Programming Languages as a Community of Belonging
by Hazel Weakly
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.
Hazel Weakly
she/her
Hazel spends her days working on building out teams of humans as well as the infrastructure, systems, and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. One of her favorite things is watching someone light up when they understand something for the first time, and a goal of hers is to help as many people as possible experience that joy. She also loves swing dancing, both as a leader and a follower.