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Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship
Under the heading, "Diversity Matters!" the website for the PHP Central Europe developer conference (PHP.CE) says, "PHP Central Europe Conference is committed to creating a conference that is as inclusive as possible."
Over the weekend, organizers of the conference, which had been scheduled for October 4-6 in Dresden, Germany, ended the event evermore after two scheduled speakers issued public statements that they would not be attending this year, citing concerns about the lack of diversity.
PHP.CE on Saturday posted a note on its website, stating "The conference has been cancelled and won't be continued*. Sorry for the inconvenience."
The asterisk points to three online posts as the reason for the decision. The first, a July 17 Tweet from Karl Hughes, CTO of educational consultancy The Graide Network, chastises the conference for a speaker list made up entirely of white men.
You can see how it was in 2018, including the list of speakers, presentation schedule, and a 9m41s "after-movie".
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday August 28 2019, @02:15PM (3 children)
That is a kind of interesting technical discussion in that the logical extension of "conferences must be banned because white males" will be around 2020 or 2025 or so, it'll be a hate crime to program in anything other than Ruby (which came from Japan, originally).
When the anti-white purge hits programming language selection it'll be interesting to watch. There don't seem to be any options out there except Ruby. Probably would be a wise future-proofing exercise to learn Ruby at this time. For non-ruby users, its basically Perl done OO to the core, or what Perl 6 should have been.
When its a hate crime to use a programming language designed by a white male, there's not going to be many options. Its like the inherent racism of living in a city with working civil engineering systems, there not much out there once the "undesirables" are crossed off the list.
Note that something like Perl's Lingua::Romana::Perligata translator filter or the 6 million localized variations on Pascal and Logo recompiled to use local language keywords are not really "non-white" programming languages.
If we're expunging the conferences for racist reasons today, we're gonna expunge the languages themselves soon, for future proofing reasons its interesting to consider the near future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @02:58PM (1 child)
The notion of banning languages invented by white people sounds sort of stupid, but it's the same logic that the alt-left uses when it throws out every good idea about the US Constitution in exchange for a brand of authoritarianism because the drafters were a bunch of white men. For that matter, how long until human languages (English, French, German, Russian, etc.) come under the gun?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @04:38PM
Actually, US Constitution was written by a bunch of white male slavers, who did not wanted to pay taxes to their king. Nothing has changed since.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @03:25PM
IIRC the Ruby guy came under SJW attack some months back. He was able to defend himself, and not get blacklisted, because in Japan the SJWs can't scare anybody yet.