"PHP sucks" and contempt culture

[zen at freedbms.net (Zenaan Harkness)]

Well not PHP exactly, that's just an example of course - Aurynn Shaw
does a fine job on the topic, worthy of any tech belittler, not just
language superiority trips...




Contempt Culture
http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture

So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities
I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other
languages sucked, the people using them were losers or stupid, if they
would just use a real language, such as the one we used, everything
would just be better.

Right?

This sort of culturally-encoded language was really prevalent around
condemning PHP and Java. Developers in these languages were actively
referred to as less competent than developers in the other, more blessed
languages.

And at the time, as a new developer, I internalised this pretty heavily.
The language I was in was blessed, obviously, not because I was using it
but because it was better designed than a language like PHP, less wordy
and annoying than Java, more flexible than many other options.

It didnâ??t matter that it was (and remains) difficult to read, it was
that we were better for using it.

I repeated this pattern for a really long time, and as I learned new
languages and patterns Iâ??d repeat the same behaviour in those new
environments. I was almost certainly not that fun to be around, a
microcosm of the broader unpleasantness in tech.

At least, until I got called on it.
â??Have you thought aboutâ?¦â??

Iâ??d been making critical comments about PHP the language, and PHP
developers, nothing more than standard â??PHP sucksâ?? sort of language. The
same thing Iâ??d been doing, and supported in doing, for years.

Getting called out was hard, and I was asked to consider who and what I
was criticising. I was able to access a very specific version of the
self-taught narrative, where I used â??realâ?? programming languages and had
â??realâ?? passion and drive, the result of which was that I fit the early
hacker archetypes and was permitted status - as long as I participated
in gate keeping. My self-taught narrative is not other peoplesâ??
self-taught narrative, and I was very firmly reminded of that. Other
self-taught narratives, such as starting with Wordpress-based design
backgrounds and moving from more simple themes to more complex themes
where PHP knowledge is required, to plugin development is a completely
valid narrative, but a path that is predominately for women.

This was a bombshell. Iâ??d been loudly criticising the language and,
through that criticism, implying that people using the language werenâ??t
as good me, werenâ??t good programmers. And suddenly I was thinking about
all the myriad ways that someone with that background would feel othered
by me, like they didnâ??t belong and werenâ??t welcome in the communities I
was a part of.

All of the ways in which I was actively participating in the exclusion
of women from STEM.
Intent is Not Magic1

Of course, I hadnâ??t intended to do any of these things, but as I came to
realise, it doesnâ??t matter what I intended to do, what matters is that I
did it and that it had real repercussions.

I intended to make fun of a language, the repercussion is that people
from minority backgrounds wouldnâ??t want to talk to me about the things
theyâ??d done in that language, they wouldnâ??t feel safe talking about
their achievements and exploits.

And why would they feel safe? If they say what they use, we as a culture
laugh at their choice. We tell them they should know better, tell them
that itâ??s a horrible tool. Tell them that they are wrong. We ignore the
achievement and focus exclusively on how it was reached, on how much
better we are because we had access to narratives that the broader
culture had already deemed more real.

Not better narratives or better tools, just more accepted, more
permitted, more discriminatory.
Contempt Currency

I was taught to be contemptuous of the non-blessed narratives, and I was
taught to pay for my continued access to the technical communities
through perpetuating that contempt. I was taught to have an elevated
sense of self-worth, driven by the elitism baked into the hacker ethos
as I learned to program. By adopting the same patterns that other, more
knowledgable people expressed I could feel more credible, more like a
real part of the community, more like I belonged.

I bought my sense of belonging, with contempt, and paid for it with
contempt and exclusionary behaviour.

And now, I realise how much of it is an anxiety response. What if I
chose the wrong thing? What if other people judge me for my choices and
assert that my hard-earned skills actually arenâ??t worth anything?

What if people find out Iâ??m a fraud?

By perpetuating a culture of contempt as the means of acquiring
credibility, I was able to avoid these difficult, introspective
questions. We donâ??t have to look at how weâ??re harming other people who
want in, donâ??t have to acknowledge the niggling little voice in the back
of our head asking are you good enough. It wasnâ??t me that was wrong, it
was them.

Instead, I was taught to use emotional weaponry to silence and exclude
others, resulting in the remaining voices being the most toxic and
exclusionary, the most able to tolerate toxicity and exclusionary
attitudes.

This pattern is common in tech, from extremely high-profile projects
like the Linux kernel to the ongoing os/language/editor â??warsâ?? to the
vile reactionary attitudes towards the introduction of Codes of Conduct,
to any developers making disparaging comments about other peoplesâ??
ability to code, and the growing contempt around people whose first or
primary language is JavaScript.
And now

This culture has ramifications. PHP communities, for example, have
lacked access to the development of DevOps tooling, the use of PHP is
widely derided as being insecure by default, are they are widely mocked
for being an â??objectively bad language.â??

Yet people make their livings working with PHP, deploying PHP, trying to
secure PHP. Donâ??t they deserve the help that we received, the help of
good practises and security-first development? These people who canâ??t
improve their work because we wonâ??t work with them and drive them away
from our communities with mockery and spite.

And then they engineer things on their own, because they still need
these tools, and we have the gall to ask why they didnâ??t use these other
tools.

Tools that we mocked them for asking about, telling them to get a real
language, to rewrite their entire app, to rebuild from scratch because
their particular path was not blessed enough.

Because we were the problematic elements.
Iâ??m Tired of This

Itâ??s 2015, and I saw a presenter at a Python conference make fun of
Java. How would that feel to people trying to move from Java into
something else? I wouldnâ??t feel welcome, and Iâ??d have learned that the
idea that the Python community is welcoming wasnâ??t true.

Iâ??m tired of calling people out again and again for dumping on PHP.

Iâ??m tired of people dumping on Windows, that most popular operating
system, because itâ??s not what we choose to use, tired of the fact that
we donâ??t make it easy to use our tools and teach them how to move, when
theyâ??re ready.

Instead, we lecture and dismiss and heap scorn upon them. We donâ??t
reinforce our communities with respect or a sense of achievement, but
with shame and contempt and awfulness. We exclude people.

Iâ??ve excluded people. Directly, me. I have to own up to that and deal
with it.

We excluded people. Directly. All of us. Even if we didnâ??t intend to, it
does not matter. We make fun of the things others care about, make them
feel small, make them feel like their achievements didnâ??t matter. Make
them feel like theyâ??re not welcome.
What can we Do?

SHUT. UP.

No, really, cut it out. If you need to make fun of a language, do it
with your own language, inside your own community. JavaScript is really
good at this, because theyâ??re trying to help people write better code
within JavaScript.

Do it around friends only, and acknowledge that itâ??s extremely
problematic that youâ??re doing it at all.

Find some amazing project to celebrate in a language youâ??re contemptuous
of.

Go to meetups of what you despise. Say you donâ??t know anything, and see
how welcoming they are to new people. See what they say, what they do,
and ask if youâ??d be as welcoming to them when they come to your meetups.

Work to change your community. Ask people who try to pay for their
membership in contempt to stop, or to leave. Make it unacceptable to use
these behaviours as a means of obtaining social wealth.

The best advice we give programmers is to leave things better than how
they started. We do it with code, why donâ??t we do it with communities?
Why donâ??t we do it with people, colleagues, friends?

Ask why itâ??s okay to do these things in your community, and leave things
better than when you started.

    Intent is magic!â?©
    http://www.shakesville.com/2011/12/harmful-communication-part-one-intent.html