Matthew Butterick wrote on 7/21/19 4:46 PM:
But as was true for a lot of kids like me during that era, computers were a refuge. They never judged me. They rewarded my curiosity.
There's a complementary acceptance component to the microcomputer&online revolutions, which I think are relevant to Racket/tech community inclusiveness...
As people first started to get online, and find social-heavy topical interest circles, it disproportionately attracted people who were diverse in ways that weren't accepted as much in "real life".
For example, in some techie social circles, that we knew of, there were quite a lot of people who were eventually open online about being gay (when that wasn't OK where they lived), or being transgender (before most of society even knew that existed), and it was fine -- whether people were there for the topic/socializing alone, or because they felt drawn to an Island of Misfit Toys themselves.
Right now, most of the world is running software some of those people helped write, when society didn't accept them at the time. And one of them, a person who seemed to have a bit of anxiety, and perhaps was socializing online because of that, turned out to start a groundbreaking technology most of the world is now using. Another one, who was a very nerdy girl who sought out other nerds, has since become a celebrated entrepreneur you've probably heard of. And another woman, who was a serious math nerd, who is currently giving tech industry conference talks on big things. And people all over the world, including at least one who later turned out to be nobility in their original country, but was somewhat restricted due to being female. (Younger people with early online access were often children of university employees or computer industry people, or of wealthy classes who could go all-out on the child's home computer, mixed in with adult computer nerds.) And one child actor would occasionally drop by one group, as a typical nerdy computer kid in real life, before most people could Tweet at celebrities' PR personae. Fortunately, for parochial me, everyone spoke English.
There was also not yet things like Facebook presences (perpetuating primary/high school looks/popularity contests well into adulthood), so we often didn't even know what people looked like, and just took people on the merits of what they said. Which resulted in some funny revelations, like the person you visualized like another stereotypical computer nerd, who turned out to be very conventionally attractive and charismatic (and who, of course, became an executive at a prominent dotcom). Or the exceptionally kind and thoughtful person, who it turned out looked like what one might've thought (with one's real-world prejudices and stereotypes) was some scruffy metalhead. (Which makes me think contemporary social media would be healthier and more beneficial, if people didn't post photos of themselves, compete for "influencer" funding, etc.)
Today, now that I'm in my 40s, it turns out that half of the American techies I socialize with frequently identify as some flavor of conservative -- which I would've found alarming years ago (I identify as very liberal/progressive, in the American sense). One, for example, is very smart and thoughtful, seems like a great family person, and seems implicitly totally comfortable with gay/trans/whatever, but will frequently rant about what he sees as progressive grandstanding in the news. I still don't agree with him on a lot of what's a problem and needs to be said in society right now, and what doesn't, but it turns out that conservatives overall are not so bad.
In pre-"social media" online, we sometimes made mistakes (including inadvertently being very unwelcoming in some ways, including by myself sometimes, I'm still embarrassed to recall), and of course there are always human conflicts and dramas, but we learned a lot about what communities can be, and that a lot of dumb real-world prejudices outside our community exist, and don't have to be that way.
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