Curious what "community" of programming language designers/implementers the author refers to. People who work on languages at universities and attend academic conferences? To my knowledge no popular language came out of that "community."
I read the paper the web page links to and came away with no idea what the author wants to changes, what organization or community exists that might coordinate those changes, or even what she means by "Feminism in Programming Language Design."
They're using "feminism" in a fairly modern sense of the term, which goes beyond just women. It includes everybody who has ordinarily been excluded from decision-making, and especially when people belong to more than one member of that group.
The best examples of this come from section 2, noting the ways in which C++ is hard to use for limited-vision readers using a screen reader. That's not about women, but the feminist lens is to ask questions like "How can we get non-sighted users involved in programming language development? What might this language have looked like if they had been consulted, and could that benefit sighted users as well? Who else has a different perspective that has previously been missed"?
Now is a really good time to be thinking about that since we're changing just what it means for something to be a programming language: AI-assisted coding, no-code systems, visual programming, etc.
The changes they're calling for are basically to look around when decisions are being made and asking, "Are we getting a variety of different perspectives?" If there are no women, no black people, no disabled users, no non-English-speakers, no gay people, etc. in the room, you can't really know what it is you're missing. Not necessarily because those specific aspects of themselves are relevant, but just because you have to expect that you're introducing biases when your contributors are limited.
I get that. But C++ — and almost every popular programming language — did not come from a community or group of people making decisions. C++ originally came from one person. So did Python, Javascript, PHP, Ruby, and most others. There was no group in the room to consult. Sometimes the author started with a hobby project that got traction later.
The author describes a world of academic departments and conferences, but what useful languages have come out of those? She seems to imagine an exclusionary process of language design that doesn’t actually exist.
Using computers presents numerous obstacles to people with vision impairment, far beyond C++ syntax. Seems like the wrong detail to focus on.
I believe that the academic programming language community is more relevant than you think it is. It's where a lot of ideas get their start, and where live projects get discussed, leading to future evolution.
Still, you're right that I don't expect that to lead to a lot of big changes. The set of really important languages is actually pretty fixed. We're still using C++ how many decades later?
I think TFA is more concerned about the genesis of genuinely novel languages, than the practicalities of what languages are being used. From a PL design point of view, a lot of the languages we use are pretty much the same thing over and over. The differences are of immense interest to working programmers, but the range is really quite limited compared to what's possible.
I read the paper the web page links to and came away with no idea what the author wants to changes, what organization or community exists that might coordinate those changes, or even what she means by "Feminism in Programming Language Design."