Clojurians Log v2

The 10-day roll-off window we now have for Slack is particularly bad when it affects private messages, which, of course, aren’t publicly logged anywhere. Those tend to be of lower volume, and, partially because of that, tend to have value over longer time frames (scrolling back to see a PM from two weeks ago is a very common use case for me).

I’ve gotten to where I record particularly interesting private messages knowing that they’re basically just a few steps away from a Snapchat session.

not a general solution, but sometimes useful - starred messages get preserved past the roll-off window, though only in the starred-messages list, not the originating chat stream

https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/off-topic/p1455164758000665

@polymeris: Can you speak to this and what we should be doing as community leaders?

I think it is critical that we create an environment that is all-inclusive and has no bias of any kind whatsoever.

Oh, I am no expert, @meow, I just stumbled upon the article and wanted to share, because I thought it was interesting and could provoke some discussion. The TL;DR is women on github get their pull requests accepted more often than men, unless they are identifiable as women (female profile picture or female-sounding nick)

Why does that happen?

I don’t exactly know, but it seems to happen to both. The acceptance rate for men also drops when their gender is identifiable,

And you have to be careful

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

Statistics is very hard after all

Yeah

I would evaluate the code. I don't care who wrote it. If a dog could fetch a stick and write code I would accept it. Why not?

Same here

Tomek likes to be on the edge apparently with his profile pic.

That statistic is not included!

The first part... women having their pull request accepted more often, might be because they tend to be more careful, more risk-adverse, as the authors say. Their argument to dismiss that is that women's PR's are longer, but I am not convinced that a longer PR is necessary a riskier one.

Or it might be survivorship bias.

There are very few women active on Clojurians that I am aware of and I don't know why that is.

Well, there's already precious little Clojurians

4,924 as of right now.

So it's not surprising there will be also little women if the percentage of female participation in programming is small.

Sure

But comparing to droves of Java programmers

That's little

I've tried to engage a few to help us here and none have.

As jaen said, statistics are hard, but wonder how we compare in % women to other communities?

E.g. OSS seems to have lower female participation rates than proprietary

In a way, to me it is a non-issue in that I will interact with and accept code from anyone: gender, race, sexual orientation, economic status, etc.

All those things are irrelevant to me. It's all about the code. The code should speak for itself. Code has no ego, neither should we.

Likewise, if I think code sucks, mine or someone else's, I'm going to be open and honest in my criticisms.

Not everyone can handle that and some will think I'm rude or an ass.

¯\(ツ)/¯

You might be unbiased (or not notice your own biases, that's how they work), but if the community in general is hostile towards women, it's potentially turning down contributors.

See page 19: http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf

"Interestingly more than 4/5 of the male respondents think that gender does not play a role."

@meow: also, in what way on edge? ; d

I thought you were a girl when I first started noticing you here.

Your avatar and nick look somewhat female

That same report says 1.5% female participation in OSS vs. 28% in proprietary software. Do we at least have 1.5%... or is it just 0%?

So you can be the judge Tomek. Do I treat you any differently now that I know you are male versus when we first started chatting and I thought you were female?

Arharhar. That's Jade from Homestuck, just like this drawing of her. And funnily enough Jaen is actually male in origin; I used to write and conlang a lot when I was younger and when you're about 12 years old you think "Jaen-ni-rin" is a pretty good name for a mage that wants to save his people from certain doom, only to be the unwitting agent of it : V

Anyway, I wouldn't know when you actually realised that ; d

But as an anecdote I can tell I was surprised to see that someone with Polish female name for a nick joined #C03S1L9DN recently. And it was like a double wow because we have precious little functional programmers in Poland, so what are the chances P ;

(Disclaimer: I feel uncomfortable being a man talking about this so I desperately hope I’m doing a good job... 🤦) I think removing the patriarchy from gatekeepers is only 1 part. There’s also removing the patriarchy that twists the whole institution. (What does “macho he-man programming” connote? Dry masochistic technical mastery? How about free creative offbeat drafts?) I think patriarchal cultures are full of people afraid to admit what they really do to be effective, as opposed to the rigorous professionalism they project. With reviewers who also play a subtle policing role that keeps people in line. (I have some examples & lit in mind, but have to run for the moment. I hope what I said was fairly clear.)

> patriarchy Welp, someone said the magic word : X

Haha, yeah “sexism,” “racism” and “bias” are such awful neutral terms. “Male supremacy” doesn’t let me lie to myself. :simple_smile:

A friend at uSwitch (that Clojure company) told me they “tried” to hire women but IIRC failed. (Of course, I don’t know the whole story.) How creative would they get if they were fired for completely failing to meet this company goal? I did diversity work in a way more hostile workplace, where we had to work secretly, and there’s just sooo many tactics. We had some successes.

BTW if our culture weren’t so blinded by racism, everyone would know the Middle East has great ideas on gender equality (and democracy): Rojava. US ally and the most effective ground force against ISIS. Some ways they ensure it: every position at every gov’t level has one female & one male (2 co-governors, 2 co-mayors, etc); all 6,000 police officers are elected and receive two weeks feminist training before getting a weapon. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/a-dream-of-utopia-in-hell.html And they’re under daily attack from ISIS. Most Clojure companies don’t have that problem. How many have intersectional feminism classes, if they’re so serious about diversity?

(Sorry for the walls of text. I'll be quiet now.)

> Intersectional feminism. Argh, another magic word : X Really, there's no need to try sounding like a Harry Potter wizard : V

@jaen I think those kinds of comments might not be very helpful and might be one reason why people decide not to participate in a conversation 😉

@maria: Sorry, I'm usually not that acerbic, maybe it's a combination of little sleep, too much coffee and engineering thesis deadline that's a day past. If not that I would probably just sigh internally at those remarks, which I feel are not very helpful either, and carry on with whatever I was doing instead of letting myself be slightly sarcastic.

But I very much disagree with treating that as foregone conclusion as he did.

@jaen It’s completely fine to disagree with someone, just depends on the way you do it. And everyone has bad days, I understand that. Maybe next time instead of dropping those sarcastic comments, you could directly tell @tjg why you disagree with him 😉

@tjg: I would like to hear more of your thoughts. Let's continue to discuss on #C0JBGNVS5 if you'd like.

@jaen: Please join us if you'd like. Everyone is welcome.

@maria: Thank you for participating here.

@maria: yes, you've certainly got a point here, I agree. Like I said - I'm sorry; I'm usually not that way even if I disagree with someone (cf. https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004#note-460). It's probably just me being stretched thin mentally (in the way butter scraped over too much bread is) at the moment. Which, compounded with @tjg's tone of phrasing emotional accusations as objective truths (that, I want to reiterate, is not helpful either), kind of ticked me off a bit and made me a bit grumpy. Should have probably found a somewhat better way to phrase that, but I'm not sure how well would that go anyway, considering how contentious those topics are these days. That said while I certainly would love to elaborate more, I hardly have time right now to launch into a long-winded diatribe why I think regarding "patriarchy is the devil" as a foregone conclusion and "third-wave feminism" as a saviour is - in my opinion of course - ridiculous, even though I agree with your sentiment of explaining why one disagrees over being sarcastic. I'm so behind on editing my thesis I'll probably get no sleep today and writing this to explain myself clearly and (hopefully) tactfully took too long already. And yes, should have done my thesis waaaay earlier… Well, at least it's in Clojure…

Anyway… I'm back to trying to force LaTeX stick captions to listings the way I want them to.

@meow: maybe if I didn't have to time-travel to finish my thesis I would consider it. Right now I'm trying to find an infinitely long cylinder to build a Tipler's time machine : V

@jaen: We all make mistakes. I've made more than my fair share. Your thesis is import. Go focus on it and get some sleep as well. This will all be here when you return. You know I like you and respect you and value your contributions to the community. You will be welcome when you return. Namaste, my friend.

a) don't exaggerate, really; there's nothing to respect here, b) if I sleep, I'll loose time, not an option.

@jaen: Please don't mischaracterize my compliments and please learn to accept them - I don't give them out for free - they are earned.

You are overtired and not yourself.

Oh no, not accepting compliments is actually very much myself. I usually hate those, because no matter the praise I know how much inadequate I am compared to someone like, say Simon Peyton Jones or Philip Wadler or Edwin Brady, and how I will stay that way : V

Getting worked up on the Internet? Yeah, probably not myself though.

Stop comparing yourself to others - that's self-destructive. Just be the best version of yourself. That's plenty good enough to earn praise. And, then, when earned praise is given, the correct and polite response is "Thank you."

Slack should have threads or something to follow tangents of the conversation