. And I found that even the things I didn't explicitly value, I benefited greatly from the fact that there were people on my team that valued them. And the teams that I didn't have diversity, there was, you know, more agreement. I found other people who held all the same values, and yet we went in wrong directions. You know, I have my beefs with PL.

I have the things that I wish we would talk more about. I wish we would talk more theoretically, not in the formal sense, but in the abstract philosophical looking at meta discussions, blah, blah, blah. I wouldn't, I'm never interested in empirical work that's quantitative. I honestly, I've written a whole thing why I don't like quantitative empirical work. But that's mostly because people make grandiose claims from it. And I think qualitative is more interesting. But even then, I wouldn't be involved in that work. And I think qualitative is more interesting, but even then I wouldn't be involved in that work.

And I think that fact shouldn't limit the fact that as a PL community, we need all kinds of work and it will inform and help us understand more. Even if I don't see it, that doesn't mean I need to stop it from happening. I don't see, I'll be honest, I don't see how weather programmers for curly braces over indention, I don't see the impact that would have for me. But other people see that. And that's important. I want to pick on that example for a sec.

Like, because this this mirrors a little bit of the problem I have with the relationship between PL and visual programming. Like curly braces and indentation, making mistakes in typed languages versus on typed languages, those ones are disinteresting perhaps because those are the few cases that this broader kind of work has actually been done or where we can, we as, you know, PL-pilled people can actually see the space for that other kind of research work to happen. But because we don't permit that research work to happen, we of course don't have very many examples to point to. And we don't have very many things to say,

like look at the great findings in that field because we shut down those that work before it can produce those great findings that then visual programming likewise. We don't have a lot of great visual programming languages we can point to because people aren't really allowed to do visual programming work. It doesn't get funding. It doesn't get adoption. There's not an engine of continual refinement and improvement and exploration

because it's derided. It's a, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that it's not going to be very good. So of course that kind of work isn't interesting, but if we recognize this cycle and try and find ways to address it and try and find ways to allow that work to happen and celebrate that work and allow that work to advance people's careers, right? By allowing that are much more interesting and that are much more valuable and that feed back into the formal, theoretical, mathematical, philosophical dimensions of PL and that make that stuff richer and we'll get a bigger, you know, epicycle of mutual inspiration and support going and that'll make everyone's work better. You know, I think it's fair to say that what tickles your

intellectual itch is not qualitative. But I think it's also like very hard to make that kind of judgment when we live in such like a skewed field, right. But also like all of this talk about qualitative does make me think back to that challenge that one of the questioners gave around this, like, if only we can make room for more qualitative work. And like, that's not the full picture. So I wouldn't want us to get too deep into the qualitative versus quantitative, because I think that's like only one of the sort of, like many ways this is getting manifested. Yeah. I think though there is this... There does seem to be a difference in what a programming

language is for, but I think this essay has an assumption built into it. So I'll just quote here and then talk about what I mean by this. So it says, this is on page 214, how do we develop languages? Developing languages, variants, and libraries is a large part of the knowledge production of PL. But how do we go about that? A common practice in technology wider than PL, but certainly also in PL, is called dogfooding,

meaning to use one's own tools, in our case, a programming language, as much as possible, and to bootstrap this to be able to use it as early as possible. Prior bootstrap this to be able to use it as early as possible. Prior research termed this I methodology. Such a methodology suffers from several limitations that are rarely addressed. First, there's the unspoken assumption that the original creator can take a viewpoint of all potential users.

This of course has the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Surely people who think like the original creator will feel more at home in such a language or system. I am, you know, I'm developing my own programming language, right? I'm somebody who enjoys this just as Ahrimond's is somebody who develops it. But I think looking at Hetty, Ahrimond's is very interested in people using her programming language to learn, in making sure that they are, you know, it's an educational language and that, you know,

colors the goals, not saying that Airmond's can only do educational languages, but obviously it changes some of those goals. And the users are clearly the people that, and the point of the language. The point of the language is to help those people in the real world Who can learn programming now in their own native language? I think this is a very important noble altruistic amazing goal

My goals are nowhere near as cool and good Right what I am my goal with the language is not to make it so that I have users or whatever, it's for me to learn, it's for me to express something that I feel I can't express just by talking about it. That part of like how I can express these things is by creating the language itself. And so I have no illusions that I can take the viewpoint of all potential users. I know that I cannot. I know that people will not like all of my choices. I think of Rich Hickey when I think of this kind of setup, right? I don't think

Rich Hickey has any illusion that he can take on the viewpoint of everyone else. He doesn't want to take on the viewpoint of everyone else He doesn't want to take on the viewpoint of everyone else he wants his language the way he wants it and he does not care and That you can see that as bad and that's fine. If you see that as a bad thing Okay, but I think this is also a valid way to make a language and this is why I'm saying whether people prefer indentation or curly braces wouldn't have a bearing on my projects because I'm not interested in that question, because I'm not interested in what those people care about. I'm interested in making a programming

language to me as much as making a drawing, right? Going and doing a survey of what kinds of art people like wouldn't help most artists. And I think there doesn't have to be that, like, I don't see why this is different. Can I come to your defense? Sure. Sure. And then I'm going to rip it apart. I come to your defense in an attempt to reject your point. That's why I'm throwing it out here. Right? No, let me let me. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no throwing it out here, right? No, let me, let me learn. No, no, no, no, no, because I think, I think, okay, in your defense, Jimmy, I would say

that the kind of practice that you're engaging with, like building your own language for your own reasons to express an idea to learn, in all fairness to you, I do think that's quite different to something like closure that Rich Hickey has made. Because I think the point that Felina Omans is making is that you might be able to benefit from more room to express that kind of idea. Like, I'm just making this for some personal reasons, right? Personal learning and exploration and expression reasons. I think it would be great to like have a place in the PL community for you to come

and share that essentially. A Slack perhaps. Right, no, who knows? But like, the other thing is like, but if you were to say that I am making a language for many people to use, and I'm completely ignoring them as the best approach to that, because I'm correct and they're wrong, like I think then that would be where dogfooding is going to be a limited approach. It depends on your goals for the language. And I do think that closure is intended for many people to use. So in that case, I think I can support you more than Rich Hickey there.

I guess I mean, hope, my hope would be that I eventually make a language that's good enough that people would want to use it. But I, I, if I found studies that said the, this kind of syntactic thing is more understandable for people or whatever. We can broaden it beyond or any sort of studies that had these user studies been found, people make fewer errors when this, right? Like, I don't think that wouldn't change what I wanted to do. Nobody's telling you you have to do a certain thing. That's not the problem.

But I also don't think I would be doing something wrong if I just ignored all of that research. Yes, that's not the problem with this dog fooding thing. That's a separate concern. Because the thing you're saying, Jimmy, is something you addressed earlier where it's like, this is a yes and, right? This is not saying we're going to take away your ability to dog food, or that by dog fooding you're bad, or that you shouldn't dog food, or that people who don't dog food are going to make things that are valuable for you. Like, even if any of those were at risk, you can just choose to ignore them. The harm here is that there are venues that are needed for people to submit their work in an academic context to advance their careers that do not value somebody coming with a user study.

That if you dog food, you're permitted to submit and say, here's what we found in testing this thing and that that totally flies. But if you come in with, and we ran this test on 5,000 people and had these additional findings, that extra work to do that extra evaluation is not as valued as other ways that you could spend your effort as an academic. That's the problem here. Yeah, totally agree. And yeah, and I think it, yeah, it's like, it's fine. And also more is fine. Well, yeah, but we want, we want to recognize that,

like, other sciences require you to go out and do that work, right? Like if you're in medicine or something like that, you're not just allowed to do, you know, like a self experiment and publish that as a, as a, you know, definitive proof one way or the other of the effectiveness of some new novel molecule or whatever, right? You have to actually go and do a large amount of testing in the field. Right. You know, like, the field I think most of is psychology, because that is a field that used to be, like a long time ago, used to be about introspection and thinking hard and just sort of like

doing what you think is right. And sort of like case studies, like individual case studies, really small sample size. Like I'm talking about like psychoanalysis and Freud and that sort of thing, which like nowadays is largely like overwhelmingly discredited by the psychological field, which is now much more rigorous about like large sample sizes and fitting that into qualitative work as well. It's like, it's this kind of negotiation between data and like qualitative data. Data and qualitative data? Oh, that's not the thing. You know what I mean. You know what I mean. Let me talk about highlighting for a really quick second. I have highlights in this, as I usually do, and the colors this time. I have yellow meaning like this is a good bit of the summary of the overall thing if

we want to work through it linearly like these are some passages that might help us understand certain sections. I have green which is like the stuff Philean is saying that's making me go, oh my god yes. Come on people. And then I have stunning right now. And then I have... Stanning right now. And then I have red or pink, unfortunately, which is like stuff that Phelan is saying that is making me go, yes, damn it, oh my God, people. Like green but more intense. So like for instance, in green, I have about this Masters of Programming

book that we talked about briefly earlier. Reflecting again on MOP shows how easy the goal posts can be moved. For some of the languages included in it can be argued that they are not a programming language such as UML, OCK or SQL. UML is not executable, so could easily be disregarded as a programming language, but it is not. HTML, which is executable, however, is not seen as a programming language in regular PL discourse. You know there's a really great video about that called Define Define by Toadpond about defining pro- anyway. There's a really good video game about that called

so that was green and then in red a recent paper review i received mid 2023 included the sentence quote i am uncomfortable with the definition of excel as a programming language despite many considering it as such. Yes, yes, sorry. Observe how the discomfort of this reviewer overpowers both the evidence presented and as well the opinion of others. Oh dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, I actually, I got told by someone else about that specific review before I even read the paper. That's how far their discomfort spread. One thing that we didn't get to in the discourse that I just have to mention, that I was going to complain about until I got to here. Okay, so this paper has end notes, not footnotes. Yes, hell yeah.

Yeah, no, that sucked. That was annoying. I am definitely very opposed to end notes, rather than footnotes. Oh my God. But there's a reason. There's a reason why this has end notes and not footnotes. And I'll read from end note 22. Oh, which I didn't read. I didn't read that end note. There's a reason why this has end notes and not footnotes. And I'll read from Endnote 22.

Oh, which I didn't read. I didn't read that end note. Yep, yep. Okay, right? Oh. It took the authors of this paper considerable effort and knowledge of the Arabic alphabet to properly typeset elb, which is this language that's an Arabic programming language, in LaTeX.

A case in point, this is also the reason we use in notes rather than footnotes. Footnotes are not compatible with Arab tech. Oh my god. That's perfect. That's incredible. That's perfect. I think this blew my mind that this level of non-inclusion of non-English cultures made it so that they had to use a totally different program to typeset this and that program did not have footnotes instead of it had to go with endnotes. And that was just, I was like, okay, I'm glad I read footnote or endnote 22.

So I knew why. And that's so sad, right? Like, I think this kind of reinforces this point of how our, such our limited point of view makes us not realize like the things that other people have to deal with. Wow. Wow. And so, yeah, I think there's this whole sections at the end of, you know, ways in which it's titled alternative representations.

And so we look at like methodological diversity with which includes some like socio PL controlled experiments user centered design. We got programming language diversity. There's like so many good examples. This paper is just chock full. Yeah, this section whipped. Of great examples and different ways that we can do this. There's like such humor in that too.

So I guess I can give my like closing thoughts on this. Wait, wait, we can't do closing thoughts yet. I haven't given a... I have like a big beef. Okay, sorry, I forgot that you had your beef. I thought that was a closing thought. No, no, no, it's not. It's like a whole, listen, we got another 10 hours. So I have a strong criticism,

and then there is like a reason why it's a slightly unfair criticism. And then I have my defense on why I think it's worth making the criticism anyway. So I'm like preempting the obvious criticisms to my criticism. Okay? Okay. So my criticism, and I guess this sort of comes something that I am like hyper aware of as a trans person and as a non binary person that this paper stays within the the narrative of the gender binary the whole time. You know, it highlights the importance that you know, masculinity isn't necessarily just a man thing and femininity isn't a woman thing. You know, there's, like I said earlier, you can be a masculine woman,

you can be a feminine man and so on. And it also highlights the fact there are many different dimensions of masculinity and femininity. It also highlights the importance of an intersectional approach. However, nonetheless, it always stays within this view of femininity on one side and masculinity on the other side. And my take is that that's a very

limiting narrative to work within. In my view, it's like in some ways, contributing to this problem. Like that this is like a really, that's the really, that's the strong criticism here. Can you guess what the what I think the like the obvious rebuttal to that is? That the focus on that dynamic is meant to be a countervailing force? Uh... no. Okay. Okay. But like, that's an interesting... What do you think the obvious rejoinder is?

This was going to be a fun game we could have played. How many feet can we fit in our mouths? Okay, I mean like, I think, you know, like, listeners might have their own views. Like, I think this is an interesting... I think this is a good conversation to have, right? Pause the podcast, send tweet, and then come back.

Send skeet or toot. No, send tweet, because the people who are gonna have their own opinions, we don't wanna see them. Exactly, so I think the unfair part of me saying that is that like, we live in a world where there is a gender binary in our culture, right? Like, that's that's an unfortunate fact for people who tend to go outside of that binary, right? Like, it's it's it's you know, that mean, where it's like, oh, you question toxic masculinity, yet you're working within the gender binary. Yeah, you claim you're against capitalism, yet you live in society. Yes, yes. That's that's I think, you know, you could say this is an unfair, like

criticism because, you know, yeah, like we're we're within this binary, we're identifying the binary, we're spotting the problems with basically picking a place on that binary, and saying that that is what our what we're spotting the problems with basically picking a place on that binary and saying that that is what we're going to build our field round. And in this case, it's like far over to the masculine side. So it's maybe it's unfair, because like we're all trapped within that in some way. But I still think that it's an important criticism to make. Because I you know, I might be wrong, but my my impression of the paper is that it doesn't take a step back from that at any moment. It doesn't sort of consider that this whole spectrum that we've decided to like grade everything on is one of the things that's holding us back. You know, like I said earlier, the paper is not claiming to find a way out of this problem that you know, in

the talk, Filayna Hermans says that she doesn't know how to solve it. And so this is me, I guess, saying, I think I have an idea. I think we need to resist this very idea of masculinity, and femininity. I think it's, it's, it's like a harmful lens. So I say that, like, I agree with the paper, but like, I think the next step, you know, and it asks questions at the end about what, what, what should we do next? What comes next? I think that's like a worthwhile way to go. Yeah. And I don't mean this as like undercutting what you just said, because I think what you said is absolutely accurate. Just for readers who didn't read it, I think it is important to highlight, like this paper doesn't deny things outside the gender binary. So I'll just read from the section

things outside the gender binary. So I'll just read from the section, feminism is for everyone. And I know you weren't saying that, I just think people might get the wrong impression if they haven't read it. So it says, one common misconception about feminism that we want to address upfront is about who feminism is for, about the roles people of all genders, including men, play in feminism. Feminist scholar, Bell Hooks, famously asserts that feminism is for everyone. Gender-based oppression negatively impacts everyone, men, women, and folks outside the gender binary. So there is at least this acknowledgement. I agree that this is a different point

than what you are making. I just want to make it clear to listeners who didn't read this that it isn't acting as if, you know, trans folk don't exist as if non binary individuals do not exist. Just Yeah, I think this is really interesting. Like, should we I think this is an interesting suggestion for how do we overcome this is deconstructing those ideas of masculinity and femininity.

Yeah, and I think it's it's worthwhile you mentioning that and like, just to reiterate, this paper does very explicitly reject kinds of feminism that are not inclusive. It's not about the inclusivity or not. It's about my suggestion about how like to practically escape this problem. I should also state that what I'm saying is radical even for queer communities, right? Like, in queer communities, there is, it is extremely common and normal for, for us all to talk about feminine, you know, for example, trans feminine people, trans masculine people. Also, like we talk about femme and butch queer people, right? This is a very normal thing for us all to do. So, you know, it is something that's really, really embedded. I guess I'm putting out like a kind of provocative challenge to the writers of this paper, but also anyone listening, like, how can we deconstruct this entire thing,

rather than just trying to move somewhere else or like, have a range on this binary that we can... it doesn't really make sense, have a range on this binary. I guess when I say, you know, you can see binary as like on or off, you can also see binary in the sense that we only have one line to move along, right? There's different ways, like you can move from one to zero, and that is binary in that way, right? Maybe we shouldn't see things as masculine or feminine at all.

Yeah, so it's not that you're saying that there's like, there's the binary version, which is like men and women, two separate things, like one and zero, there's the version of it as a line or like a spectrum where it's like you can move one way or the other. But what you're saying is not that we want to move the position on the spectrum, but that we just want to get rid of that idea of a continuum entirely. I mean, like, you know, I think I think the authors of the paper, you know, accept and agree with me on that, right? Like I, it's very clear that they are looking through an intersectional feminist lens, which does see things like beyond a linear scale, right? But my suggestion is not that they they're not thinking about that, or that they

don't think that I guess my suggestion is that let's look at that perspective more, right? Like I don't know, maybe that's beyond the scope of this, maybe this is something that's much more focused and I'm talking in like much larger, writ large terms, you know, but that's the one thing that sort of stands out to me and I guess that's part of, partly because of like, my personal circumstances. But yeah, I'd just be really keen to see what people's reaction to that essentially like a provocative challenge is. Yeah. Yeah. So closing thoughts? I guess my closing thoughts is I absolutely love this paper. I love the talk even more.

I think you should really watch it if you haven't. I think you should especially watch it if it makes you uncomfortable or if you're skeptical, because I think it might change your mind. The thing I take away is that this really equips me with a lot more language and ways of talking about these difficult topics in a useful way. Like I said earlier, I'm still kind of in crisis mode over it. I almost want to stop everything I'm doing and just put all my attention on this stuff. It's that impactful for me. It's clear to me that what Filena Hermans is talking about is

true. I think we even saw some of what she was talking about in some of the response to her presentation with one of the questions in particular stood out as an example of what she was referring to. And from speaking to her afterwards, it's clear that that is not like a standalone occurrence that happens very, very frequently within the field. So I couldn't recommend it. I couldn't recommend it more. Yeah, I think this paper is one of the best papers we've read in terms of just like the breadth of topics that it uncovers. I think there's so much interesting research it highlights.

There's so many references. It's very well put together. I think it's a fantastic paper. And I say this as, you know, I'll just call myself a normie, right? Like I am this like masculine stereotype of, in values for PL stuff, I'll be honest, right? Like the things that I really enjoy are the more mathematical things. Maybe I don't go quite into PL formalisms

as much as, you know, these things would enjoy, but like, yeah, I really enjoy the like things for themselves, the sake of them being hard, right? Like that's what I value. I value things over people in terms of what I want to study and do. And yet I find this paper super interesting. And I hope that this paper gives us enough that we get more feminist based things, more

gender based things that we can study that can go beyond the kind of broad introduction that this paper had to give us and can launch into some of those, like, I'd love to see some feminist-based, like, how do we take this idea that we didn't really talk about with, like, standpoint theory for knowledge, how do we do that in a programming language? I think that would be a fascinating thing. I think there's so many interesting suggestions and interesting avenues here that we could go down But I will end as the paper ends because I think it's a fitting ending which is

Here's to a future that is more inclusive of people of all interests genders and races Bound by a love for programming and all that it brings us