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Ballerina, a language with structural type system

v1-0.ballerina.io

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Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#121

Post by StefanKarpinski »

jclark_th wrote: post #120
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #88

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…

Thank you for your comments. Both the cartoon and the sentence you highlighted have been fixed. We want to create an environment where everybody feels welcome. Your rule about not sexualizing the name seems like an excellent idea.

Glad that feedback was useful. I know it’s not a thing to consider casually, but please do start a real discussion about changing the name to Ballet—deciding not to is a viable outcome, of course, but do have the discussion. It could save you a lot of trouble over time. Even if it seems too late, I think it’s one of those things that will seem in hindsight that it was actually very changeable at this point in time.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#122

Post by sanjiva »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #121
jclark_th wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your comments. Both the cartoon and the sentence you highlighted have been fixed. We want to create an environment where everybody feels welcome. Your rule about not sexualizing the name seems like an excellent idea.

Glad that feedback was useful. I know it’s not a thing to consider casually, but please do start a real discussion about changing the name to Ballet—deciding not to is a viable outcome, of course, but do have the discussion. It could save you a lot of trouble over time. Even if it seems too late, I think it’s one of those things that will seem in hindsight that it was actually very changeable at this point in time.

Ada was named after Ada Lovelace too. Many may not know that it was a woman's name (and of course few program in Ada; we certainly hope for a better outcome than that!).

I'm sorry but I cannot accept the argument that because its a feminine word its not an appropriate name for the language. Gender balance has been a problem for this industry and making it so all names are male so people won't feel bad to say they like it is ridiculous. I worked hard in WSO2 to create an open workplace for women and 30% engineers are women - so it is possible to make it better if you try hard. Isolating tech to male-only names is not the solution.

As James noted, I updated the blog I wrote (even though the words were not meant the way you presented them) to remove that offending bit. And indeed your points about incorporating "do not sexualize the name" are great and we'll put them into our terms of conduct.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#123

Post by sanjiva »

Vivtek wrote: post #100
OJFord wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a link to 'by example' docs at the top, next to download: https://v1-0.ballerina.io/learn/by-example/

If that page has a single example with a diagram in it, I have yet to find it.

It doesn't. The primary reason is that VSCode cannot be hosted.

We will soon publish a playground widget which will let you run the same code in the browser so you can see source and the diagram as you wish (or not!).

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#124

Post by sanjiva »

mindB wrote: post #67
tasuki wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm the founder of WSO2 which developed Ballerina. Also the person who started the project and lead it. Congrats and thank you! > We promoted Ballerina like that because we are proud of the work we do and wanted to show it off to people. And rightly proud! > You may not like the work we produce but trying to say its to get "consultancy work in India" is rather racist. Saying it's to get "consultancy work in India"…

I think the racist bit might be assuming the primarily Sri Lankan company is from India.

No, the racist bit is the implicit assumption that people in this part of the world can only do services and not creative technology development.

We can do both, just like anyone else in any country.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#125

Post by StefanKarpinski »

sanjiva wrote: post #122
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad that feedback was useful. I know it’s not a thing to consider casually, but please do start a real discussion about changing the name to Ballet—deciding not to is a viable outcome, of course, but do have the discussion. It could save you a lot of trouble over time. Even if it seems too late, I think it’s one of those things that will seem in hindsight that it was actually very changeable at this point in time.

Ada was named after Ada Lovelace too. Many may not know that it was a woman's name (and of course few program in Ada; we certainly hope for a better outcome than that!). I'm sorry but I cannot accept the argument that because its a feminine word its not an appropriate name for the language. Gender balance has been a problem for this industry and making it so all names are male so people won't feel bad to say they lik…

There’s nothing wrong with a feminine name, just be aware of the issues. The name Ballet would avoid many of those issues outright, lessen the need to have such a rule, and seems like it might be a better name anyway—it’s shorter and phrases like “I love Ballet” and “we used Ballet” work. It’s your project, of course, it just seems a conversation worth having.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#126

Post by Firadeoclus »

cormacrelf wrote: post #104
Firadeoclus wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> more of this translation could be automated It seems to me that when creating a visual programming language for a particular class of programs, you probably find that making this translator is the same hard mental work that would let you make a text-based programming language instead. Once you have a good mapping from thoughts to code, the visual part doesn't add much. I was talking to a non-programmer recently who…

> Once you have a good mapping from thoughts to code, the visual part doesn't add much.

Having the visual representation readily available is indeed "great for reading the code and sanity checking". Writing code (here meaning text or visual) involves reading code, both the code you're currently writing and anything that is connected to it. Thus the visual representation is also good for writing code.

I'm not advocating a low bandwidth interaction model. I can certainly see why some people might quickly grow tired of Scratch, but I'd argue that's a problem with the specific language/editor, not something that is universally applicable to anything that tries to go beyond "text". Structured editors can beat text editors in interaction speed.

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