[Techtalk] Programming languages for women
Malin Blomqvist
malin.blomqvist at home.se
Mon Mar 4 09:59:32 EST 2002
> On the topic of getting more women involved in open
source, are there
> languages that are more woman-friendly than others?
I want to start by saying that I don't think woman-friendly
is really the right thing to call it. Rather new-to-
computer-and-abit-afraid-people-friendly. Or something :) I
have come in contact with people trying to learn
programming from the start with absolutely no previous
experiences of computers. (Yes, many of them women.)
In my experience, these people with little experience of
math and science tend to approach learning how to program
and solving programming tasks a bit differently than people
with a lot of previous experience in the scientific fields.
I therefor believe that a programming language suitable for
getting people interessted in the field of programming
should be very flexible, easy to use (i.e. design, develop
and compile) and a short 'time to market'.
I can't help but think of Perl. Perl can today be used for
pratically anything, from handelling simple text files and
building complex financial systems to just calculate if
you'll end up having your period on your wedding day. (Yes
I did... Very handy little thing. :) The beauty of the
language is that anybody can get started in 10 minutes, and
do useful stuff within the frist day. It is very flexible
and lets you write the code as you like it and understand
it. (Mostly..)
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.
Very true. But also here, my (also somewhat limited)
experience is that the Perl community is very open to new
people, men and women. And although there are a lot more
men, there is quite a few women around as well. But
formost, there are a lot of very helpful people around.
/Malin
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