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by tetromino_
376 days ago
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It is absolutely a valid point that user experience, helpful error messages, ease of use are extremely important and historically neglected in programming language design, as contrasted with technical excellence. It is absolutely an invalid point to claim that this is due to gender, that men are doomed by biology to care about technical excellence while women are doomed by biology to care about UX. We are not living in 1825! |
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It is IMO very backwards and counterproductive to just gender-box mathematics/quantitative research vs peoples/qualitative research. Women are very capable of doing quantitative/mathematical research, and men are quite capable of doing qualitative/UX/anthropology research. Why must we be so narrow minded, _especially_ when we're talking about how we want to see the future?
The author may be totally right in suggesting that PL academic research needs more diversity in research, and that there might be a lot of status-quo bias, elitism and groupthink at play. The over-reliance on mathematical "purity/elegance" (like the monad meme someone mentioned below) instead of usability when it comes to new languages is something even I have encountered as an end user of programming languages.
However, claiming that there's some inherent gender based tendency to engage in one kind of research over another defeats their own purpose IMO. If they said that PL academic research could learn some tricks from fields X, Y and Z on how to engage in more end-user research, it would have made their point so much more convincing.