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Comment by gwn7 | Hacker News Reader

Off topic: Is it just me or are there any others who find naming programming languages with women's names a bit weird?

Julia, Janet, Eve...

I understand the guy referring to his car as his "girlfriend" and give it a women's name. I just can't feel the same about tech.

I guess this may be the nerd's way of immortalizing their sweetheart, but if I was a woman I'd rather prefer to be a car and not a programming language.

A programming language doesn't feel much anthropomorphizable to me, let alone lady-like.

Women, what do you think?

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Not named after a woman (or rather, named after not-a-woman): https://github.com/janet-lang/janet#why-is-it-called-janet

>not-a-woman

given that the character of the show in question is an archetypal secretary arguing it's not a woman is a fairly big stretch. Not only is it a woman, it's a woman embodying a female stereotype, (in line with the purpose of the language, being an easy helper), and the 60s art deco woman's magazine style logo

Can’t decide if “if it looks like a female secretary then it’s a woman” is progressive or backwards.

I suppose that depends on whether you think women should be doomed to the role but it takes some extraordinary imagination to pretend the stereotype doesn't exist, or that one gets around it by making the woman in question an artificial one

kinda like if I made a software called arnold with a picture of he-man as a logo I doubt one would be considered backward for thinking I had a guy in mind

Calling working as a PA "doomed" is probably the most offensive thing said yet in this thread.

Janet is canonically not a woman. It is said many times. Also not a robot.

No, I don’t think that giving non-objects/not objectifiable things women’s names is weird. Nor that the necessary implication is that they are named after girlfriends.

It's like naming boats after women. A recognition of the distinct nobility and beauty of women our culture has lost track of.

> I understand the guy referring to his car as his "girlfriend" and give it a women's name. I just can't feel the same about tech.

Why do you assume programming langauges with female coded names are because the creator is viewing it as a girlfriend?

Not all creators are heterosexual males (or otherwise oriented toward females as preferred or even acceptable romantic partners), and even those that are don’t necessarily view women exclusively through the lens of romantic involvement such that that would be the implication of a female name. Also, not all female-coded names are actually female in reference (Janet is named after a character that is expressly not a woman.)

> A programming language doesn't feel much anthropomorphizable to me, let alone lady-like.

Why “let alone lady-like”? Why are female-coded names a particular issue, if the problem is that programming languages aren't “anthropomorphizable”? (I don't actually think naming things after people is inherently about anthropomorphization; we do it to freeways and bridges and other things as an honor, not as anthropomorphization.)

> Why do you assume programming langauges with female coded names are because the creator is viewing it as a girlfriend?

I am not assuming that. I was just comparing it to the situation with cars.

> Not all creators are heterosexual males (or otherwise oriented toward females as preferred or even acceptable romantic partners), and even those that are don’t necessarily view women exclusively through the lens of romantic involvement such that that would be the implication of a female name.

I wasn't implying such a thing. But I knew a woke person was going to point it out to me anyway. Funny.

> Janet is named after a character that is expressly not a woman

The logo of the programming language is the face of an attractive woman wearing a lipstick and a fancy hairdo. Also, Janet is portrayed by a woman in the Good Place. Don't tell me that the name of the language has nothing to do with a woman.

> Why are female-coded names a particular issue

I don't think it is an issue. I was just thinking out loud.

Take it easy.

> I am not assuming that

Well you did say: "this may be the nerd's way of immortalizing their sweetheart", which seems to me to strongly imply that your impression may be closer to assuming it than to not assuming it.

I have no horse in this race (I'm not the one who replied to your original comment), but it did seem like you were assuming something awful close to what you are denying.

In my world saying that "something may be something for other people" doesn't equal to "personally assuming that something is something". But I understand where you come from.

For me the thinking & debating exercises doesn't have to involve taking a position personally. Sometimes I just want to focus on the argument. My own position & assumptions are irrelevant.

For that reason I don't appreciate it when somebody makes an assumption regarding my assumptions to attack myself instead of focusing on the argument.

I don't see anything in dragonwriter's response that attacks you and not your argument. Perhaps you just disagree with the phrasing, but to me, "you assume" in this context is short for "you assume in your argument" or "your argument assumes" and it still looks valid.

> "you assume" in this context is short for "you assume in your argument" or "your argument assumes" and it still looks valid

An argument doesn't assume, but it states. Assumption is something people do. When somebody makes a statement regarding "what an argument assumes", the meaning is that they are speculating beyond what the argument is stating.

So I don't agree with you, but thank you for the discussion.

An argument assumes if it doesn't back up the assertion with reasoning. For an argument to state, it needs more; as written, it wasn't really an argument to begin with. It was just a theoretical supposition.

Yes, I guess mine was more of a theoretical supposition. It was actually just an observation. Yet a moment later I wasn't really talking about that anymore, but making a more general statement regarding the exercise of debate.

Thank you for playing the role of the logic police. I guess it can sometimes be unreasonably hard to talk in a simple forum like this in a chill manner without having to deal with people's (IMO) misplaced pedantry. So be it. I'll try to be more scientific the next time.

Hey, I'm just trying to explain what your comments look like to someone not involved in the original conversation, since I agreed with the statement that you objected to. Not sure where this passive aggressive defensiveness is coming from.

The julia language is claimed to not named after a woman, and it's considered to be against the community code of conduct to anthropomorphize it. People calling julia their girlfriend get asked to stop pretty quickly.

I mean, this is done well outside programming languages. See; for example, tropical hurricanes.

That used to be true, but hurricanes haven't been named exclusively after women since 1978.

> The practice of naming hurricanes solely after women came to an end in 1978 when men's and women's names were included in the Eastern North Pacific storm lists. In 1979, male and female names were included in lists for the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml

Ada, Alice...

Interesting question, but it might just be a yellow volkswagon effect. Quickly looking at Wikipedia's list of languages, theres Babbage, Bertrand, Cecil, Darwin, Dylan, Escher, Euclid, Euler, Godel, Hume, Orwell, Tom, Zeno, and probably a few others I missed.

EDIT: Haskell and Pascal, how embarassing to miss those

also Haskell and Pascal

It's a shame that Haskell Brooks Curry did not have any more names because all three of his names have already been used for programming languages by now.

I was first introduced to programming with Pascal, can't believe I forgot about it until I saw your list.

I also like to believe PageRank was named after Larry Page.

It is interesting that female-named languages from your examples generally use first-name, while male-named languages generally use surname.

> Haskell and Pascal, how embarassing to miss those

and Curry, while we're at it, https://curry-lang.org/

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