

Why I am Renaming Testosterone - whit537
https://github.com/whit537/assertEquals/blob/master/ANNOUNCEMENT.rst#readme

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kaolinite
That's a shame, I don't really see the need to rename it, but that's his
choice. It's a clever name and naming a product after a hormone is not sexist
(and if it were, why does testrogen get her vote? That's just as bad). In my
opinion, complaints like these cheapen sexism, which genuinely is a big
problem in IT.

~~~
zheng
While in one sense I agree (testrogen is an awful name), would you want to use
a test framework named "Estrogen - The girly testing framework"? Maybe it
wouldn't matter to you (I don't think I'd care really), but imagine being one
of the only male developers in a group of overly feminist "chickgrammers"
(excuse the play on words) who all claimed that "Estrogen" made them feel
super-girly, and let you know at every chance they got just how girly it made
them feel.

Even without the hypothetical situation, branding a framework as the
"framework for [gender]" is going to implicitly exclude anyone who isn't of
that gender. Not to mention those for whom gender isn't quite as binary.

~~~
kaolinite
Sure, I agree with the "framework for [gender]" argument. I don't think that
"the manly testing interface for Python" is too bad, but I can agree that it
may put some people off - so dropping that is a good idea. Changing the name
however is a bit dramatic, in my opinion.

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VeejayRampay
While it's always a good thing to see people working together towards a common
goal where the issues of gender and sexualization have faded away, the amount
of faux-minist political-correctedness in this particular context is really
mindblowing.

Seriously, what was wrong about the project being called "Testosterone"? It's
not like testosterone is SPECIFIC to men in the first place anyway, jeez (see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone>).

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thraxil
I was there when Chad launched Testosterone back at PyCon 2006. Good times,
indeed.

I don't think naming a test app "Testosterone" is particularly sexist,
especially next to a lot of what we've seen happening recently, but I think
he's making the right decision by renaming it and publicly acknowledging the
issue.

Sexism is a continuum. This clearly isn't as egregious as the "CouchDB + Ruby:
Perform Like a Pr0n Star." talk at gogaruco or last weeks' Geeklist kerfuffle,
but we need to recognize that there is a pervasive boys club atmosphere in
much of the programming world.

Testosterone and projects/attitudes like it set up this association of "doing
X, which is tricky and requires great knowledge or skill from the programmer"
is "manly" and "manly" is a positive thing. OK, Testosterone also makes a play
on using curses as being manly, which is clever, but this is certainly a
pervasive attitude (I remember Linus Torvalds famously making a statement to
the effect of "Debugging with printk puts hair on your chest" as justification
for not including debugging facilities in the Linux kernel). This kind of
language is common and many of us (even women) are guilty of using it in
varying degrees. Individually, these aren't a big deal. But the overall
atmosphere is off-putting to many and we need to at least be aware of that.

I applaud Chad for responding in a professional and respectful manner. We need
more of this and less of the "I'm sorry you found that offensive" non-apology
apology attitude that's been the typical response. This should be the template
for the tone of future discussions.

That said, "assertEquals"? Really? camelCase for a Python library? :(

------
Zikes
This sort of "sexism" is as baseless and minor as her implication that I'm not
manly unless I have a beard, which I'm sure a lot of you missed the first time
around.

Yes, there's a problem with sexism in our particularly male-dominated field,
but like kaolinite said in their comment, this only cheapens the effort to
fight it.

~~~
gte910h
I disagree, I think small stuff like this pushes the window so bigger stuff
seems less bad.

