"By the time I’d learned that Brendan Eich, author of JavaScript, is an anti-vaxxer and was a supporter of a campaign to have same-sex marriage nixed in California, I wasn’t surprised."

"Coding has a gender and race problem, with only about 5% of professionals identifying as women or either Black, African or Caribbean. [...] a community that, while still too narrow in terms of gender and race, is easily the most culturally and neurologically diverse group I’ve ever seen."

The author, as we see here, has a worldview that is c. 2020 progressive-liberal, and a view that he takes to be correct and incontestable. He would not, I imagine, even consider, for example, the possibility that same-sex marriage is wrong or incoherent. I am not attacking the notion of truth, of course. On the contrary. I only wish to highlight that his worldview is a worldview that he takes to be true, which is to say, he takes other worldviews opposed to his to be false, even repugnant and worthy of being stamped out. And one of the worst aspects of liberalism (and most of us are liberals, as the worldview and entailed anthropology governing Western societies is liberalism) is the manner in which it denies it is a worldview in the name of supposedly accommodating all worldviews, which, of course, is incoherent, as liberalism makes definite claims and excludes all those worldviews opposed to liberalism.

Why do I say all this? I say all this to point out that you don't need programming languages to insinuate worldviews. Sure, technology is the expression of a worldview and a product of human culture, and in that sense, can insinuate a worldview that is inferred by the user of the technology. But this is true of lots of things. Science operates the same way. For example, science per se is not metaphysically materialistic, but the materialism of scientists can be insinuated through their scientific work and explanations, which becomes a tradition. So, you can become an unwitting materialist simply by studying science of a certain tradition. (It takes a certain baseline philosophical sophistication or intuition to smell out the insinuations or to take a stance toward science that doesn't translate its models into metaphysical conclusions.)

Perhaps what the author means to explode is the notion that something (in this case, programming languages) can be value-free. And that is true. There is no such thing as a fact-value dichotomy. Even the choice of focusing on one thing over another, to pursue some line of investigation, is shot through with and intrinsically a matter of value judgement, as value is always a matter of ends. "Whom or what do you serve?" is an inescapable question, because every human decision is made in light of the often tacit answer to that question.

How programming languages should understood in this context, I don't know. Certainly, the law of instrument applies. Programmers will often impose their patterns and habits of thought onto other subject matters, intelligence being one good example. Habits are what occurred to me when reading this line:

"The auctioneer explained how, the previous year, Lynn had suffered a severe burnout – common in a field where small actions can have massive effects."

What kind of habits are reinforced when programming? What affect do these habits have on our perception of reality? On our practicality? What patterns of thought are encouraged by the practice? What about where one's energies are devoted? Do we divert energy and attention away from other things we should be paying attention to? How about one's motivations? How are these reinforced or shaped? The same can be asked of technology in general. Nothing is neutral. Everything reinforces or weakens some habituation. Everything conditions. The question is: how? We are what we do, what we practice.