[Techtalk] Programming languages for women

[Jenn Vesperman]

On Mon, 2002-03-04 at 06:52, jennyw wrote:
> On the topic of getting more women involved in open source, are there
> languages that are more woman-friendly than others?

My initial response to this was 'what can she mean?'

> 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.

I can't think of -any- technical considerations, so if you can, please
enlighten me. :)

> 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).

This makes more sense to me.

However, I learned programming in the era before the 'net was really
available to home users, and it just doesn't -occur- to me to ask for
help, or find online communities. Any time I'm learning a language, it's
just me and a book and a compiler. I don't think I've ever been part of
-any- language community.
(It also doesn't occur to me to join communities for software I use.
Dancer basically pushed me at Linuxchix. I'm still not a member of Linux
Users Victoria, I write about CVS and Squid and make and haven't so much
as read the mailing list archives, much less joined the lists....)

So I'm afraid I can't answer this one at all.




Jenn V.
-- 
    "Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture 
        	you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.

jenn at anthill.echidna.id.au     http://anthill.echidna.id.au/~jenn/