tim | Sep. 17th, 2014

Don't forget to tweet to #lambda4ada when you donate! Suggested tweet, though you're encouraged to use your own words:

I donated to @adainitiative b/c I want @TheOfficialACM events to announce their anti-harassment policy. https://supportada.org?campaign=lambda #lambda4ada

So far, the following people from the functional programming community have donated to the challenge, as well as a number of anonymous donors. If your name appears here, it's because you checked the box that says it's okay for TAI to share your name, for which I thank you as well -- knowing who has donated so far makes it easier for other people to decide whether to donate. If you want to be as cool as these folks, then donate and (optionally) tweet about it!

In addition, I made an additional matching donation of $64 (on top of my usual $80/month), and my fellow challenge organizers Adam Foltzer, Clément Delafargue, and Chung-chieh Shan have donated as well. If your name doesn't appear here, you want it to, and you donated between September 1 and 3:00 PM Pacific Time on September 17, email me at catamorphism at gmail and I'll add it. (If you donated after that, don't worry, I'll be doing more thanks posts!)

In alphabetical order by first name:

Aaron Levin / Weird Canada
Alejandro Cabrera
Ben Blum
Bethany Lister
Carlo Angiuli
Chris Martens
Colin Barrett
Colin Gourlay
Dan
Dan Peebles
Daniel Ross
David Van Horn
Dylan Thurston
Edward Kmett
Florent Becker
J. Ian Johnson
Jon Sterling
Joshua Dunfield
Lars Hupel
Manuel Chakravarty
Pat Hickey
Prabhakar Ragde
Wouter Swierstra

Thanks as well to everybody else who has tweeted under #lambda4ada so far! Keep it up.

To all of you on this list, as well as to the donors who preferred not to be named: thank you! And if you haven't yet donated, you still have until Friday, September 19 at 5 PM for your donation to count towards the challenge. We have more than satisfied our initial $4096 goal, and are trying to raise $8192 by Friday. [Edit: We have raised $8678 and are now aiming for $10,000 before the end of business, Pacific time, on Friday!] What's more, if we raise $16,384, then the four of us will record a version of "There's No Type Class Like Show Type Class" and share it with the world. We appreciate your past and incoming donations, tweets, and blog posts!

In my initial challenge post, I left the connection between functional programming and the Ada Initiative's mission a bit unclear. I suspected that most people who would already be inclined to listen would already understand what TAI has to do with helping bring more people into functional programming and use their talents fruitfully there.

But on the Haskell subreddit, where a Redditor by the name of LeCoqUser (in reference to the Coq proof assistant, of course) linked to my initial post, one person wrote: "I cannot fathom what this has to do with Haskell or functional programming..." I'm going to give this person the benefit of the doubt and assume they really meant, "What does this have to do with Haskell or functional programming?", and were simply applying a principle that many people like me -- who were socialized by Usenet -- learned: "If you want to know the answer to something, never just ask a question; make a false statement that's designed to get people to answer your real question by correcting you."

And it worked! Here's what I wrote on Reddit. My comment was specific to Haskell because it was on the Haskell subreddit (it's also the community I know the best), but I think what follows applies to all other functional programming language communities too.

Just to clarify why it's on-topic, I'd like to say a little bit more about what the Ada Initiative (TAI) does and how it helps the Haskell community:

As has been noted, TAI helps conferences and meetups develop codes of conduct. The ACM anti-harassment policy, which applies to ICFP and other conferences and workshops related to Haskell, is based on TAI's model code of conduct.
TAI leads anti-impostor-syndrome workshops for women who want to enter technology. As I tried to explain in my blog post, impostor syndrome is a structural barrier to getting involved in functional programming for many people who otherwise would be interested. Impostor syndrome disproportionally affects women. By helping fight impostor syndrome, one woman at a time, TAI is creating more potential members of the Haskell community.
TAI runs AdaCamp, which has a potentially life-changing effect as self-reported by many of the women who have participated -- in terms of building the confidence necessary to participate in tech as a career software developer and/or open-source volunteer. Again, this means more potential Haskell programmers -- there's no sense in losing half the potential audience before they even start.
TAI runs Ally Skills workshops, which help men who want to make their tech communities safer for women -- including, I like to think, most of the men reading this -- put their intent into action.

Hopefully that clarifies things, and I hope folks from Reddit will help us reach our new goal of ~~$8192~~ $10,000! Money talks, and the fact that we've already raised ~~$4320~~ ~~[edit: $5557]~~ [edit: $8678] from functional programmers in less than ~~a day [edit: two days]~~ [edit: three days] says to me that most of us recognize that TAI's work is both crucial, and not being done by any comparable organization.

Don't forget to tweet to #lambda4ada when you donate! Suggested tweet, though you're encouraged to use your own words:

I donated to @adainitiative b/c I want @TheOfficialACM events to announce their anti-harassment policy. https://supportada.org?campaign=lambda #lambda4ada

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Tim's journal

Taking metaphors too far since 1995

Sep. 17th, 2014

Functional Programming Community Challenge, day 2! Thanks to the first round of donors.

"What does the Ada Initiative have to do with functional programming, anyway?"

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