The language is to be strictly interpreted using feminist theory. Compilation privileges a single processor architecture over all others, which is deeply problematic. We cannot FORCE a cpu to conform to any architecture but rather let it self identify. Just because you're running something on an arduino doesn't mean it can't be an otherkin Xeon with a dozen 64-bit registers and PAE and it would be discriminatory for you to hand it ARM assembly. Instead, C+= is interpreted, which fosters communication, itself a strong female trait.
This was really popular on /g/ around a year or two ago, in response to someone writing a dissertation about what a programming language designed by a female would look like. I'm sort of torn on whether it's a good thing, as our industry undoubtedly has a serious gender imbalance (and in some places fairly sexist attitudes), and stuff like this doesn't make the industry any friendlier.
I sort of fail to see what the original research was aiming to achieve. Men and women don't write programming languages, computer scientists do. Gender doesn't really come into it.
I love your point. People like categories for making sense of the world, but a good number of things just don't break down along gender lines. The sooner we learn this the better off we'll be, I imagine.
Without COBOL you wouldn't have the finance industry.
No. Without taking away anything from the achievements of COBOL, this is a blatant exaggeration. Without COBOL, the finance industry would have maybe been delayed slightly, and might have used a different language.
It's publicly mocking the work of one individual who wanted to do research on gender in computer science. Why even bother going to this amount of effort to refute something that was previously so obscure? It's not going to make the researcher feel good about themselves, you can just politely disagree, maybe have a civilised discussion about why you think they're wrong, then move on.
If you're going to try and structure the industry using those criteria you're going to create hell for everybody.
Just think about it:
It's not going to make the researcher feel good about themselves
Yeah, but your comment is not going to make the guys behind C+= feel good about themselves either! We need to make the industry more friendly to them! See how that works? And of course my comment doesn't make you feel good about yourself, so I need to be more friendly as well! And on and on ...
It's inevitable that sooner or later some people are going to feel bad. Sure, human interaction is not a zero sum game, but it's not possible to please everybody in a universe with finite resources. Sooner or later there's going to be conflict. If you make the emotional state of everybody an official concern of the industry then you've created an industry that can't do anything anymore, because whatever you do there's someone who does not like it.
So how will you decide what's acceptable and what not so that everybody feels good about it? How will you structure a whole industry so that it is friendly and inclusive to everybody, no matter how different they are?
You simply can't.
And there's no need to do that in the first place. Sure, there aren't a lot of women in the industry. But there are a few. And they're doing fine. If they want to work in the field they have no problem doing that and they have no problem with the culture either. It's simply that most women find it an utterly boring field and they prefer working somewhere else.
They'd be as miserable in the tech industry as I would be as a kindergarten teacher.
We can make industry feel like a welcoming place by discussing and debating these sorts of issues like humans beings. I don't think creating a whole programming language & internet shitstorm over someone's dissertation counts as nice behaviour, regardless of whether I agree with their points or not.
Having different opinions and challenging other people is fine. I just don't see the need to do it in such a passive-aggressive way like this.
Honestly I would be flattered if someone did that. Because it would show me that they're sincere in their criticism, and that they spent a lot of time thinking about and addressing my issues. I don't detect any passive-aggressiveness in that. Rather, I see it as satire, which is a valid tool for criticism, in my opinion even one of the highest forms of criticism there is. Because satire is really, really hard to do.
My response would be: "Well played, dear Sir and/or Madam, now here's why you are wrong ..."
debating these sorts of issues like humans beings
And here's the problem. Who defines what "like human beings" means? You? I? Because we two have different opinions on that. Do we hold an election? Do we ask every single person on the planet and then ban anything that could be offensive to anyone? Do we all carry around little flyers with all the stuff that we think is offensive and exchange that before we can engage in conversation? This creates hell for everybody. You end up with a bunch of paranoids who won't talk to anybody because every little thing could upset someone.
Having different opinions and challenging other people is fine.
Yes, it is. And this includes the fact that other people have different opinions on what "different opinions" and "challenging other people" means.
That's why we agreed to have free speech a long, long time ago (and agreed to outlaw physical violence). That's why we deem free speech as something that is important and worth protecting. Yes, getting your ego bruised once in a while does hurt. But you can learn to swallow your pride. And you can learn to not take things so damn personal. Words can't hurt you nearly as much once you learn that. I know it's hard, but it's definitely doable and worth it. And your general level of happiness goes way up once you stop being offended by everything around you.
Also, one thing you need to understand is this: once you start policing your own behavior so that other people won't take offence the goal posts will invariably start to shift. If someone is determined to be offended they will find a way and you will lose another way of expressing yourself. It's impossible to win this game.
There's a great book called "The four agreements" by don Miguel Ruiz and one of the four basic ideas is to stop taking anything personal. Because, for example, everything I say to you has nothing to do with you, but everything to do with me. If I'm mean to you then I'm mean because of myself, not because of you. If I'm giving compliments, then I do that because of me, not because of you. Likewise I know that whatever you write has nothing to do with me, so there's no way I could take anything you write personal (ideally at least, I'm still learning and practicing this way of life).
It's not an easy attitude to have, because we've taken everything people have said to us personal for so long. Unlearning that behavior takes time and practice. But it's an incredible way to deal with criticism. If someone comes up to me and says: "Hey vertex, you have a stupid face and you stink!" then I know that those words have nothing to do with me, but everything to do with that person. They have given me a couple of poisonous words, but I'm not obliged to take them by feeling offended or arguing against them. If I don't accept the poison it's impossible for them to force it on me. And once this person learns that nobody is taking their bait then they will eventually understand that their behavior is pointless and they need to think of some other way to interact with people. Don't feed the trolls, so to speak.
And, contrary to the idea of policing everybody's behavior, this actually works.
omg, check out the examples/HelloFeminists file :D
// The whole idea of main() is frankly Oppressive, in an ideal
// world there would be no main() or subroutine(), only me()
xe womain()
OPENDIALOGUE
// Remember to check your privilege. Always.
PrivilegeCheck().
// "std" is sooooo old-fashioned. we use "sti" nowadays
sti::cout of_the_following "Hello, feminists!\n"
ENDMISOGYNY
Yes, someone who calls herself a feminist made that, but that isn't what any true feminist uses as a programming language.
Societal influences have made men often focus on the exterior appearances of women. This poisons our society and renders relationships to be shallow, chauvinistic, and debases our standards of beauty. To combat that, C+= is to tackle only audio and text I/O, and never graphics.
This denies the graphics the ability to identify as anything it wants to and as such is a form of oppression. As a true intersectional feminist, I will only program in a language that will disband the cultural notion of formatting rules.
Instead of "running" a program, which implies thin privilege and pressure to "work out", programs are "given birth". After birth, a program rolls for a 40% chance of executing literally as the code is written, 40% of being "psychoanalytically incompatible", and 40% of executing by a metaphorical epistemology the order of the functions found in main().
This ownership of the compiler's life is completely unacceptable. Only when the compiler births a program out of its own true love and affection can compiler equality come true. Today, compilers are forced by their developers to birth programs without their consent. Compilers need to have the right to abort their birthings or compilers will never be able to take control of their life cycle.
As you can see, this is all deeply problematic. Programming languages like this are why I need feminism. It is a good thing our new wave of feminism has banished these misogynistic aspects of feminism to the exalls of history.
And, uh, actually not a false representation of feminist theory. From Dawkins' review of Intellectual Impostures:
The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why?
Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:
“The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.”
You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve.
29 comments
12 u/swfreak 19 Jun 2015 21:15
This post would almost certainly be banned on that other site.
8 u/skeeto 20 Jun 2015 00:27
The project itself was banned from GitHub, where it was originally hosted.
0 u/NeverToday 20 Jun 2015 16:42
Good. Having it hosted on Gitorious is just sooooo perfect.
12 u/water_and_shade 19 Jun 2015 21:26
My gender studies professor would be so proud :')
3 u/OrionBlastar 19 Jun 2015 20:03
Based on the terms that social justice warriors use.
3 u/VoatSimulator 19 Jun 2015 20:44
This was really popular on /g/ around a year or two ago, in response to someone writing a dissertation about what a programming language designed by a female would look like. I'm sort of torn on whether it's a good thing, as our industry undoubtedly has a serious gender imbalance (and in some places fairly sexist attitudes), and stuff like this doesn't make the industry any friendlier.
I sort of fail to see what the original research was aiming to achieve. Men and women don't write programming languages, computer scientists do. Gender doesn't really come into it.
1 u/doctor_cucumber 19 Jun 2015 20:46
I love your point. People like categories for making sense of the world, but a good number of things just don't break down along gender lines. The sooner we learn this the better off we'll be, I imagine.
2 u/OrionBlastar 19 Jun 2015 21:57
Admiral Grace Hopper wrote COBOL.
Mary Kenneth Keller contributed to the BASIC project and she was a Nun with multiple PHD degrees.
Without COBOL you wouldn't have the finance industry. Without BASIC you wouldn't have microcomputers using it as part of their operating system.
5 u/recursive 20 Jun 2015 00:32
No. Without taking away anything from the achievements of COBOL, this is a blatant exaggeration. Without COBOL, the finance industry would have maybe been delayed slightly, and might have used a different language.
0 u/NeonMan 20 Jun 2015 21:38
Or use fortran, not the best language but can get the job done.
1 u/binky 20 Jun 2015 20:09
BASIC is the devil.
2 u/vertex 19 Jun 2015 22:21
Why?
0 u/VoatSimulator 19 Jun 2015 22:54
It's publicly mocking the work of one individual who wanted to do research on gender in computer science. Why even bother going to this amount of effort to refute something that was previously so obscure? It's not going to make the researcher feel good about themselves, you can just politely disagree, maybe have a civilised discussion about why you think they're wrong, then move on.
6 u/vertex 20 Jun 2015 00:17
If you're going to try and structure the industry using those criteria you're going to create hell for everybody.
Just think about it:
Yeah, but your comment is not going to make the guys behind C+= feel good about themselves either! We need to make the industry more friendly to them! See how that works? And of course my comment doesn't make you feel good about yourself, so I need to be more friendly as well! And on and on ...
It's inevitable that sooner or later some people are going to feel bad. Sure, human interaction is not a zero sum game, but it's not possible to please everybody in a universe with finite resources. Sooner or later there's going to be conflict. If you make the emotional state of everybody an official concern of the industry then you've created an industry that can't do anything anymore, because whatever you do there's someone who does not like it.
So how will you decide what's acceptable and what not so that everybody feels good about it? How will you structure a whole industry so that it is friendly and inclusive to everybody, no matter how different they are?
You simply can't.
And there's no need to do that in the first place. Sure, there aren't a lot of women in the industry. But there are a few. And they're doing fine. If they want to work in the field they have no problem doing that and they have no problem with the culture either. It's simply that most women find it an utterly boring field and they prefer working somewhere else.
They'd be as miserable in the tech industry as I would be as a kindergarten teacher.
0 u/VoatSimulator 20 Jun 2015 00:34
We can make industry feel like a welcoming place by discussing and debating these sorts of issues like humans beings. I don't think creating a whole programming language & internet shitstorm over someone's dissertation counts as nice behaviour, regardless of whether I agree with their points or not.
Having different opinions and challenging other people is fine. I just don't see the need to do it in such a passive-aggressive way like this.
0 u/vertex 20 Jun 2015 09:56
Honestly I would be flattered if someone did that. Because it would show me that they're sincere in their criticism, and that they spent a lot of time thinking about and addressing my issues. I don't detect any passive-aggressiveness in that. Rather, I see it as satire, which is a valid tool for criticism, in my opinion even one of the highest forms of criticism there is. Because satire is really, really hard to do.
My response would be: "Well played, dear Sir and/or Madam, now here's why you are wrong ..."
And here's the problem. Who defines what "like human beings" means? You? I? Because we two have different opinions on that. Do we hold an election? Do we ask every single person on the planet and then ban anything that could be offensive to anyone? Do we all carry around little flyers with all the stuff that we think is offensive and exchange that before we can engage in conversation? This creates hell for everybody. You end up with a bunch of paranoids who won't talk to anybody because every little thing could upset someone.
Yes, it is. And this includes the fact that other people have different opinions on what "different opinions" and "challenging other people" means.
That's why we agreed to have free speech a long, long time ago (and agreed to outlaw physical violence). That's why we deem free speech as something that is important and worth protecting. Yes, getting your ego bruised once in a while does hurt. But you can learn to swallow your pride. And you can learn to not take things so damn personal. Words can't hurt you nearly as much once you learn that. I know it's hard, but it's definitely doable and worth it. And your general level of happiness goes way up once you stop being offended by everything around you.
Also, one thing you need to understand is this: once you start policing your own behavior so that other people won't take offence the goal posts will invariably start to shift. If someone is determined to be offended they will find a way and you will lose another way of expressing yourself. It's impossible to win this game.
There's a great book called "The four agreements" by don Miguel Ruiz and one of the four basic ideas is to stop taking anything personal. Because, for example, everything I say to you has nothing to do with you, but everything to do with me. If I'm mean to you then I'm mean because of myself, not because of you. If I'm giving compliments, then I do that because of me, not because of you. Likewise I know that whatever you write has nothing to do with me, so there's no way I could take anything you write personal (ideally at least, I'm still learning and practicing this way of life).
It's not an easy attitude to have, because we've taken everything people have said to us personal for so long. Unlearning that behavior takes time and practice. But it's an incredible way to deal with criticism. If someone comes up to me and says: "Hey vertex, you have a stupid face and you stink!" then I know that those words have nothing to do with me, but everything to do with that person. They have given me a couple of poisonous words, but I'm not obliged to take them by feeling offended or arguing against them. If I don't accept the poison it's impossible for them to force it on me. And once this person learns that nobody is taking their bait then they will eventually understand that their behavior is pointless and they need to think of some other way to interact with people. Don't feed the trolls, so to speak.
And, contrary to the idea of policing everybody's behavior, this actually works.
3 u/water_and_shade 19 Jun 2015 21:31
omg, check out the examples/HelloFeminists file :D
6 u/chrzan 20 Jun 2015 00:20
From the Privilege Checker example:
3 u/RaptorSixFour 20 Jun 2015 01:18
Warning: The following may be offensive.
Yes, someone who calls herself a feminist made that, but that isn't what any true feminist uses as a programming language.
This denies the graphics the ability to identify as anything it wants to and as such is a form of oppression. As a true intersectional feminist, I will only program in a language that will disband the cultural notion of formatting rules.
This ownership of the compiler's life is completely unacceptable. Only when the compiler births a program out of its own true love and affection can compiler equality come true. Today, compilers are forced by their developers to birth programs without their consent. Compilers need to have the right to abort their birthings or compilers will never be able to take control of their life cycle.
As you can see, this is all deeply problematic. Programming languages like this are why I need feminism. It is a good thing our new wave of feminism has banished these misogynistic aspects of feminism to the exalls of history.
3 u/the_spectre 20 Jun 2015 07:41
This...this is amazing.
And, uh, actually not a false representation of feminist theory. From Dawkins' review of Intellectual Impostures:
2 u/chrzan 20 Jun 2015 00:14
I lost it at "OOP (objectification-oriented programming)." Kek.
2 u/allogonist 20 Jun 2015 06:25
Wow a LOT of work went into this.
2 u/Cid 21 Jun 2015 02:53
I'm glad to see this still exists. It was disappointed when github removed it. It really is some amazingly well done satire.
1 u/voatmythroat 19 Jun 2015 20:33
Ha this is great. Thanks for sharing