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Perl6 seems like a fantastic language, but one of the things I'm most interested to see how turn out is the way it is being branded for tweenage girls. NOTE TO
by marshray 11y ago
Perl6 seems like a fantastic language, but one of the things I'm most interested to see how turn out is the way it is being branded for tweenage girls.
NOTE TO DOWNVOTERS: This is not a joke. E.g., http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2015/10/06/the-night-larry-wall-unveiled-perl-6/ http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2015/10/06/the-night-larry-wall-... "the new butterfly logo for Perl 6 'is specifically designed, among other things, to appeal to 7-year-old girls. The Python community has done a much better job appealing to kids with fun stuff.'"
- xaduha 11y ago> This is not a joke. > is specifically designed, among other things, to appeal to 7-year-old girls but this is
- zoffix222 11y agoBut why? Most of tech confs are sausage fests. It's time we start addressing the sex inequality issue in our trade.
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoMaybe because smart people are usually interested in equal opportunity, not equal representation.
- cygx 11y agoCulture matters. It's not enough to have equal opportunity in theory, you also have to make people realize that they have this option as well as make them feel welcome.
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoBut just certain people for certain jobs, right? We don't need to make women feel welcome in the mining community or men in the nursing one, do we?
- cygx 11y agoWe do. But as programmers, we're generally not in a position to do anything about those.
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoOf course we can help. Let's start making sites promoting a 50/50 sex distribution in all the mines! Let's convince Google and Facebook to finance "mining girls" programs, both inside and outside schools. Let's start shaming male miners for being males and discriminate against them when hiring! What can possibly go wrong?
- cygx 11y agoIt's not about reaching gender parity, or shaming. It's about merit and bias. Jobs that are, on average, more suitable for a person of a certain sex do exist. But it's a loss to society to culturally enforce gender-based barriers to entry: You want to leverage the high-performance end of the bell curve of either sex.
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoSo when people discuss statistics about women/ethnic minorities/eye color in tech, you really think it's about breaking barriers to entry and not about mirroring the composition of the general population in a ridiculous failure to understand the sampling bias?
- austinjp 11y agoActually, yes.
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoThen you need to question the underlying assumptions, because your conclusion is wrong. Start with this: given equal opportunity, any self selected group will mirror the composition of the general population.
- raiph 11y agoIt sounds like you like Camelia but think the design goal is a mistake. Is that right?