Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Unoppressive Pizza

Last Wednesday I was invited by a friend (who is a graduate student in electrical engineering, which involves lots of exciting math) to go to a computer science pizza party. Sadly, the pizza was not complimentary and it wasn't much of a party (lots of people standing around in a small room) but I had a pleasant time nonetheless. CS pizza parties used to feature something known as "Sexist Pizza" in which people with a feminine gender presentation ("women") didn't have to pay for their pizza. The point of this was to attract more of them to the parties in question, presumably in order to facilitate interaction between the two genders (I gather that the idea behind this would be to create intra-CS straight couplings).

Anyway, at the party in question I nommed some pizza and listened to some intriguing conversation between some computer scientists of my acquaintance about various functions of Gmail. One of them was so bold as to ask me what I was doing there and persist with a "But I thought you were in religious studies..." in response to my claim that I was in CS. I think that he saw through me though, because the rest of our exchange went something like:
"No, I used to be but I switched out"
"... Isn't lying a sin?"
"How would I know, I'm not in religious studies..."

I also, in order to make the whole experience more CS-like, asked one of my acquaintances (who knows I'm not in math or CS) which was his favourite programming language. He asked if he needed to have a preference and returned the question. I said that Python was but couldn't give a good reason why. Julia then asked how I felt about Perl, which I was better at answering. Apparently Perl involves lots of dollar signs, which people find objectionable. Exciting!