[Techtalk] Programming languages for women

[Amanda5]

At 11:52 AM 3/3/2002 -0800, jennyw wrote:
>On the topic of getting more women involved in open source, are there
>languages that are more woman-friendly than others?

IMHO Wrong Question: Imperative programming languages (ALGOL, Basic, 
Pascal, C, C++, Java, Ada, Fortran etc) are not intended for males or 
females they are intended for expressing arithmetic algorithms on machines. 
Programming languages have no inclusive notion of gender.  Programming 
languages provide a way to express an algorithm on a target CPU. 
Programming languages are machine oriented.  Programming languages have 
mathematical underpinnings. The best programmers have broad as well as deep 
knowledge in math as well as theoretics in computer  science such as 
automata, grammar and computability. One such person was Admiral Grace 
Murray Hopper.  Here is an interesting quote about a distinguished woman 
pioneer in the field.  "Probably no one did more to change the conservative 
culture of the 1950's programmers than Grace Hopper." Cambell and Aspray, 
"Computer, A History of the Information Machine," 1996.   Grace Hopper (a 
woman of distinction) was one of the first to build the types of compilers 
we use today. If you read her papers there is no discussion about building 
male or female oriented languages.  Her discussion is about supporting, 
from arithmetic to business oriented algorithms that can be compiled and 
run on  the first CPUs.  There are other non-imperative languages that 
attempt to express subject orientations like AI in LISP and declarative 
mathematical proofs in PROLOG and calculus in REDUCE. IMHO  programming 
languages tend to be subject and CPU oriented not male or female oriented.

What features would you have in a woman friendly language?  What algorithms 
or declaratives would you try to express or program in a woman friendly 
language?


>   Since the number of
>women are in decline in programming, this may need to include current
>non-programmers and beginning programmers.

I'm not sure why the numbers have declined. Today women have so many 
choices its not clear to me why other women have made the choices they have 
made. IMHO our lack of supporting the math and sciences in elementary 
schools has more to do with the issue than anything else.

>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).

I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.  Actually if there is 
such a culture as C++ it is not really C++ it is Object Oriented 
Programming or OOP.  OOP folks have philosophical ways of thinking about 
expressing algorithms differently as do database people as do AI folks as 
do graphics folks as do web folks.  I think you might be more influenced by 
your negative relationship with the guys on-line as an on-line culture than 
a language culture such as C++. It is very true that on-line males tend to 
behave like children hanging out under a dim street light in the back 
alleys of the Internet. They have tormentive manners that would buy them a 
spanking from their moms if they were found out. I lurked from the shadows 
of that group for a while and found them to be not worth my time. The group 
of on-line boy C++ programmers are but one group. Over a period of time the 
good "guys" leave because they do not want to put up with the nonsense any 
more than you do. Have you tried University based groups? There are also 
professional groups like ACM and IEEE. AND there is this friendly group 8-)


>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.

With Open Source there appears to be a developing culture regarding the 
philosophy of  access/use and the costs of software with developing rank 
and file purposes.


>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.
Don't know anything about Ruby. Never heard of it.

Amanda5