[LiKao]

I would rather dismiss her point on the basis, that from my perspective this may be true for a small niche of academics that focus specifically on programming language formalisms.

When I studied programming language during my university time, this was really focused on formal approaches, so it is true there. But that is how this field of studies defines itself, and that should be considered their right.

Once you look outside of this narrow field, you can easily find a lot of projects and endeavors that cover exactly what she is requesting in that article.

* The rust compiler focuses a lot on more understandable error messages (a topic specifically covered) and even recommendations that make picking up the language easier.

* C++11 standardization also focused a lot on usability and how to improve hard to read error messages.

* Scratch is explicitly designed to look for alternative approaches to programming.

* Programming in other languages has been around for a long time.

In school we were taught a German version of Logo. I don't buy her argument that her language research was dismissed purely because it wasn't hard enough. We simply have anything we need to understand how we could do a programming language in another language. Replace a few lexer definition, and then re-define the whole stdlib in another language. There is simply nothing novel about this. I really hope her research on language covers a lot more than just this.

She also does a very bad bait-and-switch when she suddenly replaces the meaning of the word "hard" in the middle of the article. Initially she clearly used "hard" to refer to difficult, then later she suddenly switches hard in the sense of "hard" sciences, i.e. sciences based on formalisms and empirical research instead of discussions and opinions.

I agree with her a lot of research is missing from non-technical hard sciences (I would consider large parts of psychology a hard science, although it lives at the border of the two worlds). There is some research on the psychology of programming, but this is definitely under-researched. Also usability studies of programming languages are not well established.

In a lot of cases, however, I don't think this is actually something we can really do research on. I have a strong background in psychology, and I don't think we actually could study the impact of different paradigms. If you pick participants that already know programming, they will be highly socialized with the dominant paradigms. If you pick novices you will have to control what they learn over years until they become fluent in the studied paradigm. This isn't feasible and raises sever ethical concerns. Or you don't control it, make short time studies, in which case the results will just not carry any meaning.

Overall for me the article raises some really valid concerns about programming language research and CS in general, but I think she took a really bad turn in describing these as gender based issues. What I would see as the reason for these issues lies in completely different areas and are only very remotely related to gender.