An open request to LÖVE library authors...

[Lafolie]

I don't understand how gender has anything to do with this. The term "anal" bears no reference to either gender, I have no idea why people are mentioning women?

[Saegor]

A better question is how many women have been turned off to the Love community. I'm kind of working on the assumption that this community it 99% Male, with the remaining 1% avoiding identification, and rightfully so, we all knows what happens when the internet finds a girl in its midsts.

This is really something we should think about as a community. With all the gayness inherent in LÖVE, we should be at the forefront of encouraging diversity in open source, not be (or pretend to be) a bunch of stereotypical heterosexual male cisgender frat boys. Really, the only diversity we now have is that of culture, nationality and race. We should do more. Let's begin with fixing the gender imbalance.

i agreed but the last thing is impossible. we can't fix a problem inherent of the programmation's world : it's not attracting unless you exactly know what it is.
but if you keep löve simple and efficient, yeah, girls will come (why not ?)

indie (and foremost open-source) programmation is likely male-infested because no girl will take the risk to learn a langage that will take minimum 30% of his free time to use without knowing what reward is behind (EDIT: somebody said me it was shitty sexist reflexion. i'm sorry for somebody who feel it too because it was absolutely not my intention). life is hard, we are (boys) just crazy enough to never care of money problem and spent a lot of time in programming (definitively-) open-source projects. it's my humble opinion and i'm sorry for syntax

I don't understand how gender has anything to do with this. The term "anal" bears no reference to either gender, I have no idea why people are mentioning women?

yeah, gender stereotypes like that are a common problem but i'm sure minimum 90% of the people here understood for example that AnAL was not a bad joke against male homosexuality

[Robin]

How do you suggest we do that, though?

It's pretty hard to do, I'd think. Still, my suggested approach would be:

1. Image and attitude. We as a community must become conscious about the way we present ourselves to the world. This includes calling each other out if one of us makes sexist comments.
2. Anonymity. Make it acceptable for people to keep their identity private if they choose so. This way people won't have to be afraid to be harassed for being female. I think we already have this down.
3. Role models. We should look for women who would like to be highly visible members of the community. If people see someone sticking their neck out by being themselves and see them being appreciated and respected, it might help them to take the leap. (If you're reading this and interested in being a role model here, please do.)
4. Try to get women in game dev you know personally to join.
5. Try not to scare female newbies away. Being an asshole isn't recommended any time of the day, but watch out if you know or think this newbie might be a woman. This might sound sexist, but it's just a practical thing to do if we want gender balance.
6. Formulate some form of protocol about it. (It's vague, I know, but I don't really know much about what kind of protocol it should be.)

This just off the top of my head. I need to do more research on this (much has been written on how to introduce and encourage diversity), and I'd like to discuss this in depth with the community at large. We might need a dedicated topic for this.

I don't understand how gender has anything to do with this. The term "anal" bears no reference to either gender, I have no idea why people are mentioning women?

The conversation turned from being about us driving people away who dislike associating themselves with human sexuality, to being about us driving people away for who they are (intended or unintended).

I'm going to ignore what Saegor said. If someone likes to address that, please do. I just don't want to do that conversation right now.

[Saegor]

We might need a dedicated topic for this.

somebody can resume the main problem in a correct english and open a new topic for that ?
i'm ready to quote you because i agree with your two first points but no more

[slime]

How do you suggest we do that, though?

It's pretty hard to do, I'd think. Still, my suggested approach would be:

1. Image and attitude. We as a community must become conscious about the way we present ourselves to the world. This includes calling each other out if one of us makes sexist comments.
2. Anonymity. Make it acceptable for people to keep their identity private if they choose so. This way people won't have to be afraid to be harassed for being female. I think we already have this down.

Definitely. However, it's also important to recognize the difference between sexism and PG13 library names. They are not even really related at all. Perhaps the names might be too much for the official API, but they're not part of any official API.

[*]Role models. We should look for women who would like to be highly visible members of the community. If people see someone sticking their neck out by being themselves and see them being appreciated and respected, it might help them to take the leap. (If you're reading this and interested in being a role model here, please do.)
[*]Try to get women in game dev you know personally to join.
[*]Try not to scare female newbies away. Being an asshole isn't recommended any time of the day, but watch out if you know or think this newbie might be a woman. This might sound sexist, but it's just a practical thing to do if we want gender balance.
[*]Formulate some form of protocol about it. (It's vague, I know, but I don't really know much about what kind of protocol it should be.)[/list]
This just off the top of my head. I need to do more research on this (much has been written on how to introduce and encourage diversity), and I'd like to discuss this in depth with the community at large. We might need a dedicated topic for this.

I don't think the lack of women in the LÖVE community has much to do with the LÖVE community specifically. It's a societal issue - women are a minority among programmers, and at least perceived as a minority among "gamers" currently. LÖVE is a game programming framework, so its community reflects that of people who are interested in programming games.

Trying to put people up on a pedestal simply because they're a minority is absolutely the wrong way to do things, in my opinion. Why talk about equality and then go on about giving special status to people just because they have a certain gender? It seems incredibly contradictory.

[kikito]

So, my only request is that we don't turn into the Ruby community. (further reading)

The Ruby community should not be characterized by the actions of two particular individual. If anything, the ruby community is particularly active on its efforts to be inclusive. Even to the point of having one conference cancelled just because the of its all-white-male-lineup.

While I don't follow the ... naming convention ... that others have decided to follow, I will defend their right to be puerile. It's their library, and they can call them whatever they want, within certain limits. The names so far are certainly not sexist or racist, they're just ... a bit stupid. But not unreasonably so.

If someone doesn't like the names, they can simply not use the libraries, or rename them. If that someone happens to be in a minority, that doesn't automatically make the libraries sexist or racist.

But if that someone wants to have the names of the libraries changed, that makes him a censor.

Don't take me wrong; there's a line - when's crossed, censorship is acceptable. I would not be opposed to have any hate/sexist/racist games or libraries that appear on the forum/wiki to be removed. In fact, I have already pushed in that direction in one occasion in the past; a forum thread was deleted. But this is not the case.

Our creative rights end where other's rights start. But being easily offended by puerile jokes is not a right. It's a flaw.

So he went into Google and searched "love anal"...

Well, he probably nearned something .

The two main animation libraries appear if you google "love2d animation". One of them has a non-lewt name (Disclaimer: I built it).

[Robin]

Definitely. However, it's also important to recognize the difference between sexism and PG13 library names. They are not even really related at all. Perhaps the names might be too much for the official API, but they're not part of any official API.

It bears mentioning that I'm not talking about library names at all any more (although it would be a different question if someone were to use, for example, a gendered slur as library name).

I don't think the lack of women in the LÖVE community has much to do with the LÖVE community specifically. It's a societal issue - women are a minority among programmers, and at least perceived as a minority among "gamers" currently. LÖVE is a game programming framework, so its community reflects that of people who are interested in programming games.

That may be, but that doesn't mean we can't change things! At least here, that is. Be the change you want to see in the world and all.

Trying to put people up on a pedestal simply because they're a minority is absolutely the wrong way to do things, in my opinion. Why talk about equality and then go on about giving special status to people just because they have a certain gender? It seems incredibly contradictory.

It's not about putting people on a pedestal. (I feel terribly unfit to talk about this, I don't really know how to explain these things.)
Those role models would be role models because of their skills and role in the community, not solely because of their gender (although we would be disqualified, but that is because guys are already represented, they already have their role models (you and me, for example)).

It's frustrating that there are no women in this conversation (at least not ones who are "out"). I can't tell you how it is to be a girl in this community and neither can you. This community is not large enough (and has not enough women) to support something like PyLadies, which is too bad. This role model idea was about bootstrapping something like that. On average, an open source community is 2% women, and it's worse for LÖVE (that, or most of the women here feel the need to hide their gender).

[Pash]

I don't understand how a topic started where the OP stated concern regarding library names and conceptions of professionalism within the game dev community, only for a question of female game developers participation within the community to come to light. A case for a different topic much?

I do get the context with which these lib names are chosen, and my opinion is, they add a quirkiness to using this framework. I use lua and love because of the same reason everyone else does here, not because of English words and slang that could be perceived as off putting to new developers.

[CaptainMaelstrom]

I agree a lot with what Robin's saying. Taking people's feelings into consideration =/= putting them on a pedestal.

Recently, I had to go to the Office of Equity and Diversity here at school because a professor was using softcore pornography as a firefox add-on.

I don't think there's anything wrong with naming a library AnAL, unless we start gay-bashing or hating on women. Thankfully I haven't seen any of this around here, but I haven't been here long. Long live gays, women, and other minorities.

[scutheotaku]

A lot of this has been said, but...

I think that this is a reasonable request to LOVE library authors; nothing less, nothing more. I think that the OP simply wanted to request that people give their libraries more...professional (family-friendly?) names, so as not to discourage anyone from using LOVE or recognizing it as a serious contender. As the OP said, he's "not attempting to police the community," it's "just a friendly request."

As far as gender...why assume that library names like "AnAL" and "SECS" would turn off female programmers any more often than they would turn off male programmers? Most (all?) of the library names are pretty gender-neutral, after all. And who says that you need to be a "single male" to get a chuckle out of these sorts of juvenile jokes? I suppose that I just don't see library names like those as inherently "male" or chauvinistic names.

As far as encouraging female programmers - I agree! Though to have a strong female userbase, I think that we need one or two female users active in the community first and that it will naturally balloon out from there. After all, PyLadies and RailsGirls weren't started by men (at least I assume not). Until then, I think we simply need to be friendly to everyone. I'm pretty new to the community, but it seems like we already are friendly to everyone, women included. There's nothing anti-female about LOVE or its community AFAIK. In fact, if we're going to look at gender stereotypes, I would think that LOVE would be more attractive to women considering the "girly" name and the rainbows and such But seriously, it doesn't really seem like the LOVE community is one that would scare off any programming or game design minority groups. So, I say let's just keep doing what we do...be nice to everyone and, if there's an interest, they'll come. And who knows, maybe some females are already here? This forum doesn't really discourage anonymity, so they could be here. And if they are here and do want to be anonymous, then it's no surprise that they wouldn't be revealing themselves in this thread