Felienne Hermans relates her journey in programming—writing The Programmer's Brain, uncovering biases within computing culture & herself, and building the multilingual, gradual-syntax programming language Hedy. We even dip into AI (trigger warning) and dumb phones.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: elmtown@logisticallyinc.com.

Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.

Recording date: 2025.04.08

Guest

• Felienne Hermans

Show notes

[00:00:26] Sponsored by Logistically

[00:00:48] Introducing Felienne Hermans

• Hedy - Textual programming made easy
• The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
• "How to teach programming (and other things)?" at Strange Loop 2019
• "A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design", co-authored with Ari Schlesinger
• Elm Town 59 – Elm Camp with Katja Mordaunt
• Code Reading Club
• The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

[00:04:09] The costs of misconceptions

• Science Mike

[00:09:51] Journey to computer science

[00:14:33] Programming culture: challenges and creativity

• Elm Town 48 – Making Little Games Like Presents with Martin Stewart
• Elm Town 64 – The network effect with Martin Stewart
• Advent of Code

[00:21:36] Bias and building a multi-lingual programming language

• Mark Guzdial's blog: Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take

[00:28:35] Hedy's gradual syntax

• Addressing Computing’s Discrimination Problem: A Framework for Anti-Discriminatory Computing by Ari Schlesinger
• The Will to Change by bell hooks

[00:38:12] Programming language community, learning, and valuing hard things

[00:47:19] How language design choices affect cognitive load

• "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki at Strange Loop 2019
• Elm Town 58 – Unblocking users with quality software with Tessa Kelly
• Episode 68: Elm and ADD with Dillon Kearns and Jeroen Engels

[00:56:22] History of women in computing

• "Female Inventors and Narratives of Innovation in Late Twentieth-Century Computing" by Myra Cheng
• Nathan Ensmenger

[01:03:40] Kotodama (言霊): What's in a name?

• Feeling of Computing 75 • A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans

[01:08:49] Switching to a dumb phone

[01:16:48] AI

• "An Age of Hyperabundance" by Laura Preston
• In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe

[01:30:10] Picks

Felienne's picks

• "An Age of Hyperabundance" by Laura Preston
• Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond by Tamara Kneese
• Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han

Jared's pick

• The End of This Day's Business by Katharine Burdekin