Chief Correspondents Corner

A page for the random musings of the Legacy Guild's Chief Correspondent.

Is CoBOL the new feminist programming language? (posted 22 January 2014)

It's amazing what Google turns up sometimes. Consider this academic debate revolving around a graduate student's thesis on the need for a feminist programming language, supposedly because all object-oriented languages need to be superseded.

Here is an excerpt, though I encourage you to read (or at least skim) it all - the comments are even more fascinating than the original post.

"… a feminist programming language is to be built around a non-normative paradigm that represents alternative ways of abstracting. The intent is to encourage and allow new ways of thinking about problems so we can code using a feminist ideology."

"The idea came about while discussing normative and feminist subject object theory. I realized that object oriented programmed reifies normative subject object theory. This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like…"

"I realized that to program in a feminist way, one would ideally want to use a feminist programming language."

http://www.hastac.org/blogs/ari-schlesinger/2013/11/26/re-feminism-and-programming-languages

Let's put aside (probably permanently) what coding using a feminist ideology would look like, and focus on how anything that might weaken the "lock" that object-oriented thinking has on the current IT world is probably a good thing, no matter where it comes from, because despite recent object-oriented extensions to CoBOL, CoBOL is still primarily a procedural language (some call it an imperative language, because the statements are like imperative sentences.) And the author does seem to dislike the O-O paradigm.

I'm just not convinced that she knows anything about CoBOL, or the importance of the role of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper in its creation.

The article has been critiqued quite a bit since its posting late in 2013, and with more than a little bit of sarcasm. Well, maybe some of that is deserved, but I would think that the author's intent is not so deserving of that sarcasm.

For example, take the recent creation of the satirical Feminist Software Foundation, a word play on the legendary Free Software Foundation, and the debate, even censorship involving it.

The nouveau-FSF website: http://feministsoftwarefoundation.org
The controversy it created: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/19/feminist_software_foundation_c_plus_equality/ .

And if you click on Who We Are, and then on Shop, you can find yourself where supposedly you can order buttons and t-shirts with the Feminist Software Foundation logo for C+= (C-plus-equality) - the satirical feminist programming language they "created", whose design is a hoot!

But If the discussion were to shift from a more philosophical basis to an empirical basis, as in "What computer languages seem to attract women's participation?", then a different light would be shed on "the problem", with less room for satire or sarcasm.

From my career viewpoint, I have seen more women in the roles of CoBOL developers and business/system analysts, who can more easily communicate with CoBOL developers than the O-O language developers, owing to the fact that CoBOL, for all its supposed excessive verbosity, a much more "natural" programming language than say Java or C#.

Call me old-fashioned, but the authors/students in the original linked post would do better to find the best current feminist language to support instead of inventing a "new one."

Seen this way, the best way to view the declining participation of women in the IT workforce can be attributed to the (relative) decline of CoBOL, rather than a "dearth" of feminist programming language candidates.  Well, in her bio, the author of the original article does state: "I am interested in women in technology, feminism, and computer science." Until proven otherwise, I am inclined to take people at face value in what they say. And she says she is interested in whether women participate in IT.

So let me tilt toward how what she is talking about is related, even tangentially, to what the Legacy Guild contends is a discovered Truth. And that is how for software systems that are mission-critical operations, the software is precisely an iconic model of the business operation. Now there are any number of ways that software development can go astray and projects fail. One way that I have found is helpful to keeping a project on track is to help the Team become aware of, and understand, the Greater Social Good that is being served, whether it be selling and delivering books to customers, or performing efficient inventory control, or manufacturing refrigerators. Developers' awareness of the Greater Social Good they are doing can go a long, long way toward compensating for bad and unappreciative IT management. Developers finish projects for all kinds of reasons, and doing so to get a check and please the boss are only a couple.

That the debate and discussion that the original author has stimulated has at its foundation the search to understand some kind of relationship between technology and society, or seeking to understand technology in the broader context of society. And I think this is a good thing.

This "feminist programming language" thing is a bit of hair splitting, I readily concede, and maybe even a distraction. But the author is young, the project is her academic "thesis", and I am persuaded to allow her a bit of slack. Maybe even a lot of slack. :-)

Well, at least until any of her ideas enter into any Code Review sessions I attend, lest my programs be critiqued on socio-politico-ideological terms for the data names that I choose.

Besides that, after all, what she has written is probably no less relevant than some of the esoteric papers I have read from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on "program provabiity" and the like.

And because she is taking care of it, that is one less thing for me to do, which allows me to work on the puzzles that the Legacy Guild prefers to work on.

Your Legacy Guild Chief Correspondent

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