Searching for Justice in Programming Language Design

Amy J. Ko
ACM Distinguished Speaker, Professor University of Washington

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

From its earliest days, computing has been an eclectic project of capitalism, war, colonialism, and white supremacy. Its central Western values of utility, efficiency, rationality, and mathematical beauty have enabled sweeping changes to culture and communication, but also amplified some of the worst parts of these oppressive systems. At the heart of many of these forces are programming languages, which deeply embed many assumptions about their users: English fluency, normative ability, and a devotion to speed. These assumptions create a culture of computing that structurally excludes vast parts of humanity from participating. In this talk, I describe some of my nascent efforts to design the opposite: programming language that seeks to be global, accessible, playful, and simple, embracing all of humanity’s natural languages and abilities, while trading computing’s devotion to efficiency for simplicity and silliness. Throughout, I’ll provide demonstrations of these gestures toward programming language justice, pointing to alternative visions for how we might make with computing and who might do the making.