The Garbage Collector

« first day (526 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (120 days later) »

Michael Homer

01:50

A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design was a really good presentation that I recommend everyone here watch (paper too)

lyxal

02:09

@MichaelHomer society design stack exchange :p

~~we language design in a society~~

13 hours later…

Seggan

15:23

@MichaelHomer ehh tbh its a very big logical leap from "we feel what a programming language is" to "programming language is a social construct"

esp since different people have different ideas on what is and is not a programming language

ex, i dont think HTML is a lang but you might

Michael Homer

It sounds like you’re describing why the term is a social construction

Seggan

isnt a social construct a commonly accepted idea of what x is?

i havent taken sociology so i might be wrong

Michael Homer

I did cut the slide out of its context in the talk

When we say “programming language”, we aren’t identifying a category of things defined by some rules, but a cluster of things that are accepted as having enough programming-language-ness to qualify

We went through C, UML, Scratch, knitting patterns, spreadsheets, HTML and had a show of hands in the room that gave an interesting gradient of results

I recommend the talk, it was very good, and then skip the first question because it was very bad

Seggan

yeah am currently watching it

its real quiet tho :/

Michael Homer

15:39

We had a discussion about what a programming language is for the purposes of the site and it was also interesting to have to form a consensus on that

Yeah, I heard there was an audio problem with that session

I think the final videos will have that fixed, but those are a couple of weeks away

Michael Homer

15:55

Today's schedule has SPLASH-E (education) instead of REBASE, same deal applies that Onward! and SPLASH-E are probably more interesting