 Alright, thank you so much. And thanks everyone for being here. I'm Gabrielle Hayden I'm a librarian for research data management and reproducibility at the University of Oregon. But before I did that I got a PhD in 20th century poetry, and I spent three years as a visiting professor at Reed College. And it's some of the things that I learned in that former profession that kind of gave me the idea for this talk. So in, in my dissertation work where I got to do a lot of research at this ridiculously beautiful and inappropriately wealthy library the binary library. One of the things I was looking at was the ways that Spanish language and literature. The way that people had biases about Spanish language and literature sometimes press the translation and publishing about literature in the 20th century. And so that essentially what struck me was that some of the biased ways that people talk about human languages I saw some real parallels with the bias language that people use to talk about programming languages. So here I want to stop and say that I'm going to talk about language of bias and things that people will say that if they were said in earnest but absolutely violate the code of conduct here. And so if you're not in the mood to think about sad and stressful things or interactions that you've had in the past you should totally feel free to just hop off and come back the end of the talk will be less about these depressing topics. So you could even just hop off for the next seven minutes but but but that was basically just noticing that parallel right and and seeing so programming languages like human languages are social. Right. And I think the little scholarship that's done on this I think there's a lot of consensus right there embedded in the interesting hierarchy so just as the way that we talk about human languages is influenced by things like the history of imperial colonies and differences in power between cultures and nations in the same way. And I see that there are differences in the way that people understand programming languages or who has access to certain programming languages over others, or parts of the the computer science and software engineering ecosystems and you know the pay bills that can be associated with it so another way of saying that in more positive terms is that in the way that we talk about all sorts of human languages formal competing languages and other we have opportunities to emphasize solidarity or division. So here's just a selection of kind of classic gender and put downs that, you know, my, my thought for this inspiration for this context was really kind of running across these kinds of things. Often people don't say this type of stuff outright it's more like you notice. Oh, at this company I'm working at it seems like there are more women working in the front end or there's an assumption that that would be the case. Those kinds of things but it was very interesting because once I started to look into it. Of course I saw that actually this kind of way of putting down things that are newer potentially more accessible that that change who's using the technology are often getting in the same way by in this kind of gendered, gendered language, and that really harkens back to a way of putting down other people's languages that goes back quite a long way right so just I could have taken things from my dissertation but I actually thought it would be useful to think about how this goes back a lot farther. This is a fantastic feminist and post colonial analysis of the Gospel of St. Paul and his role in history, and talking about the way that he is pushing back against this language within Rome of imperial conquest being associated with masculinity and conquered lands and languages being associated with femininity right and you have this like image of potentially a sexual violence here on the cover right of the Roman soldier and the feminine, the female figure who sort of stands in for lands conquered by Rome. And you see that more recently in the 20th century with. So I was studying as a pound among other writers and you know you can see here he's talking about. He's sort of making a direct parallel between well Spanish literature is good one Spain has power. Now that it doesn't it's feminine and then he just throws in some gratuitous racism. Okay. On the one hand that's a kind of depressing thing to notice on the other hand I think it's useful when we run across this kind of toxic language to know that it has this sort of long and on our original uninteresting genealogy. But of course, I think that if you were to have this conversation on Reddit, you come across a lot of people who would say well but aren't some programming languages better than others. I'm actually not much of a programmer, although I do help teach some people in Python in my work and I am excited to be learning more, but I'm not someone who's going to have this opinion. Very friendly well who does care about the answer to this question that the folks we've, we've just been alluding to. But then also people who design and write programming languages right I mean, unlike human languages which developed completely organically. Programming languages are written by people and they're written to be successful. And so the people who design them want other people to adopt them. And they are also thinking about this so this is a great article from 2015 by CMU Professor Jean Yang and Ari Rapkin that talk about the question this kind of again this this kind of faux technical language, and there that essay actually comes out of this great study called the sociology of programming language adoption that Rapkin did with Leo Myrovich where they surveyed developers and asked them, you know, why are you choosing one language over another. And I think their sense was as people who wrote programming languages, or who are involved in the development of programming languages, you know that people would care about things like development speed and and correctness. I think all of these very specific technical things I mean you can think about if you're an advanced mathematician there's all sorts of fun work I think that can be done. But in fact what they found was no developers ultimately are choosing languages based on you know who they know and what what those people are using right open source libraries. There's a powerful existing code personal familiarity team familiarity so that those interpersonal dynamics are, are the things that really, that really matter. But there are still people who are thinking about the differences between languages and how that might affect people. There's sort of interesting parallels between the way that we talk about human languages, and the way that we talk about programming languages so German romanticism that's the 1700s and early 1800s, there was a lot of talk about language representing the spirit of the people are the spoke of a people and this was in the context of really empowering the German language over say Latin, and, and you know really thinking about the mother tongue, and how and thinking about that as a font of literary inspiration and so on. The recent version of this in the 20th century is what people tend to call the separate work hypothesis which is that this idea that the structure of language of human languages can influence how we think. And I think there's a general sense that that is not true in a in a really strong way, but that there can be a subtle. The subtle structures of language can suddenly affect what we're paying attention to within the language or what we're sort of the ways that we're invited to speak. And what's interesting is that there are people now who are doing research around those questions. And programming languages as well. So the knowledge lab at the Chicago just got a Sloan Foundation grant to do a bunch of machine learning analysis of the way that people are using computer programming languages. And thinking about that. There's also a fantastic talk that's still available on the way back machine by the inventor of Ruby, where he talks about having written Ruby, really very much with the separate work hypothesis in mind and in particular, the way that it's articulated in this fantastic novel by Samuel R Delaney if you don't know him he is really great sci fi novelist who thinks about a lot of smart interesting stuff. So the other thing that that comes up out of this is that I don't have time to really get into but I would love it if you guys had questions about it or wanted to chime in about it. In your own experience is that you know programming languages to a certain degree are based in English right so Python was developed by someone from the Netherlands Ruby by someone from Japan, and yet the sort of small words in there that to the extent that they're human language words are based in English. Yuki hero Matsumoto and I don't know that I'm saying his name right who developed Ruby in the same talk which I highly recommend that you go back and look at all the slots for because it's hilarious. You know starts out by saying you know when someone came to talk about Ruby in Japan we got them an English translator, because he had looked at Japanese for two weeks and, but here I have to stand before you with my bad English. I need to suffer just because I was born in Japan. Life is unfair, but he's really I mean it's, he's being he's being cute but of course it does reflect real structural imbalances in how how easily people can access language and then maybe how they feel about it to so geek sublime is a beautiful set of essays about all of these issues. It's a zero five minute warning. Okay. Great. And one of the things he talks about is the origin of of computer languages being inspired in part by semiotics, which is kind of a forebearer of certain strand of linguistics. In turn, having been really inspired by this brilliant Sanskrit grammar and from the fourth century BCE, who made a grammar of Sanskrit that can really be understood, according to the most recent arguments by scholars as a kind of a formal language or even a competing language so it's fascinating I don't know Sanskrit and I'm not a logician but if you want to go down that rabbit hole, I got really excited and read skimmed a lot of a b logic stuff that I didn't fully understand totally fascinating stuff but you know this is also something where when I mentioned this to a colleague who worked in tech they said oh you know I had heard of that because someone you know that I talked to who was being kind of rowey who was from India was like oh yeah well you know it all came from Penini right and there's that sense of wanting to express a kind of national pride or a cultural contribution when the programming languages are so dominated by the English language and by English language companies and then I'll just mention one other study that kind of gets into this is a chapter in critical code studies this new book out from MIT press about flowmatic which was written by Grace Hopper and was a precursor to cobalt, which is sort of focused on business folks, which in turn you can imagine as a kind of very early precursor to excel in certain ways in terms of its focus on the business audience and just talking about how that was a matter of bringing more English in and then I just want to end with noting that Excel is one of the only sort of platforms for programming languages that actually allows you to program in your language so there's the Excel the German version and so on. So I want to end by asking some questions that I hope can lead to some conversation either now or in the slack so you know how has language chauvinism affected your relationship to particular programming languages or your access to opportunity. Your first language is not English do you feel that the fact that programming languages are based in English affects your work or do you see it affecting others. And are there strategies you found helpful for interrupting language chauvinism so no obligation but if you're interested, I am totally fascinated to hear your thoughts so. Yeah, so I'm just going to stop there somehow I wanted there to be a more uplifting note at the end of this but this is me on Twitter come find me if you want. And yeah I want to continue to think and talk more about about interrupting these these kinds of associations are just noticing the ways that they are truly unoriginal. Thank you so much that was absolutely fantastic. And I just want to give a little comment on in terms of the time we've got left we've got five or six minutes so certainly time to ask a few questions or to have that discussion. In fact, we could go a little bit experimental and if anybody would like to come up on come up onto the screen and engage in any of those questions then I would be happy to do that. We've got a question that's coming. I'll read it out. And it's from Minister Klein, thank you Melissa. And they say I'm curious whether you've looked at similar effects within programming languages, ie, dialects that develop in particular workplace or set of packages. So tidy verse versus base are. You know, I haven't but I'd really like to I mean this was really. This talk is like posing the question and I think that the. I wanted to be able to come in here with more answers and questions but I think that to do that really requires a certain amount of more ethnographic research or really kind of getting into. So, but I want I think that's a really good question right I mean it's sort of what follows from that observation that people are choosing languages based on the, the language packages, and so on. Yeah, so I'm excited to keep, keep looking into that how much is the culture of the language due to the actual founders, or community that evolves I think that's a great question from Peter Murray rest. Something that comes to mind. There is a recent controversy that some of you will remember better than I about about they're in a in a Linux manual that was sort of an abortion joke that was made around the abort command and the person who was maintaining it insisted upon keeping it despite the fact that people really didn't like it and then that person and I remember their name just just recently got kicked out of MIT for being a jerk. So, so I think in that sense like the people who are like so much of the work that is gone. So, and I think that's mostly at CSV comp, for example is that people do this work of maintaining and setting up the culture of being inclusive and inviting and respectful. And I think when you have people who are involved who are doing the opposite of that. I think you really see that so yeah and draw my day Elton is saying in her opinion founder effects are very strong. Yeah, absolutely any opinions on programming languages not written in English. Yeah, so I'm not I'm still so new to programming that it's not like I have opinions myself about different programming languages I mean it seems like there's a big challenge that people talk about network effects right that because many people have to learn the English based programming languages in order to enter in to the conversation. Then that's also then what everyone knows and so there's a kind of bigger audience and there's a kind of knock on a fact that you get from just in the sense that the founder maybe of a language can help set the culture, the fact that the early languages were in English then makes it harder to not write in languages that are not in English. And so a couple more comments, several people said this reminded them of the work of the lean Herman and that was someone who I ran across right at the end of giving this talk and I'm excited to read more about their work. And then Jonathan Cain says, it makes me think about conversations this morning about community building and what does this mean for all the work that folks are joined to build inclusive communities I think that's a great point and in fact, I had really I had meant to say at the very beginning to give a shout out to Angela Lee and her talk on data communities and those who build them. I think that these kinds of posturing right are the exact opposite of creating the kind of excitement and kindness that we work so hard to foster here at CSB comp so it felt it almost felt a little sad to give this paper here in the sense that it's sort of documenting the opposite of what we want to build but I, I hope that there's some value in, in noticing how the operations of our of the enemies of our inclusive communities. I think Gabrielle that I think is a lovely place to finish.