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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.


Some historical language names that are also first names:

    * 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
Honorable mention: Erlang is a (male) god in Chinese Buddhism.

Some caveats apply. Many language names are also surnames, I leave that to future work.

See also: Beryllium


Joss: can be either male or female, as a nickname for Joseph or Jocelyn (think: Joss Whedon, Joss Stone)

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).


My criterion for the list was whether or not I could find a well-known person with the given word as their birth name.


Lua means 'Moon' in Portuguese


I remember a HN post where someone talked about naming their daughter Lua. They liked the name when they first heard it, and being a programming language was just a nerdy bonus.

Telling their wife that it means 'moon' in Portuguese made it an easy sell.


At least people aren’t naming their daughters after programming languages yet.


Tell that to my friend BASIC


And their buddy CPP.


Ruby.


That's like people getting tattoos showing the name of their favorite programming language. Those always get covered over with MOM.


If you name it after men you get even more problems.


Dylan, Haskell, Erlang, Pascal, etc. What’s the problem either way?


These are older so I guess that is why.

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.




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