[Techtalk] Programming languages for women

[jennyw]

On the topic of getting more women involved in open source, are there
languages that are more woman-friendly than others?  Since the number of
women are in decline in programming, this may need to include current
non-programmers and beginning programmers. Technical issues aren't the only
consideration, though. Programming languages tend to have cultures
associated with them. The culture of C++ programmers I experienced wasn't
particular woman-friendly (actually, it was kind of woman-hostile -- lots of
boys with big egos and rampant sexism).

My limited experience with the SmallTalk community was positive, but
unfortunately it's not a particularly popular language these days, and might
not be a good choice for open source projects. I don't know about Python,
Perl, and PHP.

There was a recent discussion on comp.lang.ruby about including more women,
and Ruby seems like a pretty clean language that seems to be gaining
popularity, and there is significant SmallTalk crossover. On the other hand,
there were also comments about there being a particular shortage of women in
the Ruby community, even compared with the computing community at large.

Anyone care to comment?

Jen