5 ms·
What’s with this new fashion of using feminine names for tech products? Imagine being a woman, working in an office, and hearing your first name in random conte
by dsnr 4y ago
What’s with this new fashion of using feminine names for tech products?
Imagine being a woman, working in an office, and hearing your first name in random contexts. I see how that could become annoying.
- kgwxd 4y agoAs a Jason, you get used to it.
- dsnr 4y agoGood one :)
- hombre_fatal 4y agoShips are given female names too because, apparently, they used to be dedicated to goddesses. I do think even common female names sound more majestic to me than common male names for projects whether that's because of cultural tradition or because women are still abstract mysteries to me (jk). Fwiw, Travis CI never bothered me despite its ubiquity when I got into software dev. It's not really "random contexts". The context of whether someone is talking about me or CI is actually quite clear. It's 1000x more confusing when someone else shares your name in the office.
- rmetzler 4y agoMariaDB is a fork of MySQL and was introduced in 2009. Is this new? Other than that, Maria is also a male name although not very common. ~50% of humans are female and if there is a „trend“ for giving female names to software, yes, please do it more.
- dsnr 4y agoMy point is, I don’t recall seeing any tech product named “John”. We shouldn’t be using first names for random products regardless of gender. People somehow assume that female first names are somehow better suited as names for some software product, than male names. It’s new in the sense that I keep noticing them more often lately.
- sritchie 4y agoHaskell, Erlang, Pascal… Maria is a reference to Maria Montessori, whose educational philosophy inspired Maria.cloud.
- dsnr 4y ago> Haskell, Erlang, Pascal Those are family names, correct me if I’m wrong.
- tosh 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Curry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Curry
- andsoitis 4y agoHaskell and Erlang perhaps, but Pascal is both. But I think the larger point, that male names are only rarely used, stands.
- o_pax 4y agoYou're wrong. Haskell is named after Haskell Brooks Curry. There might be an opportunity for a new functional language named Brooks.
- dsnr 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(surname) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(surname)
- weatherlight 4y agohttps://www.houseofnames.com/maria-family-crest/Italian#:~:text=Early%20Origins%20of%20the%20Maria,different%20parts%20of%20the%20peninsula https://www.houseofnames.com/maria-family-crest/Italian#:~:t.... Maria is also a surname, what's your point?
- weatherlight 4y agohttps://everything2.com/title/People+with+programming+languages+named+after+them https://everything2.com/title/People+with+programming+langua... (Spoiler: It's mostly men.) AI Personal assistants on the other hand do seem to have feminine names or voices.
- dsnr 4y agoThose are last names.
- weatherlight 4y agohaskell is a first name.
- dsnr 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(surname) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(surname)
- ritchiey 4y agoI imagine they’d find it no more annoying than do Frank, Bob, Doug or Russell. In fact I might call my next project Karen. Because things can only get better for her.