Programming Languages as a Community of Belonging
RustWeek Utrecht, NL
In the last few decades, programming as an identity has gone through a tremendous amount of changes. One of the most impactful changes has been the rise of programming languages as a community of belonging.
Programming languages were originally a tool that we considered, for the most part, on purely technical merits. But at some point, programming languages went from being a mere tool to being an anchor that communitis were built around. As the complexity of the language ecosystems evolved, and as the expectations surrounding supplementary tooling grew more and more sophisticated, a curious thing began to happen. Community values started defining the language development process itself, and tools started being picked on social merits as well as technical.
Join Hazel as she takes us through a journey of reflection, drawing on her experiences on the board of the Haskell community, as well as being adjacently involved in Rust. Together we’ll discover what makes a community have that sense of belonging, and why that’s become existential for programming languages.