It's not surprising that numerals in Arabic script (or other human scripts) aren't handled in most languages. Languages are developed by people for some community. If a language is developed in an American-English community for developers within its context, what is their purpose for adding other communities?<p>We're seeing the network effect in action. Programming languages influenced by other perspectives will need to interoperate with operating systems written in the dominant paradigm (C, assembler that assumes English opcodes and ASCII - English hexadecimal) until that other perspective writes all the foundational software. That's quite expensive in time and money.<p>As far as feminism is concerned, it's not clear that it's a _feminist_ perspective that's helpful, as opposed to _being thoughtful about other people's experience_. Retaining the contributions of women to the state of the art is necessary, for sure, and that can affect the entrance and treatment of women in the field.