The Cultural Meaning of Programming Languages

Human languages develop over time a set of cultural associations. For example, during the early and mid-twentieth century, the Spanish language in the United States was seen both as a European high literary language and as a language associated with femininity and racial mixture. In my dissertation work, I documented how US modernist poets who translated from Spanish used or resisted those associations as they intervened in controversies over race and style in twentieth century poetics. Coding languages, too, can take on gendered and raced cultural associations. This talk explores the possibility of an analogous set of dynamics in the history of coding languages, exploring their changing cultural associations as languages and how those cultural associations were expressed in changing coding styles or conventions. It draws on the work of Vikram Chandra (Geek Sublime) and other writers exploring the cultural meanings and stylistic associations of computer code.