Elm Town 88 – Wonder: Unconscious bias with Felienne Hermans

Felienne Hermans relates her journey in programming—writing The Programmer's Brain , uncovering biases within computing culture & herself, and building the multilingual, gradual-syntax programming language Hedy. We even dip into AI (trigger warning) and dumb phones. Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: elmtown@logisticallyinc.com . Music by Jesse Moore. Edited by Toni Cañete. Recording date: 2025.04.08 Guest Felienne Hermans Show notes [00:00:26] Sponsored by Logistically [00:00:48] Introducing Felienne Hermans Hedy - Textual programming made easy The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans "How to teach programming (and other things)?" at Strange Loop 2019 "A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design" , co-authored with Ari Schlesinger Elm Town 59 – Elm Camp with Katja Mordaunt Code Reading Club The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman [00:04:09] The costs of misconceptions Science Mike [00:09:51] Journey to computer science [00:14:33] Programming culture: challenges and creativity Elm Town 48 – Making Little Games Like Presents with Martin Stewart Elm Town 64 – The network effect with Martin Stewart Advent of Code [00:21:36] Bias and building a multi-lingual programming language Mark Guzdial's blog: Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take [00:28:35] Hedy's gradual syntax Addressing Computing’s Discrimination Problem: A Framework for Anti-Discriminatory Computing by Ari Schlesinger The Will to Change by bell hooks [00:38:12] Programming language community, learning, and valuing hard things [00:47:19] How language design choices affect cognitive load "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki at Strange Loop 2019 Elm Town 58 – Unblocking users with quality software with Tessa Kelly Episode 68: Elm and ADD with Dillon Kearns and Jeroen Engels [00:56:22] History of women in computing "Female Inventors and Narratives of Innovation in Late Twentieth-Century Computing" by Myra Cheng Nathan Ensmenger [01:03:40] Kotodama (言霊): What's in a name? Feeling of Computing 75 • A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans [01:08:49] Switching to a dumb phone [01:16:48] AI "An Age of Hyperabundance" by Laura Preston In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe [01:30:10] Picks Felienne's picks "An Age of Hyperabundance" by Laura Preston Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond by Tamara Kneese Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han Jared's pick The End of This Day's Business by Katharine Burdekin

You can listen to Elm Town 88 – Wonder: Unconscious bias with Felienne Hermans online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Elm Town 88 – Wonder: Unconscious bias with Felienne Hermans is an episode from Elm Town by Jared M. Smith.

This episode is 01:44:56 long.

This episode was published on Dec 16, 2025.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Elm Town when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.