A review of Ms. Schlesinger's writings at HASTAC shows that a lot of people take her ideas seriously and respectfully, even if they might disagree. I am astonished by this. To me, her work is postmodern gibberish. In her latest blog on HASTAC, posted in July 2014, she writes:

"For code to be feminist, it must be explicitly identified as feminist (in particular by the developers | authors), developed with feminist theory, and/or developed with a feminist politics."

As long as these requirements are met, does it matter to Ms. Schlesinger if the code can be executed to actually do something, for example, process a payroll, control a robot on an assembly line, assess water quality on a continuous basis?

In my (modern) world, there is real physical work to be accomplished, day in and day out, much of it not even remotely glamorous, and computer software helps us get it done. It is a first-world luxury - and, to me, silly - to require the coding language to embody an ideology.

Last night, there was something funky going on with the Showtime app when we were going to watch "Homeland." Gregg finally got it to work, but I'll echo what DrPinWV said above: When your computer or some piece of technology doesn't work, you just want it to work; you don't give a flea's leg who designed it or whether the language is "phallic" or "feminist."

Underneath her idiocy there actually is a good idea there. I think you'll agree Amy that men and women don't think the same. Honestly when it comes to programming plenty of men don't think the same way. Hence people talking about the knack and such.

Programming languages have slowly been getting more and more human usable. So there may be merit in doing things one way for women and another for men. Or even just for groups that naturally think a certain way.

But there is no merit in her ideology. C++ and Java have no political ideology. Their makers certainly do but Ruby is not more Republican than Pascal. It is like asking how libertarian your parsley is.

This loony woman's writings bring to mind the old computer acronym (probably sexist, hateful male originated)GIGO -Garbage in equals Garbage out.

"the purpose of a language is to make its features (affordances) obvious to its users."

Bullshit. Programmers are expected to RTFM. The purpose of a programming language is twofold: to instruct the computer on what to do (duh) in an efficient as manner as possible, and to be comprehensible to someone reading the source code. In a programming language, each word and symbol has a specific meaning. It is the exact opposite of academic feminist writing, in which words are meaning-free and nothing is comprensible because it isn't intended to be. To a huge extent, postmodern feminism is wish fulfillment. Computers scoff at your wishes.

I'm at least somewhat familiar with about 30 different programming languages, and I've seen a bunch of different approaches to the problem. One thing is for sure: languages in which the meaning or intent of something can be unclear or unspecified in a non-pathological situation eventually die out, because they cause too many problems. The languages that have survived today have done so in part because a person with the appropriate training can look at code written in that language and immediately comprehend what it is intended to do. Something like the '&' operator in the C language has a specific defined behavior; in a specific situation it will always behave the same, and if you understand and use it properly, it will always do what you intended. This is why the zillion "natural language" approaches to computer programming that have been tried have always failed. Human language is just not precise enough.

If it is a feminist language, I expect logic will be replaced with volume and the compiler will determine what code to spit out depending on its feelings at any given moment. If a man tries to use it, the system call him a Patriarchal oppressor and shuts down.

The first thing any programmer wants to do is create their own programming and/or scripting language, it seems to be a requirement to call yourself a programmer/software developer/computer scientist/etc. Constant re-invention of the wheel, if you ask me. I have a hard enough time with today's set of languages.

In Schlesinger's discussion however, it seems maybe there's some other ideas rolling around. The computer will do EXACTLY what you TELL it to do, where she seems to desire that it do what she WANTS it to do without having to actually SAY it. Ya know, that sounds vaguely familiar...

Dr Grace Hopper, developer of COBOL, is spinning in her grave.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary, and those that don't. Sadly, a student in "Technology and Social Change" appears to be the latter. I guessed that when I saw the "Social Change" thing. Tech can cause social change, but that should be incidental to the tech not the primary driver.

And after plowing who know how many tens of thousands (if not hundreds) of dollars into this indoctrination, she'll be sitting at a computer in a coffee shop bemoaning the misogynistic computer industry which won't give her a job.

Because they don't care how you pee, or your feminist creds. They care about how many quality lines of code you can come up with in a day. And they care if you can come up with an innovative approach to the problem at hand.

Also: how is a programming language "feminist" or "misogynistic"?

This is what happens when you've no idea how the physical computer works...
It's a light switch. On or off. Layer those switches, layer upon layer, and you have a series of events.
Knowing how to construct a series of events, allows you to write the event FIRST. (Called coding)... then the switches perform the events.
Build it layer upon layer... and you too can have windows tell you it "can't do that Dave..."
Wherein you backtrack to find that switch failed.

If you've never programmed directly, without a "tool"... it might seem like there is some sort of magic involved... because the tool translates.

I suppose that's how this would all work: defeat the patriarchy = goto line 679...

Interestingly I occasionally run in to youngins that don't seem to know an explicit function call, unless it bites them...

Bah. - old cantankerous programmer.

The semantics for the commonly-known languages (like C++ or Java) are not gender-biased. That's silliness. If anything they are culturally-biased, since the constructs (like if-then-else) are English-language based.

But software is both an art and a science. And in that art, there are some (usually funny) slightly misogynistic variable names that get chosen. If I have the opportunity, I'll change them into a slightly misandristic name - and see if anyone notices. Nerd humor.

Cousin Dave has exactly the right answer if one takes this writer's rant at face value, but why AND how in the world could anybody ever do that?

I'd like to hear again when she completes her thesis. It can't possibly fail to be funnier than hell!

There might be some case to be made that the INTERFACE --ie the GUI, has some gender affinities. Mostly current interfaces are pretty crappy for everyone. But if she thinks an interface is a language....
There is no more gender in C++ than in Calculus (though some feminists insist that Calculus is patriarchal).

A few months ago, Kate Paulk wrote a guest post on Sarah Hoyt's blog, in which she takes on another blogger's essay about technology's "man problem," and how the programming field could me made more welcoming to women. The money quote:

Hell, it’s not a welcoming profession for most men. It attracts weird, it attracts poorly-socialized people (yes, I’m one of these. I can fake it for a while, but sooner or later the truth shows). Programming is ultimately for people whose focus is on cutting through the crap that makes up most of everyday life and teaching a very fast moron [the computer] to do things that the ordinary everyday people think are valuable. If you don’t have the basic competence, you might as well not bother.

Stated another way, I suppose you could write a feminist programming language, but as SwissArmy points out, the instructions a computer actually uses are the same regardless -- all zeroes and ones. Would feminist programming still use the zeroes and ones? If it does, what makes it feminist? If it doesn't, what would the code run on? Or do we then move on to demand feminist hardware?

All this patriarchal oppression sounds familiar somehow.

Ah.

Here it is.

This was written at HASTAC, you say? When did the Onion change its name?

I think the late Grace Hopper would think the idea of a "feminist" computer language is ridiculous.

Whatever the afterlife equivalent is of getting drunk and throwing stuff at the TV screen, that's what Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace are doing right now.

I guess nobody remembers the hilarious C+= language (C-plus-equality) that was developed by 4chan in response to the article.

The language comes with a functional inHERpreter.

Here's the readme:

https://gitorious.org/c-plus-equality/c-plus-equality/source/cefcfb4276889bd3833c539225a9cdfd3eb16d33:README.md