Bearing in mind slack's amnesia - has there been any discussion around diversity here? Seems strange to talk about the future of technology without involving diverse voices. Should the forum be renamed Future of Coding for Comfortable White Men?

The fact that most activities around FoC are a hobby/leisure time involves a level of privilege that prefilters diversity. Second filter is that most of the relevant content and forums like this are in english, we may have some lurkers who can follow but are afraid to participate actively or they can't express their ideas clearly enough. PS: Argentinian, native Spanish speaker here 👋🏽

We touched on that topic before, not much though, searching for diversity here brings up some relevant posts (unfortunately, the thread context goes missing somewhat): https://observablehq.com/@stevekrouse/future-of-coding-slack-search

This is important to address! Two "future of programming"-type projects I enjoy following seem to take diverse perspectives pretty seriously: https://dynamicland.org/about-us/ https://theartofresearch.org/a-history/

I think this group represents a very small part of the tech world @Stefan. All kinds of people have used and made technology, both now and historically. Normally the early days of a community are an opportunity for this, before hierarchies and power structures form.

adapting the expression "You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something." I would say "You can't think seriously about coding without thinking about coding something", the name of this forum leaves the what part out, since it's generic, but I think many of the members care about coding as an end on itself, the turing completeness of the solution makes it relevant to all fields, but diverse fields don't care about turing completeness, in fact those solutions "overshoot" them.

That's super interesting and helps me understand the difference between the otherwise synonymous 'live coding' and 'live programming' communities.

it may work to accept the self selection of FoC but build "working groups" for specific topics and invite members of other communitites into those, like "live coding for music", "live coding for graphics", "coding for generative art/music", "coding for data analysis and visualizations", otherwise even if we try to integrate members of those communitites, 99% of what we talk about here will be nonsense or uninteresting to them.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love coding alone in the dark, building strange and fascinating linguistic structures outside of any time frame.. But that is nothing compared to being in a state of flow writing code to make music with other people. It becomes a full-body experience, coding, hearing, feeling in the now. I think the future of coding needs to include using code to interact with the world and the other people in it. I see that same motivation in dynamicland so it's a bit strange if this kind of liveness isn't accepted as the core to the future of coding.

The useful interactions should be we listening to what they want to do, how they imagine doing it, how do they do it currently, which tools do they use, what are the shortcomings of those tools. Then trying to provide them with protoypes, and listening to the feedback.

The FARM workshop does a fairly good job of being an interdisciplinary venue within the very formal world of a functional programming conference https://functional-art.org/

we don't have solutions, that's why it's called Future of Coding and not Present of Coding 🙂

Working with weavers, it's very clear that their technology is extremely advanced, after all their craft is thousands of years old! So by working with them, it's an opportunity to learn how to adapt their grounded approach to programming language design.

We sure have mainly problems, but that's why we are here, we want to solve some of them

Perhaps programming languages have reached a local maxima, and we need to learn from other fields how to get out of that rut.

Alex have you looked at racket in this capacity (environment for language design?). I recently attended their summer school: https://school.racket-lang.org/#htdl. See also the other more beginner-oriented track.

FWIW, when I found out about this thing I was very excited and told pretty much everyone I know (I am a CS student in a very diverse university!). Of those, only one person signed up, which happens to be a white male. I cannot think of any single reason that could have prevented the others to come here as well. So, hmm, they just don't come ¯\_(⊙︿⊙)_/¯

people don't join communities often and when they do, they do it because the objectives of the community are clear to them and align with their interests (also, when they have the time and energy to keep up with the activity). Not everyone has to want to join a community, but we may have to work to clarify our objectives to avoid missing some members who come, look, don't understand and leave.

I suspect there are many women who log in, see what a sausage party it is, and leave out of genuine fear

Funny, that as an ex-Thougthworks consultant, I'm not expecting a lack of diversity in my workplace, similarly where I am now (Tes), there's no lack of diversity, so in a way this concept is alien to me from my daily experience. Indeed, I'd be surprised to find myself on a white/English-native, male dominated team. Maybe that's just the Euro perspective?

@Duncan Cragg Not sure about Euro, but it sounds like a very London perspective.

Maybe. I remember once stopping and looking at my team and I was the only privileged middle class white male southerner! Quite a shock, but then I just went back to forgetting about people's origins as usual, they were just my friendly colleagues again.

I love @yaxu’s suggestion to collaborate with other groups. Hosting some joint events would be awesome for this. I also think @Mariano Guerra and @yaxu are on the money about the various prefiltering that’s happening in this group. I’d add that the lack of a Code of Conduct is probably seen as a red flag, as is the celebratory promise of fierce and heated debates on the getting started page. But it’s tricky to figure it out since the people we’re missing will never see or respond to this thread. That’s part of the reason that I think joint events are such a good idea.

@alltom I didn't realise there wasn't a code of conduct here, that's pretty surprising in 2019. That will certainly have excluded people.

I'd hate for this thread to be totally derailed, though… One of the things I'm wondering is, what connections to other groups do we already have? Is there already a practice of posting ads for other meetups in our various local channels? I see some of that in #CG8QU2QUU, though I haven't been able to make any of them. 😅

So, I'm not an expert, nor can I make any claim to speak on behalf of the deeply under-represented, but there are some things I'd like to comment on in response to Al. A friend of mine, a woman who works as a programmer in SF and participates in her company's diversity efforts(as well as doing really cool coding for girls outreach as a volunteer!) explained it to me like this: basically, when a women is interviewing for a tech company and sees an office full of dudes, it instantly sets off red flags to her. Most of them have had bad experiences in these environments, and if they've been in the industry for a while, although it's entirely likely that they've accumulated the expertise to improve those conditions, they're just plain tired of putting in the emotional labor for a place like that. So they often make the totally logical choice to pass on such groups, and find places where they can better spend their energy thriving on their own terms. So that is just one women's perspective in San Francisco, relayed through a dude's retelling, and barely scratches the surface of these issues. But when I heard her story and really unpacked what she was talking about, and connected it to some of the other experiences I've heard about, it was really eye opening. Once you are a big group of dudes with typical tech backgrounds, it is not sufficient to say that you are friendly to diversity. When you make a serious effort to empathize with the BS that women(and other underrepresented groups) have to deal with in this industry it becomes clear that saying, "I have never witnessed any kind of behavior that was hostile towards (not just women)"- the absence of overt hostility!- clearly isn't even close to sufficient! My takeaway is that if you want to make a qualitative change in representation in tech, you have to abandon your preconceptions, go out and listen to the real experiences of under-represented folks, and make a genuine effort to understand their interactions with this world and place that against knowledge of the systemic issues they face(think of it this way: this process is not too far off from how to do good science or research of any kind, you want to build a better model of the reality). @Al Mo, if you want to appreciate a fuller picture of reality, I would recommend reading up on the direct experiences of folks dealing daily with systemic discrimination in tech, and try hard to empathize with them. If you take this journey seriously, it will only benefit you. I believe this is a good start, make sure to follow the links: <https://cate.blog/2014/07/28/the-day-i-leave-the-tech-industry/>

Here's another twitter thread about CoCs specifically for this community: https://twitter.com/chrisamaphone/status/1199331327209824256