Swierstra’s remarks were also potentially alienating to any non-heterosexual men who were present, as they reflected an assumption that he was speaking to an audience of people who found women, and only women, “attractive”. Finally, there is a tacit understanding when one talks about “attractive” women that one is talking about women who have cissexual bodies, are thin, aren’t disabled, and are in a particular, narrow age range. Apparently, so the thinking goes, if you’re a woman and not all of those descriptors apply to you, maybe you shouldn’t think about learning Haskell, as your presence wouldn’t make the Haskell Symposium more attractive (to heterosexual men).

One of the boys

For any women in the Haskell Symposium audience, Prof. Swierstra’s audience might have been an example of a “grunch”. A page on the Geek Feminism Wiki defines a grunch as one of those little moments that just causes all of your illusions of being seen as an equal to fall apart. A moment like that makes you seriously question whether people actually see you as an equal, or they’re just pretending to in order to be polite.

I once experienced a grunch that changed my life, and it happened at another Haskell event. I was an enthusiastic Haskell programmer for years. I always loved Haskell because I could write concise and elegant programs in it. Haskell had better support for abstraction than any other language I knew of, and the concept of levels of abstraction was always one of the things I found really exciting about computer science. Because Haskell is a pure functional language, you can think about your programs and predict what they will do based on logic and math, as opposed to in a language like C, where the ability to mutate implicit state (with an assignment statement) means that seemingly simple programming constructs can be very complicated to understand.

A secondary reason why I liked Haskell was the community. I learned Haskell in a pretty unusual community: an undergraduate research program at a (historically) women’s college, in which both the (six) students and the (two) faculty mentors were exactly evenly balanced, gender-wise. In that program, I started the research—on type-based deforestation—that became my senior thesis and later my master’s thesis. When I attended the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) for the first time, while still an undergrad, I discovered a bigger community. I kept attending ICFP, most years, and began to have a sense that for a few days each year, I could be around people who thought the way I did, and who would accept me as someone who had something to contribute, regardless of what I looked like. The Haskell Symposium (which was called the Haskell Workshop the first time I attended, in 2000) is usually co-located with ICFP. The second ICFP and Haskell Workshop I attended, in 2002, changed my life: I was a second-year Ph.D student at UC Berkeley, and a professor there had told me that functional programming research was dead. I was disheartened, having wanted to work on it. Being at ICFP showed me that not only were there people still interested in functional programming, but also, some of them might be able to show the way to places where I could actually work on it.

A bit later, Shae Erisson invited me to join the #haskell IRC channel on Freenode, where I became a regular for a while. I loved the way that the community—the overlapping groups that would hang out on the IRC channel and at academic conferences—combined intense intellectual work with humor. It didn’t seem to matter who you were, for the most part, as long as you had something to bring to the conversation (or even if you just wanted to lurk and learn). That was different from other subfields of computer science: for example, at Berkeley, the experience of some of the women in the Ph.D program showed that in systems research, for example, women weren’t so likely to be treated as equals.

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