[Techtalk] Programming languages for women

[Malin Blomqvist]

> 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