What is with new programming languages with women's names? It seems a bit cringey to me, like the guy in my first-year cs classes who would name variables after his girlfriend.
* JOSS - male - 1966
* Pascal - male - 1970
* Ada - female - 1983
* Perl - both - 1988
* Haskell - male - 1990
* Lua - female - 1993
* Ruby - female - 1995
* Delphi - female - 1995
* Julia - female - 2011
Some caveats apply. Many language names are also surnames, I leave that to future work.
See also: Beryllium
Perl: doesn't strike me as a name at all, and the language name definitely wasn't referencing it (more likely a reference to the shell).
Lua: doesn't strike me as a name either, and the language was named for the moon.
Ruby: is a girl's name, but the language was named for the precious stone.
Delphi: is the name of a city, though it does reference the (female) Oracle of Delphi (the language was designed to make Oracle databases accessible).
Telling their wife that it means 'moon' in Portuguese made it an easy sell.
And no, no problem with me. I just pointed out one reason why people might prefer a female name for a project.
Another valid reason might be because they want to bring some women into the spotlight in what is ofte perceived as a male dominated field.