https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28366945 thread is vaguely about cancel culture

  • BeamBrain [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This reminds me of a time when a bunch of hackers made a satirical programming language "C Plus Equality" full of sexist and transphobic jokes, and when called out on it, this was their response:

    Nota bene: In light of recent events, we’d like to express our concern as to the blatant hostility some people in the social media have against the original, old-school spirit of playfulness that same call the ‘hacker spirit’. The purpose of this software project is two-fold: one, to explore the implications of ‘feminist-inspired logic’ on computer programming languages; and two, to explore how much ‘hacker playfulness’ we could get out of this process. However, too many people, it seems, are none the wiser and perceived our project as something that is unabashedly anti-women, some even accusing us of ‘harassing’ women. How could a page so self-evidently playful be sincerely misogynistic is beyond all our comprehension, save for the lament that too many people nowadays lack the ability to understand other people before giving in to knee-jerk reactions of hatred and selfishness. Indeed, we dare say, it is these so-called self-brandished ‘feminists’ who take offence at almost everything that is making females a hard time in the computing industry by perpetuating the stereotype of the eternal victimhood of a female programmer. To this the Feminist Software Foundation is deeply disappointed, and would like to send a pull request to you all to remove that little chip on your shoulder, and enjoy the world a little bit more.