
Feminism and Programming Languages - jawngee
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/ari-schlesinger/2013/11/26/feminism-and-programming-languages
======
southpawgirl
Do we really need a genderised programming language? As a female programmer, I
don't feel discriminated by current programming styles - I think they fit my
brain as well as anyone else's. I am afraid of positive discrimination which
puts any minority in a ghetto by highlighting differences who simply aren't
there. Programmers come in all shapes, sizes, genders and sexual orientations:
in fact, it's one of the charms of the profession. Privilege code quality over
oneupmanship and more girls will come (and diversity in general will
increase).

~~~
mtrimpe
There's nothing wrong with doing a research project to figure out what a
gendered/feminist programming language would be like if it were to exist.

Perhaps a little nugget of wisdom might fall out like how men and women tend
to navigate differently [1].

[1] [http://searchengineland.com/human-hardware-men-women-and-
how...](http://searchengineland.com/human-hardware-men-women-and-how-we-find-
our-way-14359)

~~~
southpawgirl
Hmm - what about researching how would be a programming language for black
people? For lesbians? Does that makes you comfortable?

~~~
RyanZAG
That's perfectly all right - you can have things specifically for only women,
black people or lesbians. In fact you should have those and you'd better
support them. Failing to support those kind of movements means your company
probably isn't moral.

Of course, a programming language created specifically for white males would
be both racist and sexist.

~~~
southpawgirl
True. I'd also moot a programming language for left-handed people. What the
heck, a programming language for left-handed people who had a difficult
childhood. Or a goth period during their teenager years. Or who are Scottish
nationalists.

Maybe it's me, maybe it's PCness gone full circle, but to encourage division
doesn't seem the way forwards to me.

------
beloch
I'm probably going to regret this, but let's accept the premise that
programming languages are both gendered and a product of "the patriarchy"
(Sorry, Grace.).

How far down does the patriarchy go? Are programming languages like C and
Java, which were almost all created by men with awesome beards, inherently
patriarchal? As the products of male minds, this is possible. What about
assembler? Well, it's pretty much dictated by the design of the processor,
which is based upon older processors, and even older processors, etc.. Women
helped create these, but they were in the minority.

The foundations of computing are math and physics. We exploit the laws of
physics to build transistors, and combine these to form flip-flops, gates,
etc.. The basic logic that computers are built of is dictated by math. No
matter how far I stretch, I just can't see anything gendered in transistors,
logic gates, 0's and 1's. If you insist that this is not the case, then you
are asking for a new branch of feminist science that has nothing in common
with the science we know. Good luck!

Next, we can build computer out of our basic pieces. Modern computers are big,
complex, beasts, and there is certainly room for the masculine mind to assert
itself in how a processor is built. However, we can abstract things a little.
Let's just stick to turing machines. Is a turing machine a product of the
patriarchy? If no, we can abstract a language and build it to run on a turing
machine, which can then be simulated by the processors of the patriarchy, and
we're off! If yes, you need to invent a fundamentally new basis for classical
computing theory. Good luck!

Okay, so if you believe me so far, it should be possible to build a male-
cootie free language on top of a simulated turing machine. That's doable...

Okay. I'm done. Honestly, I think this kind of study is akin to literary
criticism. i.e. It's a lot of pretentious wanking (Sorry about using the crass
sexual argot of the patriarchy). However, the essence of academia is throwing
a lot of random stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and if some of it's a
bit fruity, hey, why not? Fruit can stick to stuff.

~~~
rjknight
My reading of the situation is this:

In the beginning, feminists were concerned with how women were being directly
oppressed by men. They fought against this, and laws were changed and social
norms were changed, and now things are better than they were.

As feminism has advanced, it has climbed a pyramid somewhat akin to Maslow's
hierarchy[1]; as concerns about the most basic rights have been addressed,
attention shifts to other matters, to questions that one might describe as
"academic" or intellectual in nature - it's no longer just about freedom from
violence and the right to vote, own property or control one's own body, it's
about ideas and beliefs and questions which are both very _fundamental_ to
society but also somewhat _abstract_ \- philosophy, in other words.

At this point, it's not unreasonable for feminists to want to re-open
questions that have been settled in Western thought for centuries, on the
basis that the settlement was reached almost entirely by men, and many of
these men would have held sexist views which could have influenced their
conclusions. Some of these re-openings will prove to be pointless - it might
turn out that sexism is orthogonal to the question of logic anyhow. But it's
worth checking, just to be sure. And some of the re-openings may turn out to
be very useful and important.

What this is _not_ is a question about Dennis Ritchie's beard. There's no such
thing as a sexist transistor or a patriarchal processor. But our notions of
how these things work, of how they _ought_ to work, and what questions are
worth asking and which are irrelevant, those things _are_ shaped by history,
and we need to step back and consider the paths _not_ chosen, because there
may be possibilities deserving of consideration there. (This is basically what
Bret Victor keeps telling us[2]).

This is kinda why I don't really understand the geek vs feminist antagonism
that everyone seems to take for granted around these parts. The feminist
perspective is an outsider perspective that seeks to understand the true
workings of the world, asks questions that others find awkward, disrupts
outmoded institutions where necessary, and seeks to empower those who are
often misunderstood and mistreated by society. _That is also exactly the geek
perspective_.

There are, of course, plenty of pretty terrible feminists who do want to make
an issue out of Dennis Ritchie's beard. I think it helps to think of them as
being to feminists as brogrammers are to geeks.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)
[2]: [http://vimeo.com/71278954](http://vimeo.com/71278954)

~~~
aeorgnoieang
I found the first parts of your comment interesting.

Writing for myself, I'm definitely antagonistic about feminism because I feel
antagonized by it, e.g. being subjected to shaming for 'being a tool of The
Patriarchy'.

------
duncan_bayne
This is not a joke.

Well, actually it is, but it's not intended to be. Some background reading:

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/187505014/Representing-Reason-
Femi...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/187505014/Representing-Reason-Feminist-
Theory-and-Formal-Logic)

"Many of the analyses reviewed earlier expose the symbolic association be-
tween rationality and masculinity. However, since human development is shaped
by society and culture, those symbols have repercussions for real, concrete
human beings. We are constituted as knowing agents by symbolic
representations, social practices, cultural discourses, and our structural
positioning. Consequently, the ideal of detachment and the separation of
reason from emotion that the rationalist world view promotes have been
instrumental in constructing gendered aspects of the social order, in
particular the subjectivities of Western privileged white men."

~~~
marvin
In layman's words, a tenet of one part of feminism is that our language is
shaped in such a way that it oppresses women and sets men as the ruling part
of society. Sort of like the idea in Orwell's 1984 that we modify language to
not have the ability to express dissent.

This is presumably a suggestion that the same principles be applied to
programming languages. I read it as satire of the feminist idea that language
is inherently oppressive. Are you sure it's not a joke?

~~~
duncan_bayne
I'm not 100% certain, to be honest. The best satire tends to be like that, I
guess :)

------
Sarien
How does this kind of crap make it to the front page? What's next a vegan
programming language? Gluten free mathematics? Dear god, for years I have been
using a terminal with a black background and I AM WHITE!

~~~
oakwhiz
Well, if you think about it, pretty much every modern programming language has
been shaped by people who also happen to eat meat. Therefore there will be
systemic bias in nearly every programming language toward the "meat-eating"
way of thinking, which oppresses vegans and gives meat eaters an unfair
advantage when programming in those languages. There is no way to fully remove
this bias other than to create a new programming language for vegans, by
vegans.

For example, in a programming language like C++ or Java, one is not required
to think about the consequences of their design decisions. It is possible to
design an API in such a way that it causes harm to another person or program,
for example not using type safety, or being vulnerable to a buffer overflow
attack. A vegan programming language would ostensibly prevent such harmful
actions by way of its very grammatical and logical structure. It would be next
to impossible to write a valid construction in a vegan programming language
that causes harm, because you would be required to inform the compiler of your
intent. Any such construction would simply be illogical, and cause an error to
occur.

The differences between a vegan programming language and a non-vegan
programming language could even be extended to include political correctness
enforcement features. A compiler for a vegan programming language could be
designed to include an artificially intelligent runtime library which attempts
to decide if the actions of the program could put people or animals at risk to
be harmed, and if so, modify the control flow of the program to prevent
possible harm from occurring. This is relevant, because computers, and
computer software, are being used as components in machines for the food
industry (e.g. meat processing plants) as well as militaries (e.g. missile
guidance systems.)

Disclaimer: I don't eat animals.

------
billyjobob
This nonsense is exactly why the humanities should have no place in any
scientific institution. They copy the language and structures of science
without any understanding, like a cargo cult mimicking an air traffic control
tower out of wood (in the hope that it will bring back the cargo planes)
because they have no comprehension of the science of how a real tower works
and think the form is all that matters.

------
revelation
_I think this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can be
and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the following
statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1._

Ohh, I understand this! It's like in quantum theory or chaos theory, you know,
which is why homeopathy works.

~~~
Morendil
She's talking about paraconsistent logics.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic)

Feel better now?

~~~
revelation
I've been feeling a bit under, but it's better now. Thanks for asking!

I recognize you can define your logical axioms as you wish, just as you can
mathematical systems. But the question is always going to be: how powerful is
your system and what useful things can be _derived_ from it? Judging from the
Wikipedia article here, that logic excludes lots of useful things we have come
to expect from (you know, useful) logics, starting first and foremost with
Gödel's completeness theorem.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
There's nothing particularly under-powered about para-consistent logics;
they're interesting really. But the idea of para-consistent logic somehow
being 'feminist' is stupid.

------
bencollier49
I don't understand the terms she used well enough to work out if this is a
joke or not. You will find me in Wikipedia looking up feminist subject-object
theory.

~~~
bencollier49
..which doesn't appear to have much literature behind it. Is this a joke about
the objectivisation of women?

She appears serious enough in the comments section. It seems a shame to
characterise male logic as aristotelian, and the feminist version as holistic.
That seems to do a disservice to the vast number of people of both sexes who
have pondered the problem.

One way or another, I suspect that this will make terrific flame-bait.

~~~
mtrimpe
If I'm correct it refers to the preference for men's cognitive style (I
perform an action on object X) whereas women's cognitive style tends to focus
more on group dynamics (I relate to X and Y through Z.)

~~~
phoboslab
That sounds really interesting, actually. But, please correct me if I'm wrong,
isn't one of the big arguments of feminism that women and men are "the same",
i.e. women and men think in the same way and our current differences are only
conditioned by society?

Wouldn't this feminist programming language imply that this is not actually
the case? That men and women truly are different and think in different ways
and that this is not (solely) a matter of condition but natural differences in
our brains?

~~~
mtrimpe
Feminism is a big field with a lot of different theories; many of which
plainly contradict eachother.

I'm not really an expert on this but it sounds like you're describing a strict
interpretation of first-wave feminism.

Second wave feminism started from the observation that many of the first
wave's successes were very masculine women and argues that while women were
now allowed into men's circles it was still on the precondition that they
acted like men and essentially left their femininity behind.

The classic example of a first wave feminist is Margaret Thatcher who is
undeniably a powerful woman but can hardly be called feminine. A good example
of a second wave feminist is Sheryl Sandberg who became a powerful figure
while retaining, and to some degree even capitalizing on, her femininity.

P.S. It's also important to remember that when it comes to studies like these
it's important to keep the difference between gender and sex in mind.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
I'm so confused! Doesn't The Patriarchy ruthlessly enforce 'feminity' itself,
as 'society' understands it? Wouldn't that necessarily mean that Margaret
Thatcher might actually be the _most_ feminine precisely because she adopts
exactly what 'society' says is _not_ feminine? Is it Sherly Sandberg's
hairstyle(s) that make her more feminine than Thatcher? Or did she
"capitalize" on engaging in Patriarchy-approved feminine behaviors?

~~~
mtrimpe
You're obviously trolling or conflicted about this but I'll answer
nonetheless.

> I'm so confused! Doesn't The Patriarchy ruthlessly enforce 'feminity'
> itself, as 'society' understands it? Wouldn't that necessarily mean that
> Margaret Thatcher might actually be the most feminine precisely because she
> adopts exactly what 'society' says is not feminine?

Yes. That is the viewpoint of first wave feminism as I understand it and I'm
not one to argue in favor or against it. I can confirm that it's not a belief
universally held by all feminists.

> Is it Sherly Sandberg's hairstyle(s) that make her more feminine than
> Thatcher?

No, even though that it's probably related. What makes her more feminine is
that she embraces her softer and more nurturing side.

> Or did she "capitalize" on engaging in Patriarchy-approved feminine
> behaviors?

She capitalized on it to the degree that one could argue that given Mark's
lack of soft skills her softer, nurturing, communicative side (which are
indeed traditionally perceived as more feminine) were themselves a crucial
asset in attaining her current position.

------
clarkm
> I am currently exploring feminist critiques of logic

Can someone explain this to me?

Taken at face value that seems like a ridiculous statement, but I'm assuming
there's a lot of context I don't know about. I tried googling for it, but only
found stuff like this:
[http://www.indiana.edu/~koertge/rfemlog.html](http://www.indiana.edu/~koertge/rfemlog.html)
which didn't clarify thigns at all.

 _Edit_

The author clarifies themselves in a comment:

> What is a feminist logic is a question I’ve spent the past six months
> thinking about and researching. There are not a lot of women in philosophy,
> and there are definitely not a lot of feminist philosophers, so I don’t have
> a good answer for this question. There is great scholarship talking about
> weather a feminist logic can build off of formal logic or if it has to
> reject the laws of identity and create something entirely new. There are
> solid arguments for both camps, personally I’m swayed by the constructive
> theories that would build onto formal logic through a feminist lens. There
> exist logics that handle contradiction as part of the system, namely
> paraconsistent logic. I think this type of logic represents the feminist
> idea that something can be and not be without being a contradiction, that is
> a system where the following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1.

~~~
fab13n
That's my core problem with her approach: she seems to takes for granted that
having limited formal reasoning skills is a defining feature of being female,
and therefore must be promoted by feminism.

It is to my understanding of feminism what Stephen Colbert is to
Republicanism.

~~~
j2kun
> having limited formal reasoning skills is a defining feature of being female

Where does she say this, even implicitly? Questioning the axioms of logical
theories is just as much practiced by men, and has a large historical
precedent.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
If questioning the axioms of logical theories is practiced by men, does that
mean that those men are necessarily 'feminist'? Does the fact (or not) that
para-consistent logics were first discovered and studied by men exclude them
from being a candidate for 'feminist' logic? Would you answer differently
depending on the politics of the mathematicians? Can you understand why this
seems ridiculous?

------
billpg
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_Law)

------
waterlion
> Sapri-Whorf Hypothesis [sic] ... if the hypothesis stands

I don't think it does still stand, does it?

For an interesting, not-overly-academic look at Sapir-Whorf, I recommend
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Through-Language-Glass-Different-
Lan...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Through-Language-Glass-Different-
Languages/dp/0099505576)

~~~
mtrimpe
Language has even been found to influence color perception [1] so in one form
or another it most certainly still stands,

[1] [http://boingboing.net/2011/08/12/how-language-affects-
color-...](http://boingboing.net/2011/08/12/how-language-affects-color-
perception.html)

~~~
waterlion
The book covered that in quite some detail, but I can't remember the
specifics. Certainly, there are links between colour perception and language.

As I recall (I could be wrong), the author's conclusion is that the ability of
someone to think something or understand a concept isn't limited by language.

The author of this paper seems to suggest that the means by which we express
computer programs have some link to human behaviour (causation in either/both
directions).

Human behvaiour does, of course, have a massive influence of language. And I
think a lot of the natural-language-redefinition and re-framing of concepts by
interest groups to achieve their aims have certainly had an effect on society.

But I don't think Sapir Whorf is pertinent here. Unless people are learning
about the world by reading computer programs.

Also, we've had half a century to express programs in all kinds of forms (LISP
vs Java vs Prolog spring to mind). I'm not dismissing the potential effect
that the gender imbalance has had, or the possibility of future achievements
in computer science. I suppose I'll wait and see, firstly if this is a serious
and credible paper, and secondly if anything comes out of it. But I don't
think it will.

------
dTal
Alan Sokal, is that you?

------
bttf123
Having had a cursory look at 'feminist critiques of logic' and 'paraconsistent
logic' I am reminded of this post-mordern article generator, complete with
citations:

[http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/](http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/)

~~~
tree_of_item
Maybe you should take more than a cursory look. What exactly makes you think
these two things have anything whatsoever to do with postmodernism?

[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-
epistemology/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/)
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-
paraconsistent/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/)
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-
inconsistent/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-inconsistent/)

Paraconsistency is real branch of mathematical logic, and contrary to popular
belief feminism is not a joke either.

------
xradionut
If this isn't a joke, then Grace Hopper is spinning in her grave.

------
morgante
This is a joke, right?

~~~
fab13n
I'm not sure, but it seems not to be.

That we can't tell whether it's an actual thesis subject or a joke tells
something about the state of academic social science...

Now, since the underlying question seems to be "why women don't do (computer)
science?", I'd like to ask the author: why did _she_ choose to comfort socio-
sexual prejudices, by studying such a stereotypically feminine subject as
social sciences? Why did _she_ decide not to become a developer, a lumberjack,
a surgeon, a mathematician...

------
crazychrome
Nobody cares about the name, the inventor, the gender, where are you from,
what books you have read, how many months you spent. just show me the f*
codes! At the end of the day, it's all that matters.

seriously though, it's a common problem for new PhD to start from manipulating
concepts. we have all being there. in reality, great concepts emerge from
practical, concrete and tangible things (in the case of programming, codes).

------
detect0
This reminds me of a lecture I attended in Berlin by "Alan N. Shapiro". Has
anyone else here encountered his work?

[http://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1n5tje/skeptical_ab...](http://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1n5tje/skeptical_about_alan_n_shapiros_work_in_computer/)

------
rjknight
I think there's a confusion here, but it's a very interesting one. This
article raises the question: 'where do our ideas about what programming
languages should be like come from?'

The genesis of functional programming is obvious from its name - it is based
on the mathematical concept of functions, and languages which are described as
'functional' try to remain close to the ideal of emulating mathematical
functions, such that concepts which work in mathematics can be applied in
computer programming. There are limits, of course - we need to interact with
the world (state) and we have limits on the kinds of things that we can
feasibly compute which do not exist in abstract mathematics, but the general
principle holds.

Object-oriented programming does involve the assumption that we have a system
which can be described as a set of objects interacting with each other, which
can respond to requests from the user's program. The OP is arguing that this
forces the programmer to see the _world_ as a set of objects interacting with
each other, or to _objectify_ the world or things in it, in a manner that
feminists have long seen as problematic (I don't personally see it as
problematic per se, but this is not about me). The OP then suggests that a
feminist programming language would offer a different paradigm of non-object-
oriented programming.

I can think of a few critiques, of varying quality:

\- There's a difference between object-oriented programming (how to structure
a computer program) and object-oriented analysis and design (how to decompose
the world into objects in order to represent the world within a computer
program). The two tend to go together, but do not have to, and it is perfectly
possible to program in an object-oriented manner without objectifying real-
world things, e.g. people. The 'Person' object is a very common example in
texts teaching people about object-oriented design, but is quite uncommon in
real-world programming.

\- I can, in a certain light, see how feminism and object-oriented analysis
might be in tension. I am less clear on how functional programming and
feminism might be in tension, but would very much like to know.

\- I am not sure that calling this language 'feminist' is necessarily a good
idea, since one could of course find it to be an excellent programming
language without sharing any of the tenets of feminism, and the label actually
obscures a lot more than it reveals in this context. It's certainly going to
lead to a lower-quality HN thread than if this were a discussion purely about
novel programming paradigms.

\- Of course, one may simply disagree that there's anything particularly wrong
with objectification, but at this point we're no longer talking about
programming languages.

On the other side, this might turn out to be really interesting! We're nowhere
near having discovered all of the possible paradigms that might underpin a
programming language, and new ideas should be welcomed. The only way to know
if a feminist programming language is a good idea is for someone to create one
and demonstrate how it can be used. On longer time horizons, many of our
current assumptions about how programming works may have to be discarded - the
von Neumann architecture and the idea of deterministic, predictable results
from computation may prove impossible to scale for certain requirements, so we
might have to embrace programming languages that deal better with
contradictions and the inability to 'cleanly' categorise things. If feminism's
outsider status makes it easier for feminists to think heretical thoughts
about computation then perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if feminists are a
good source of ideas about these things. (Nor, of course, should we pigeonhole
feminists or women in general as purely contradictory thinkers, valuable only
insofar as they challenge established paradigms!)

EDIT: formatting

~~~
fab13n
I see a fundamental issue with her presentation: she shouldn't have called the
non-normative approach to modelling "feminist". Although it might help her
grabbing a gender-studies grant, it's a loaded word, and it's extremely hard
to do proper science with loaded words.

If she's going to study modelling paradigms based on some variants of fuzzy
logic, great; but she gives me the impression that she plans to do little real
science, possibly because of limited mathematical abilities, and cover it with
some sociological and militant mumbo-jumbo that Sokal wouldn't have disowned.
"Non-normative" would then be an euphemism for "accessible to cognitively
challenged people", which, ironically, would make this work violently
misogynistic.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I see a fundamental issue with her presentation: she shouldn't have called
> the non-normative approach to modelling "feminist". Although it might help
> her grabbing a gender-studies grant, it's a loaded word, and it's extremely
> hard to do proper science with loaded words.

She's probably calling it "feminist" because the entire approach emerges from
a strain of thought in feminist theory. That it is pretty far distant from
what the average person thinks of "feminism" (and just as distant, though in a
different way, to parodies of academic feminism), but that (both, really) is
true of most things in of actual academic feminist studies.

> If she's going to study modelling paradigms based on some variants of fuzzy
> logic, great; but she gives me the impression that she plans to do little
> real science, possibly because of limited mathematical abilities, and cover
> it with some sociological and militant mumbo-jumbo that Sokal wouldn't have
> disowned.

I don't see support for _either_ side of the dichotomy you propose here -- she
discusses a number of concrete issues of interest (none of which are "variants
of fuzzy logic", and all of which are serious theoretical areas.)

Where, particularly, do you get the impression you report?

------
manimalcruelty
Is this SEO copywriting? "feminist programming language" used 9 times in such
a short article.

------
redcat7
I know some perks of that language: \- time functions would be off \- new
boolean states: \- do as you wish \- maybe \- I don't know \- (true|false)
because I say so \- objects ending on vowels coundn't be treated as objects

------
auggierose
What's next, feminist mathematics?

------
fosap
[https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Objectivism-
oriented_pro...](https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Objectivism-
oriented_programming)

/edit:

Also, Java2K.

[http://esolangs.org/wiki/Java2K](http://esolangs.org/wiki/Java2K)

------
changwalton
Here [https://github.com/bodil/BODOL](https://github.com/bodil/BODOL) is a
programming language designed by a woman. I'm not sure I could actually tell
that it was designed by a woman.

------
NAFV_P
A feminist processor would be nice.

