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[Hadas Zeilberger <hadaszeilberger AT gmail.com>]

Thanks for saying that, Talia. I feel that this thread is treating this issue as a war between cultures (or spoken languages) when the true victims are women and perhaps gay men  (both French and English speaking). Nobody should have to fear harassment just by talking about what they are working on.

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 10:57 AM Talia Ringer <tringer AT cs.washington.edu> wrote:

So while I'm not strongly in favor of a name change (the see-oh-que solution sounds pretty good if I can get used to it), I'd like to note that calling Coq what it is as a woman in the US has led to harassment in the past. I was in a ride share home after working on a POPL submission, and the driver asked what I work on, so I explained. When I eventually mentioned the tool name, he stopped talking about work and started making sexual comments at my expense for the rest of the ride.

Consider, Thorsten, that it is not about being "offended," but actually people have different life experiences from yours.

Keeping the logo that can easily be interpreted this way has always felt like a tacit endorsement of this kind of situation, though given the overwhelmingly male demographic of the community, it's more likely it's just ignorance of the difference in the way men and women are treated.

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021, 7:22 AM Robby Findler <robby AT eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:

I am reluctant to post here but I decided that I might have something of value to share. I am also from a community that had a radical name change, and indeed one that came with a lot more emotional community-related baggage than the name change proposed here. The result is that the developer side of the racket community has experienced significant growth; it was like removing shackles from our legs. I doubt that'd happen here (as the baggage removal, more than the new name, may be what spurred the growth), but I offer that as a data point that changing a well-established language's name isn't a non-starter. It wasn't even that hard (making cons-pairs immutable was a much easier sell to everyone and also a much more painful change).

;; ---

Since I'm posting, I figured I might as well offer my thoughts on the main body of thread. For context, I'm not deep in the Coq community by any means (sum total from me: I wrote one paper that used Coq in a deep way and I taught from Benjamin et al's book twice, all quite some time ago). And, for the record, I am not female (extremely so, in my own estimation). I am also deeply involved in a language community that also enjoys a bit of spicy word play in language names. All that said to help you give this comment the respect it deserves (perhaps none):

The word "cock" is vile. Repulsive. Disgusting.

I would also like to add that taking the silhouette of an iconic rooster and coloring it the same color as my penis is hardly an accident in this context. Seeing a penis in the logo is not a reason to see one's doctor. (Duh.) And "coq au vin" being acceptable (indeed, the connection not even really noticed) is also a complete non-argument, at least in this anglophone's ear.

Robby