Ballerina, a language with structural type system

Except that it is. A one way street, that is.

You are simply asserting that "sexist stereotypes contribute to more skewed representation", which is no better than asserting that wet roads cause rain.

First, there is nowadays strong evidence that people generally do not hold explicitly sexist views. So the fact that people know that there are, for example, fewer female software engineers does not mean that they think women are incapable of being software engineers. Knowing that there are fewer female software engineers and therefore a software engineer you encounter is more likely to be male is not sexist, it is simple knowledge of the facts.

So what about "implicit bias"? Well, the poster child for implicit biases, the Implicit Association Test, is actually highly dubious, as results (a) are highly inconsistent [the same person will get wildly different scores on different instances of the test] (b) quite weak and a bit different than reported and (c) do not predict biased behaviour.

What do I mean with "a bit different than reported"? IIRC, it was reported that the IAT showed men being biased against women. Which was a bit of mischaracterisation: for male subjects, there was no difference in "bias" for/against women or men, but women had a positive bias towards other women. So there was a difference, but not quite what was reported. (This in-group bias was also discovered in a different study).

Finally, what about the backwards causality? Let's take Stereotype Threat. Results were always weak and somewhat questionable, and basically crumbled in the replication crisis, the effect disappearing when controlling for publication bias.

https://replicationindex.com/2017/04/07/hidden-figures-repli...

> how many professional software developers will really want to self-identify as “ballerinas”

Ballerina -> Baller. Problem solved.

> we could say the same about the ballerina pictured being a woman is driving man out of the ballerina industry

Maybe it is, I've got no problem if someone wants to make that argument. I don't know much about the Ballet world, so it's not something I'm going to raise myself.

On the other hand I've got personal experience of talking to a young girl who was trying to understand gender roles and if it was acceptable for a girl to be interested in space or computers because of things people had said to her at school. If she'd been looking at webpages with these kinds of pictures, I'm sure they would have had an effect.

> Stop being oversensitive about such minor things

At some point the regress of people getting annoyed about other people getting annoyed becomes ridiculous. I'm not spending time in a state of rage about this, and you don't need to be in a state of rage about my opinions about this either.

> I want to live in a society where there is no outcry over a chosen photo

And I want to live in a society where people understand that communication involves two sides, and that if your speech / picture selection makes a significant number of people think you're sexist and you aren't then maybe you should improve how you communicate.

As a co-creator of a language (Julia) with a name that is feminine in most of the world, let me give some friendly advice regarding the name "Ballerina", which means "a female ballet dancer". The way you talk about Ballerina comes off rather tone deaf to gender issues. In the post linked here and elsewhere on the language website, the female ballerina—and she is definitely a she—is talked about as an object of grace and beauty to be appreciated by the programmer, who is presumed to be male. In one cartoon on the site, the male programmer is getting a massage from the helpful, friendly, female Ballerina while he does his programming work. And then there is language like this (pointed out by @yoz):

> That obviously starts with the Enterprise Integrator team as that is where this baby was flirted with, dated and then conceived

This is really damaging: the Ballerina in question is referred to as "baby", she is flirted with and then conceived—weird because that's an unusual order of events, but I guess this means you knocked her up and then had a baby with her? I can't continue, even dissecting this sentence feels creepy. Just don't do this. It's weird and disturbing and it will put off most women and many men who might otherwise consider using or contributing to your language.

Consider renaming the language to "Ballet", which is distinctly non-gendered and doesn't have these issues but still suggests the grace and beauty you are inspired by and aspiring to. Seriously, consider this. Yes, it's late in the game (post 1.0) and you like the name you have, but it's close enough to the current name that you won't lose much branding and you can keep the same nice logo that you already have.

If you are going keep the name Ballerina, you cannot sexualize the name and you should have a rule that others in the community not do so either. Julia has a specific rule in the code of conduct saying "do not sexualize the name of the project"—we didn't originally think we'd need to say that, but it turns out people just cannot resist saying creepy, sexual shit about anything they perceive to be feminine.

Logical thinking and problem solving can greatly benefit from visual representations and feedback. I write code but I often wish the representation was much more visual than lines of dense monospaced text with a little bit of colour. Diagrams are often easier to parse and reason about. When trying to understand difficult code or figuring out a difficult problem before writing code I generally draw diagrams with pen and paper. These diagrams are much closer to my mental model than code, and I wish that a lot more of this translation could be automated.

"Visual language" doesn't have to mean low-bandwidth interactions.