[Jun8]

Possibly sexist question: Does giving a female name to a programming language increase the rate of its adoption? AFAIK, this is the only such language (perl was nearly named gloria, though!). Does anyone know the etymology of the name (julialang.org seems to be down, so I couldn't check there)? There are Julia sets but that's for the lastname of the mathematician Gaston Julia.

[_delirium]

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.

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/).

[eric_bullington]

You're forgetting Ada, a very interesting language, but one that has suffered from a constantly low rate of adoption.

[tomjen3]

I doubt it matters, really. Ada is still laughed at rather than adopted widely (too bad, since it is not that bad as a language).

[mbell]

It seems there is a stronger correlation with facial hair: http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/30/secret-for-popular-programm...

Not sure what that means for the sexes, possibly nothing.

[spicyj]

I find it likely that the programming language was named after Mr. Julia as well.

[Tycho]

Ruby.

[damncabbage]

That was named after Perl.

Having said that, it'd be interesting to know how many people think "gem", "girl's name" or "derivative of Perl" when they first hear it.

[necubi]

Interestingly, the chat session where the name "ruby" was chosen has been saved for posterity: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/... (and the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2954764).