
The programmer who created Python isn’t interested in mentoring white guys - nitramm
https://qz.com/1624252/pythons-creator-thinks-it-has-a-diversity-problem/
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Jonnax
Here's the quote below which is quite reasonable, it's their time mentoring so
they should mentor how they like. I feel like the article is designed to
kindle the fires of internet drama.

“It’s not just about writing the code, but you have stand up for your code and
defend your code, and there is a certain male attitude that is endemic in many
projects where a woman would just not feel comfortable claiming that she is
right,” he explained. “A guy who knows less than that woman might honestly
believe [he is right], so they present a much more confident image.” In his
experience, van Rossum sees incompetent men’s ideas gaining acceptance more
often than merited because they are more forceful in how they present them.

Van Rossum believes that the different attitudes of women and men in
programming communities is due to wider societal problems that we need to fix
from the bottom up. “I’ve always felt that feminism was right and we need to
change the whole society,” he said. In the meantime, he feels a responsibility
to act in the places he has influence, like in the Python community.

He believes the key to making open-source communities more inclusive is
establishing (and enforcing) codes of conduct and mentoring. Van Rossum says
that he now mentors women and underrepresented minority programmers. “But
white guys can forget it,” he said. “They are not the ones who need it most.”
(In typical programmer speak, he calls mentoring a “completely distributed,
democratic approach.”)

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belorn
He is free to do what ever he wants but I find nothing reasonable in
generalization that reduced complex individuals into two bits of information,
skin and gender. To quote Carl Sagan, reducing people down to single bits of
information is intellectual laziness.

 _" Ethnic groups are stereotyped, the citizens of other nations and religions
are stereotyped, the genders and sexual preferences are stereotyped, people
born in various times of the year are stereotyped (Sun-sign astrology), and
occupations are stereotyped. The most generous interpretation ascribes it to a
kind of intellectual laziness: instead of judging people on their individual
merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about
them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed
pigeonholes.

This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a
profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the
enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if
stereotyping were valid on average, it is bound to fail in many individual
cases: human variation runs to bell-type curves. There's an average value of
any quality, and smaller numbers of people running off in both extremes."_

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thedevindevops
I feel this article would win more people over if it had a more positive spin,
e.g. "I can't mentor white men - there are too many women of colour beating
down my door for mentorship" or something like that.

