I wish I had read this paper by Felienne Hermans and Ari Schlesinger before going to SPLASH.

Felienne’s blog post is worth reading as an introduction, and here’s the stream of her presentation, which I highly recomend -- she's an excellent compelling communicator.

I don't have much to add, beyond a few quotes I felt worthwhile to share:

Coming back to my insider-outsider perspective, I sometimes wonder what we are even researching. What exactly is a programming language for? What does it mean to design a programming language? And I keep coming back the the question: why are women of all colors so under represented in the programming languages community?

The spread-out nature of research on programming languages is problematic, since it prevents the PL community from having a more holistic view of programming language use. We are robbing ourselves of a place for conversations on the different perspectives on the ways people use with programming languages.