Alive. This moment. Can't guarantee anything, though.
Drinks wine,  beer, whisky, in that order of preference. Loves computers, especially breakdowns of.
Tends, when properly aroused, to smash telephones.
Greta Monach 1978

Jan van Poppel's NRC article on professor Felienne Hermans' oration how "programming languages are not inclusive, far too complex and that they were developed in the US by white Western men" at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), makes me think of the countless female programmers in the Netherlands since the 1940s. To begin with, a brief introduction to a few female programmers with whom I myself have had direct or indirect dealings with over the last 35 years. Three of them are Dutch, the fourth is American. For privacy privacy reasons I will avoid most names of people and institutions, except for a few iconic figures.

1. My partner, was a programmer from 1990 until fairly recently. She had many female colleagues at the company where she worked.
programming language: PL1 on mainframes

2. An acquaintance, graduated from university in the 80s. But yes, crisis, so immediately unemployed. She is one of the many who were retrained to become a programmer by the Dutch employment office. The demand for programmers was high in the 80s and 90s.
programming language: the prevalent language at the time

3. Greta Vermeulen (Monach)
programming language: whichever was used in the 60s and 70s at the Institute of Sonology.

4. Elizabeth Rather
programming language: fortran, FORTH since 1971

Computer languages are by and for men?
There is a phenomenon when a new programming language appears. Initial reactions are often positive and much is expected of it. The new programming language scores high on the list of currently used languages. After six months, the situation is different; many users have dropped out. The jubilation has turned into disillusionment. The dropouts are generally men.

When I think of a programming language like Forth, initially developed by "Chuck" Moore, I think primarily of Elizabeth Rather. She has as a second user, strongly advocated the use of this language in industry and universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Many presentations (watch at 12:48), demonstrations, courses and books. But competing with Dennis Rictchie and Ken Thompson, the creators of UNIX and C, Forth's contemporaries, she eventually lost. I was always told it had to do with money.
For the record, this did not end Forth; on the contrary, companies and agencies such as NASA, ESA and Apple used it for various projects. Even today, but an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) often stands in the way.
It is worth mentioning that about 15 years ago I attended a presentation of a Forth system for producing sound in the Waag in Amsterdam. A young woman with a fanatical, passionate presentation, razed traditional programming languages to the ground. No bit of doubt left: go Forth! But as indicated in my first three examples, women, like men, program in all languages, according to personal taste or corporate preferences.

Computers and music.
Or better technology and music, they go together for a very, very long time. Sound is amplitude over time. Music is organized sound. With computers soon to do something with that. 1950s "Jetzt geht's los! On the understanding that it can also be done with coin toss and I Ching, for example.
Composers (men and women) in electroacoustic music often programmed their own work when necessary. In the 1960s and 70s, many of them in the Netherlands, were taught or assisted in programming by Greta Vermeulen at the "Instituut voor Sonologie". In those days it belonged to the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht. Since 1986 the Institute of Sonology has been part of the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. Greta Vermeulen is, or rather WAS, also known as Greta Monach (get your translator to this page). Sadly she is basically forgotten and unknown to many at Sonology these day. It is their loss!

Many women and men in art also do other things. Working with computers can be one of them, but that is often not mentioned on their CV. They are known as composers, poets, musicians, etc. They often forget to mention it themselves. Possibly it was known _at_the_time_ anyway.
But 50 years later it is not! Such omissions can have major consequences. The search engines need help here, so adjust those resumes.

Women need a manual (see the NRC article)
Will never forget how a woman reacted to an interactive sound installation by the collective I am part of. This was specially made for the sound art institution where she worked. She was highly surprised that she immediately understood what she could do with it, aha! We often work improvisationally and investigatively without much concern for how it should be "done". A manual is minimal, the material used is often already a clue and needs little explanation. We are certainly not unique with this approach!
A friend graduated in the early 1980s with a project called "Chemistry from a kitchen cabinet". House, garden and kitchen resources, in chemistry experiments. She certainly inspired me! She, too, later programmed for a while when the demand for programmers was so high, easy enough for her.

Syntax or sex?
That there are women _and_ men dropping out of computer programming due to the use of mainstream languages has always been true. I myself would have given up a long time ago if I had to work with Modula2, C, C++, Python etc. Doesn't fit me. But others (female and male) can get on with it. No problem.
Interactive languages like Logo, Forth and Lisp with completely different syntax and way of working, certainly make a difference. And there is Elizabeth Rather. But also the men who taught me Forth and Lisp.
Syntax and not sex.

Here it is, the de ARRA, the first Dutch digital computer (p. 6). Also see here about female programmers in 1951. Women, late 1930s 20th century, mathematics graduates, or plucked from the HBS (Hogere Burgerschool = a Dutch secondary school), worked in Amsterdam after World War II as programmers developing digital computers. There is a story about these women at the retirement of one of those ARRA people. Lost it unfortunately. I don't know to what extent they were involved in creating the programs and a programming language. What their influence on ALGOL, an early and international programming language, has been is unknown to me. Wikipedia won't help you. Discrediting history, however tempting, may not stand the test of time, as recently demonstrated in an article in Nature. Will have to make do with my (colored) memories and the video mentioned above. That they were called "the girls," you might shrug. But that they were financially disadvantaged compared to their male colleagues for the same work is likely. That was the norm in the Netherlands back then.
Sex!

I do know some women who had to deal with that (and also point it out to me in case I forgot). The "equal pay for men and women" law was only introduced in 1975.

We seem a little further along now, but:
The ARRA women are often forgotten, or more often, people don't know they existed. In the autumn 2022, the Evoluon, once legendary Philips exhibition space, was once again open. Inside, all around, were photographs on display of men and women who meant something scientifically and technically in the 20th century. Mostly American and British, one might rightly ask why? Anyway.
Of course the focus was on the dark-skinned women in the US who did extremely important work with computers in the early 1960s. Fully justified, but if you mention them why not the Dutch women who were active in the development and programming of digital computers? So missed opportunity in the Evoluon. In Eindhoven, near ASML.
No doubt unintended, but the all-in-English poison in higher education did work and not by little.

English (US) oriented computer language a problem?
I myself did have a problem in the 1980s when I was learning to work with computers at Sonology: English. That certainly was not the lingua franca in Europe at that time. Nowadays, 40 years later, you sometimes get the idea that Dutch is difficult even for professors working in the Netherlands.
So is programming always in English? See here some non-English programming languages that have been in use for a while. How do people from China do it? Maybe like this. Also the aforementioned ALGOL, one of the mother languages has a Chinese version.
As for the programming language I use, Forth, I know of the existence of various dialects besides English. For example, there are Dutch, Spanish and Chinese versions. Some of them are a mix of English, Arabic (numbers!) and the local language and or script. Others are published in the local language and script to begin with. An example of such a mix can be found here as Haiku.

Graphic programming languages
It is not new when professors mistakenly think they can do something for a particular group in society. In the 1990s at the Technical University Delft they had the (well-intentioned) idea of helping musicians and composers with music and technology. It was the other way round. A friend and colleague came over from the US to give demonstrations and workshops to interested people at the university. A graphic programming language was used. As indicated earlier, composers of electroacoustic music often programme their own work, some also create the software and systems to do so: Max.

Oops, almost forgot, oh so important:
Of course the computer hackers, whether individually or in groups. Consider, e.g., the Chaos Computer Club. Films and books also feature female programmers within these groups, alongside men. They also act as lonely wolves, again just like their male colleagues. How this relates to reality, I do not know. Could be pure fiction.

RTFM (Read The "Fine" Manual).
Stubbornness or lack of discipline, can result in especially _not_ reading the manual. I am guilty of this, but so is my partner. But not when programming. Creating documentation is just part of the job, regardless of the language used, regardless of sex. There are programmers who find that their code can be read like poetry without any documentation. In that case, their RTFM results in a raised middle finger. Interesting of course that this abbreviation originated almost 100 years ago, before we programmed, long before we had the Internet. The term "bug" by the way, is even older. Regarding programming, here is the fun story of how we get those bugs. Told with great pleasure by computer pioneer Grace Hopper in 1947.

How to proceed.
In gathering Internet support, I came across them. Wow, future assured, BMB con. avant la lettre :-)

Kind regards,
Roelf Toxopeus, member of sound collective BMB con.

Many thanks to those involved for helping out in making this readable in both Dutch and English.