Felienne Hermans, creator of the Hedy programming language, uses her own disillusionment with computer science to argue that the field systematically values difficulty over usefulness. She traces this from dismissals of spreadsheets as "not real programming," to Python and nine other top languages rejecting Arabic-Indic numerals as invalid characters, to a feminist-epistemology reading (via the "Glaciers, Gender and Science" paper) that hard-to-reach problems get studied because they make the researcher a hero. She then connects this to the field's unexamined history (von Neumann and the atom bomb, IBM's punch cards for Nazi Germany) and to the LLM hype, arguing that AI inherited its benchmark-everything methodology from decades of chess research. Her closing point: chess computers exist but are barred from human competition, and we could choose the same for programming, writing and art.
- Hermans built Hedy, a localised, open-source teaching language now supporting 71 languages, after being told for years that her spreadsheet research was "not real programming" despite demonstrating spreadsheet formulas are Turing complete.
- Arabic-Indic numerals, used by roughly 300 million people, fail in the entire TIOBE top 10 — Python calls them an invalid character, Java an "illegal non-ASCII digit," C# just "build failed" — and only SQL accepted them.
- At the SPLASH conference she was asked "why don't they just learn English?", and "why was that hard?" — questions that revealed the community cares about technical difficulty, not who gets included.
- The 2016 paper "Glaciers, Gender and Science" gave her the frame: high mountain glaciers are over-sampled relative to accessible rural ones because climbing the mountain makes you the hero of the story — the same dynamic that makes Haskell and C++ prestigious and spreadsheets, PHP and JavaScript disposable.
- In this frame, making something easier is seen as taking away value, and simple activities have to be dressed up as complex systems to be acceptable — "asking people what they need" becomes requirements engineering, and, she argues uncomfortably to a DDD audience, event storming and ubiquitous language.
- A 2017 paper found the strongest predictor of *not* studying computer science is caring about social change, which she says leaves a field populated almost entirely by people who love complexity — hence "programming is to make programmers happy and proud."
- The field suppresses its own history: von Neumann calculated the detonation height for maximum civilian casualties and still has an IEEE medal named after him; IBM's Thomas J. Watson was decorated by Nazi Germany in 1937 for selling 1.5 billion punch cards a year used to catalogue Jewish ancestry.
- Citing Nathan Ensmenger, chess was the "Drosophila of AI" — an easily formalised true/false problem whose benchmarking methodology was later transplanted onto art and language, where good and bad can't be measured that way.
- Invoking Peter Naur's 1984 theory-building paper, she argues we may have artificial intelligence but not artificial intellectual activity: an LLM cannot hold a consistent model and defend why it implemented something a particular way.
- When she asked the audience to raise hands if their software makes the world better, only a fraction did — so even if LLMs speed up software production, they are only accelerating an unimproved end.
The single analogy the whole talk turns on — how prestige, not usefulness, decides which data gets collected and which programming work gets respected.
You know what you can do after you climb the high mountain? You can climb down the high mountain and then you can go to the pub with your friends... 'I climbed the high mountain, and it was so cold and high, but I did it for science.' And your friends are like, 'Yay, hero.'
A concrete, disarming counterexample to AI inevitability that reframes the whole LLM debate as a choice rather than a fate.
Still today, if you are playing chess with a friend and they go to the bathroom and you take your phone to look up the next move, this will destroy your friendship... That is an interesting notion, right? That something can exist, but we can still choose not to use it.
Having walked around in this field for 25 years, I think the sad answer is that programming is to make programmers happy, and programming is to make programmers proud.
Maybe we have artificial intelligence, but certainly I would say we don't have artificial intellectual activity.
The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make... we could just as easily make it different.