The upshot is you only a dozen women need to get involved to achieve gender parity.

I think that the how willing we are to accept the transience of something we have created often ties in with how much time and effort we invested in creating it, and, also how much time and effort would be involved in recreating something similar.

A program is generally expression of one or more ideas, e.g. sed is an instance of the idea of a simple line editor built around regular expressions. Expressing that idea is easy, but writing a sed implementation would take a long time. There are a bunch of edge cases for example that usually only become apparent once you try and use a tool for real work.

Haskell is an interesting case here: it seems that in the case of Haskell the ideas are a lot more complex than the code itself. Once you understand e.g. functors you realise they are a super simple concept and can be implemented in a few lines of C++ templates or whatever else. So the value of the code of an implementation of a type system supporting functors is quite low, but the actual idea is super complex (at least to me).

Where I’m going with this is that in music it’s very common to improvise. Unless you’re recording the whole time, this is quite a similar activity to writing code and throwing it away once it’s been run. And just like when writing code, even though you jammed for an hour and coudn’t reproduce a single minute of it note for note, a whole bunch of ideas will have been spinning around your head and developing and maybe some of them will stick with you and you’ll turn them into structured tunes and record them, or just use them as a starting point for future work.

My attitude to programming has developed along the same lines (it took a long time to get there). The goal is to develop whatever idea / whatever need is at the heart of what I’m doing as fast as possible. Later on it can be tested, structured, formalised etc. but first I’d rather discover if the approach will actually work at all.

So, I think the act of composing a piece of music out from a basic idea and the act of testing, debugging and making a program user-friendly and reliable are kind of related. And this kind of informs my opinion on free jazz :)

I saw your talk on EP, and the demo on Overtone. In a musical performance the only thing that matters is that of interpretation (ερμηνεία in greek language, unfortunately there is a gap in translation. In Oxford dictionary type ‘interpret’, and see 1.second bullet and 2), and this has nothing to do with ‘busy-ness’.

The great Greek poet K. Kavafis was trying to show that, by saying for polytropos Odysseus in few words that, ‘only the journey matters’ (see poem:
Ithaca).

We are trying to communicate to each other using both the nowadays lingua franca, the English language. You are a native British speaker and I am a native greek speaker. When you say ‘science’, you refer to ‘pure knowledge’. When I say ‘science’, I refer to ‘επιστήμη’, meaning ‘standing above’. In a sense, ‘επιστήμη’ is related to empirical knowledge, while at the same time this is not excluding theory and logical knowledge.

To conclude, for sure powerful tools and methods, like yours Emacs Live and Overtone, are welcome in the process of evolution and actually these are our drivers into this journey. But we all have to be aware of how we are using them, or communicating them if you would like. Finally, AFAIK business was never immediately related with the foundations of art & science.

I suspect a big part of the problem may be women getting cut out at early stages of getting involved in the practice/community. Plenty’s been written over the years about forces that socialize women away from computer science. And the music / visuals / club scene’s problems with sexism are fairly notorious But being a female coding-artist seems to complicate things exponentially. Female programmers often assume you’re a graphic designer trying to pretend to be a programmer. Male coding-artists often assume there’s a guy behind the curtain doing the coding. And all sorts of people get caught up in the circular perception that if a woman did it, there can’t be much to it. (We can see this one all the way back to Eniac, where the programmers were virtually all women, and programming was considered clerical work. Once men returned from WWII in large numbers, they started to fill programming jobs and it suddenly morphed into “man’s work.”)

This last point – devaluing the work that women are doing – is a problem that comes up all over the place. As a professor teaching algorithmically-generated digital media, I’ve observed that sometimes women students will approach a broad topic differently than men – from content to technical approach. During crits, there’s a tendency for their peers to see the men’s approach – which is often more overtly about technology (I could write another tome about why I think that is) – as more substantive than the women’s. But it’s not more substantive, it’s just more overtly about technology.

So back to conferences: are the conferences failing to find women to invite? Or are the bigger problems a) women being discouraged at early stages of participation in the field and b) women not being recognized as doing work that is relevant to “the field” because the field has been defined in a way that devalues or excludes the work that women are doing?

Again, these are general thoughts not really based on much experience of the topics at hand, but with the idea that some of what I’ve observed over several centuries as a female coding-artist/professor might help shed some light.