Sexism in the Ruby community: how does the Python community manage it?

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:38 AM, Danyelle Davis <ladynikon at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am a woman and all I can say to these things is.. Bringing light to these
> things do nothing but give attention to the attention seeking.. yea the
> names are dumb.  But does it ever stop me. No.  Mainly because ignore the
> college/boyish mentality that is associated with names like that.

Thing is, it's all very well to avoid using one particular module
because you don't like its name... but what happens when there are a
goodly number of such ill-named modules? Let's suppose you don't like
the name "readline" because it offends your religion. (I'm
deliberately picking something that I can't imagine actually being
offensive; my sincere and humble apologies if there is anyone who
actually IS offended by that name.) You might be able to use libedit
instead, but what if that name also is offensive to you? (Again,
apologies if it really is.) How long are you going to poke around for
alternative modules before you throw your hands up and say "This
language sucks, all its modules have stupid names"?

Or do you mean that you'd use something despite its offensive name,
because the name doesn't bother you? If so, awesome for you, but
unfortunately not everyone is so generous :)

Personally, I would avoid using profane names, if only because I don't
like trying to explain to my boss what it is I'm using. "You use
Python? What's that?" "It's a language, named after a comedy group."
"Great!" - vs - "You use Brainf--? What's that?" "Uhh... it's a
language... that I don't like to say the name of. Uhh...." - awkward.
Same with module names. When I watched a Ruby app installing itself, I
googled a few of the gem names out of morbid curiosity, and to be
quite frank, I dislike a lot of them. Module names should be
descriptive, not fancy. And I really don't think they need profanity,
which some people apparently disagree with.

ChrisA