C Plus Equality C+=

Overview

C Plus Equality is a satirical programming language created by 4chan users in response to a proposal of a feminist programming language published on the humanities and technology site Hastac in December 2013.

Background

On December 11th, 2013, feminist Arielle Schlesinger wrote a blog post for Hastac^[1]about a project aimed at creating a a feminist programming language. On December 13, the article was posted in the /g/ (technology) board on 4chan, along with links to a feminist programming language titled “C Plus Equality” on GitHub^[2] and BitBucket, credited to the parody feminist organization Feminist Software Foundation.

Notable Developments

On December 13th, 2013, the Feminist Software Foundation^[9] website was launched, which contains links to the C Plus Equality source code.

On December 14th, blogger Molly White^[4] published a post about the GitHub page, criticizing the satirical coding language for being misogynistic. On December 14th, the repositories were banned from both GitHub and BitBucket. On December 18th, YouTuber Juliette De Fonteville uploaded a mock promotional video for the satirical “Feminist Software Foundation” (shown below).

On December 19th, C Plus Equality was moved to the Google Code^[5] database. On the same day, Redditor FemSF submitted the new hosting location to the /r/TumblrInAction^[6] subreddit, where it received upwards of 340 up votes and 175 comments in the first eight hours. On the same day, a C Plus Equality interpreter titled “InHERpreter” was uploaded to the Google Code^[7] website. Also on December 19th, C Plus Equality was mirrored on the open source hosting database Gitorious.^[8]