I don't see a strong pattern. There are others named after female first names that aren't particularly popular (most, really), though the set of popular languages is small enough that it's not clear there's enough data to draw any conclusions.
What about "Ada", "Miranda" or "Haskell"? First names, too, albeit ones much less common these days. ("Linda" the language isn't even in that category, popularity-wise, although the source of the name seems to be a weirder story)
I see, that's what I thought. No problem with naming languages after people, but it's easier if it's an homage to a certain person. Common first and last names alone often point to confusing people, and there might be a certain dissonance between the mental images ("I pulled some Julias pigtails in kindergarten, now I have her name on a CV?").
The same problem would probably arise if the last names would be more common, too. "Pascal" and "Turing are probably rare enough ('though "Pascal" was a bit in fashion as a boy's name in Germany when I was young).
that would be very interesting, especially if you can factor in non-alphabet based names, such as ones from Asia, and find that there is a universal pattern.
I'm a french speaker, Jolie is a common woman name, yes it also means pretty, but that's like people called Lily or Prince. The logo is also a woman's eye + brow.
It's possible the author was going for the meaning of pretty, but there still seem to be a strong personification happening with emphasis on it being a beautiful woman, and it's that aspect that unease me.
Again, you can call your language however you choose too, and I'm not going to judge it by its name, but I still personally find this womanization trend in programming language names a bit weird.
I'll probably get used to it, though it does feel like an interesting meta-psycholigical subject as well. Where are the programming languages named John, Richard and David? Why are we calling a language by a person's name? Why are their logo becoming human facial features?
I was thinking French. I kept seeing notable programmers with female-sounding names like Jan and then realizing it was a non-Anglophonic man's name that's spelled like an English woman's name.
> María too is way more common than “Mary” in English (that is a real English name, but AFAICT it’s pretty rare in the last few generations).
I think thats partly because Maria itself has been quite popular in English recently. Marie is also quite well accepted as an English name even if it's technically not.
That's an interesting thing. However, it would me more interesting (and usable, for example, in gamedev) if each name would also contain a reference to, for example, top-3 countries/cultures in which the name is popular.
Most English names are, but surely so are most other names too. I am sure there are exceptions, but let's say in Muslim naming traditions there are definitely male and female names, also in Chinese there are male and female names (sort of, as girls names tend to use certain characters and boys names use certain characters. So between English names, Chinese names and Muslim names I am guessing a pretty good coverage of world population, enough to say that it is more common that names are gendered, than for them to not be. I would love to hear a counterpoint or even example of alternatives.
Oh almost forgot Iceland,not a huge population but changes the surname based on gender too, e.g Johnsson or Johnsdottir
1. Marketers surely have mined this data to the hilt -- cross-referencing these trends with address lists and full-name email prefixes can make targeted promotions a lot more effective.
2. My own name is relatively rare in the U.S. among my age cohort (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ian) to the point where some adults had problems pronouncing it when I was in elementary school 35 years ago ("Isn't that a girl's name?"). But I suspect, based on anecdotal evidence and personal observation, that the name is more common in England, Scotland, Australia and Canada. And the Wolfram data shows that it has been growing in popularity for many years in the U.S.
Hah, funny to see this here. When our daughters were born we were a French and German living in an English speaking country so we tried to make sure that the name works in 3 languages. Actually when we finally decided on a name for our first daughter (Tia) we chose a long form of the name (Tiahana) because my mother in law is half Spanish (Tia means Aunty in Spanish).
Incidentally most of the names we considered don't seem to be on the list returned by this website (and we didn't go for very uncommon names).
It seems the algorithm selects on names that exist in both languages (judging by the graphic in the results). I'd argue that's often not really what you want, as they might sound very different.
Interesting. It would be useful I think if somebody implemented a gender predictor for Chinese first names, which is difficult: http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/316/is-there-a-ru.... Also the set of Chinese first names is much larger than for any given Western country.
Reading through the list of just first names, the only phonetic pattern that sticks out is that there aren't any female names that start with K. But otherwise I would agree, I doubt most non-Chinese would be able to differentiate Chinese names by gender.
Your chinese names link is inexplicably ranking entire names (look at #s 5, 6, and 8, the girl's name is ?? xiuying in every case; ?, ?, and ? just happen to all be incredibly common family names. ? li also occurs in the list with each of those, although it does seem to be much less common for girls with the surname ? [also pronounced li]. Or notice how the top four male names are all ?.). But I'm pretty sure no one is interested in which names occur how often with which surnames -- would you be interested in studying the breakdown of "Lisa" among people variously surnamed Black, Smith, Jones, etc?
The chinese names link does accurately indicate that a chinese girl's name is usually distinguishable by the meaning; things like "beautiful", "graceful", "quiet", "compliant", and so on are popular. I would guess phonetic considerations are a distant second (though, as illustrated by the anomalous unpopularity of ??, they clearly do come into it).
True. Most Latin names are gonna work in several languages + English. For example, Amalia. As far as I know it works in English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. In French there’s a small variation to Amelie (still pretty close).
Apart from Ada, which is probably the most popular language in the category, there are two named Alice (http://www.alice.org/, http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/), and others named Claire (http://www.claire-language.com/), Mary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(programming_language)), and Miranda (http://miranda.org.uk/). If you allow ancient Greek names, there's also Io (http://iolanguage.com/) and Ioke (http://ioke.org/).
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