On human attributes(gender + race) and entitlement disease

Just want to key in my thoughts or do a brain.Flush() on how human attributes and entitlement disease impacting the programming world.

1. Saw two online posts yesterday that will probably influence or shape the future of Golang community. First is about a female only Golang meetup and second is a highlight about Golang being dominated by Chinese.

2. Let us explore the first post. I stumbled upon a Golang meet up group ( http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Go ) with the joining condition of being a female either publicly or privately and having some interest in Go. The founder of this meetup lamented that she is sad because she is the only female around after attending Golang events for 2 years and want to do something about it. She took action by forming a meetup to scratch her own itch. This is similar to the Rails Girls movement.

3. Being a husband, brother and son, I understand the females need to have their own girls time together. I'm fine with that as long it doesn't become an entitlement movement - such as demanding certain packages or programming language name to be named after a woman.

4. Now, to the second post. This is about a flawed opinion that Golang is being dominated by Chinese because Go is popular in China, HongKong and Singapore. (see https://www.facebook.com/groups/206770519471402/465070086974776 )

   

5. As a person/earthling/Malaysian of Chinese descent that doesn't know how to read Chinese language in full capacity(think of me as a burning CD-ROM being ejected half-way), I found the post to be mind boggling(kepala pusing in Malaysia) initially. However, as the conversation goes, I found out that the commenter just want to highlight that most of the documentation he came across is ... err... written in Chinese and this is turning him off. He also assumed that this trend (Chinese documentation) will push people away from learning Golang and caused Golang's ranking in TioBE to drop.

6. Living in Malaysia and having worked in different countries. I understand where he is coming from. There are times, when a person feel isolated because ...... everyone is conversing in a language that you don't understand. For examples :

   • A Kenyan within a group of Portugese speaking Brazilians.

   • A Malay within a group of Chinese of speaking programmers.

   • English speaking tourist asking for help in Paris.

   • A female within a group of male programmers making sexiest comments or

   • A male within a group of female shoppers browsing at the female section of the shopping mall

7. It is a shame that most people are not aware of the impact which having a casual conversation in their native tongues or gender-lingo can actually isolate the lone person within the group. However, what I'm trying to say here is not about conversation in human language but programming language in particular.

8. Programming languages have a unique property. They can transcend(go beyond) gender, race and human languages. A person or a technically inclined person learning a new programming language should not find it hard to comprehend it because most of syntax is in English or similar to maths.

9. So what can YOU do about this? Simple. First, ditch the entitlement disease within the community or yourself. Be the change yourself, scratch your own itch and others will follow if the change you initiated is worthy. Imagine what would happen if :

   • Alan Turing demanded that the Nazis to use English and don't encrypt their radio messages with Enigma.

   • Chinese lamented Golang documentation is written in English and don't take the effort to translate the docs to Chinese language.

   • Matz - Ruby creator - decided to force everyone learning Ruby to use Japanese only in their codes.

   • Drink Kool-Aid and follow everyone to use punch card or assembly language and do nothing about it - like creating high level programming languages.

   • Give up learning Golang because the documentations you found were not written in the language that you understand.

   • Google stick with existing programming languages and decided not to create Golang to solve their internal problems.

10. Some examples that I can pluck from my mind now about those that DO something about their situations.

    • An American woman decided to launch a Go meetup group for women. ( http://meetup.com/Women-Who-Go )

    • A Korean asked me for permission to use tutorials on Socketloop.com for her/his upcoming Golang Korean books. Told him/her to feel free to use the code examples.

    • A Malay guy decided to start a tech blog for the benefits of his community ( http://amanz.my/ )

    • A Chinese guy decided to create a Golang framework and share it with the rest of the world. He asked for help to translate his work into English, Japanese, Russians and other languages. ( see https://github.com/beego/beedoc )

11. The question I want to leave you with is ..... which category you want to be in? The one with entitlement disease or the one that will become change agent themselves.