if there are so many trans women in programming why haven’t they written any programming languages
@Lady Initial thoughts:
Perl 6/Raku, Audrey Tang?
Whatever the HECK Alexia Massalin was doing with quajects and the Synthesis Kernel?
(Trans men on the other hand have Rust as a notch on their belt.)
@gaditb i don’t mean contributing, i mean controlling, tho
@gaditb JavaScript was written by Brendan Eich; PHP was written by Rasmus Ledorf; Python was written by Guido van Rossum; Perl was written by Larry Wall; Zig was written by Andrew Kelley. These are massive oversimplifications, but the question remains
I know for a fact there are lots of talented trans women right now working on other people’s programming languages. that’s what makes me wonder why they don’t have one of their own
@Lady @gaditb societal transmisogyny imposes a lot of obstacles to tw creating successful programming languages: being trained to devalue their own capabilities and contributions; the abuse that publicly prominent tw suffer; all the other fucking shit they’re going through that makes it harder to maintain such a prominent and demanding role; many people not taking their work as seriously as that of men.
(Audrey Tang’s perl 6 work was before my time but i’m pretty sure if she hadn’t been prevented by factors like the above from continuing her work, it’d be uncontroversial to attribute the language as much to her as to Larry. hell, i’m not sure it would be controversial among the community even with the mere year or two she worked on Pugs.)
@alyssa @gaditb what’s bothering me, and this is a more general Bother with tech, is that there doesn’t seem to be a space for trans women to develop their own products in their own community without it needing to go thru the gauntlet of universal approval or criticism. i look at projects like Zig, or Servo (not a programming language, but probably the complexity of one), and they are not large teams. there is the knowledge and numbers to do a project of that size and have a little community around it. but it feels as tho unless it will also be as welknown and used as Zig or Servo, which is unlikely because of all the reasons you mentioned, people are not willing to consider it. or there is a networking problem, where people are willing to consider it but not willing to work together to make it happen
tl;dr here is i don’t want something successful, i want something i can write small libraries for which are good and useful without ultimately supporting Apple, or the Rust Foundation, or some random cis male BDFL, which is what most of the options feel like to me. there are things like C or JS which are more neutral (as committee-driven standards), but conversely have no real community to speak of (at least not good ones), which feels alienating to labour under
a project doesn’t need to be very successful to fill that niche. it’s just depressing and demotivating working in a field where everything you produce is enhancing the product of someone else, and most of those someone elses aren’t people you would otherwise want to prop up. i don’t think i’m the only one who feels this way, but if the sentiment is shared, it doesn’t feel like anyone is actually capable of acting on it
@alyssa @gaditb to be clear i think a lot of the actual trans women who might fill this role are probably libertarian racists and i’m not sure i would love supporting them either, because that’s how these things seem to go, but i also know many in the community are not as selective as me, so it still seems viable, and a trans libertarian racist is probably still better than a not-trans libertarian racist (maybe; open for debate)
