And that’s why I’ve been holding my tongue. The problem is endemic to the broader Javascript and tech industry. Lets drop this, before I dig up more skeletons and mud.
Sure. But my clients and I are generally in the US, trying to get projects FDA certified. They’re trying to sell into Stanford, UC San Francisco, Harvard Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, University of Chicago, New York Presbyterian Healthcare System, UPenn, etc.
So no “Banana” as the name of a Chimp plugin please 
I was wondering when this type of cancer would infect the community. Let’s see if the mods do something about it and nip it in the bud. We’re all adults here.
Removing my post as it certainly wasn’t helping. Would seriously like to know what forum you think is appropriate for having a rational discussion on this topic. If there is a serious issue here and we should be considering boycotting packages because of their use of language I would like to know how people approach this.
Do they also have problem with Java ? Python ? Ruby ? Perl ? Oracle ? I don’t get it.
I agree with you that there may be a certain tendency into that direction in tech industry. But to be honest, I really have a problem understanding why you consider terms like “cucumber” and “jasmine” as being sexist?! Ok, I can think of a sexual connotation that you could give the term “cucumber”, but I would never had even thought about such a connotation when I heard it. And “jasmine” might just as well be the name of the girlfriend of the developer. In this case, I’d rather see this as a nice appreciation and not as being sexist. Maybe we should ask the devs why they named the frameworks like this? I’m curious now 
I normally don’t feed trolls, but I’m making an exception in this case since it appears I am being accused of giving something a sexist name.
Allow me to explain the origin of the name “Cucumber”. On the 8th of April 2008 I was writing the first lines of code for a new BDD tool I had an idea for. I didn’t have a name for it, so I asked my wife who happened to be sitting next to me. She is a human rights lawyer and doesn’t know the first thing about software. In the spur of the moment she exclaimed Cucumber! She just liked the word. At first I thought the name was silly, but before I knew it the ruby open source community ran with it and the name stuck. Today it’s implemented in a dozen different programming languages and used by an estimated community of 1M users.
@awatson1978 I would appreciate if you could clarify a couple of things for me:
All the best,
Aslak Hellesøy
Creator of Cucumber
Oh great, here’s comes the PC-Police…
I don’t think the names are sexist, but one can see a sexual innuendo as cucumbers and (jasmine) flowers can be viewed as symbols for reproductive organs. Freud’s been saying this for years.
While I think she was off the mark in this particular case, the fact of the matter is that no matter how bad things are, the dominant group is always oblivious to the experience of others.
Polls are nothing new and so you can pick any decade in history and any privileged group (via gender, race, religion, wealth, etc.) and you will find that the vast majority of people in the dominant group answers questions of discrimination with “there is no problem”, “they get what they deserve”, “it may have been bad before but not now”, “they’re just being too sensitive”, etc. This time it’s not different and, like all throughout history, most men would say sexism isn’t a problem, women are just being too PC.
I regret awatson’s comments because they only strengthen men’s blissfully ignorant position that sexism isn’t that big of deal. So at risk of patronizing, I’ll cut her some slack given the history of our society and specially our industry.
If we have to address such silly speculation that the above projects are sexist, then yes it becomes a matter of political correctness in my opinion. I’m sure if I look hard enough, I could deem the story of Troy and a trojan horse to be sexist & that it should be wiped from history books. I won’t, hence my comment, though I appreciate you taking the time to man-splain things to me.
I rest my case…
Good thing you’re not a lawyer. 
If you keep demonstrating privilege and obliviousness with every post then there’s nothing to do but to point it out
That… is sort of exactly what I hope we avoid in the future.
Look… lest anybody think I’m a prude or stick-in-the-mud, I don’t give a crap what kind of apps people write. Seriously. Want to write a chat roulette app or a real-time porn site? I could care less. My portfolio includes embryology and obstetrics apps; and is about graphic as they come.
The issue is when content starts filtering into the API and official docs. Then my clients and I start to mind.
Because here’s the thing… working in healthcare, we actually deal with patients and naked bodies. My clients have apps that are responsible for neonatal ultrasound screenings, mammogram screenings, prostate screenings, in-vitro fertilization matching… And when you work with such app content; it becomes real important to have a clean technical jargon without innuendo. People’s minds are going to be going to be thinking about sex anyhow. Adding an API that has innuendo just adds fuel to the fire.
And to be clear, we came to Meteor with it’s promise of being the .NET of Javascript. So we’re looking for a clean API and clean syntax. Not an API and packages that have innuendoes. We have enough problems training and managing staff to be professional as it is.
I actually thought you were making a perfectly reasonable point. It’s an issue of going with the lowest-possible common denominator, and simply giving some thought to whether language can be misconstrued and offend someone.
In particular, I thought the point about Gagarin was particularly insightful. The execute() syntax is… imperfect. And along with the subject matter of the dutch painting that Nightwatch is named for (depicting the armed guards of a dutch town), there’s a slightly violent imagery associated between Gagarin and Nightwatch. It’s a legitimate criticism; and something that I’d like to clean up eventually.
And, like I said in an above post… I and my clients could care less about the underlying technologies. Here’s an example where we took the practicalmeteor:sinon package, which doesn’t have any sexualized language, but does have the spy/mock language, and we aliased it to use language specified by the FDA:
It only becomes sexist when someone starts layering in language like ‘spy’ and ‘mock’. If the libraries that were being promoted were ‘cucumber’, ‘tomato’, ‘celery’, and ‘kale’, this conversation wouldn’t be happening.
In of itself, no. But the term is generally understood to have phallic imagery, and is prone to innuendo. I get it… sex sells. No harm in that.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, Cucumber and Jasmine got paired up (Jasmine has yonic flower imagery) and promoted as the recommended testing packages; along with the Spy and Mock apis from the Sinon library.
So for the past year, the forums have been filling with language and comments like below:
And as I stated before, some of us have clients that work in healthcare and enterprise environments. And the last thing I or my clients ever want to have to deal with is an email from an intern, student, new hire, or collaborator asking for us to show them how to use their cucumber (tests). Because that’s an email away from getting misconstrued and sent to the HR department.
So we actively choose NOT to use that package. Or jasmine. Or Sinon. Because it causes problems. They are not best practices for the healthcare/biotech/medical industries.
By comparison, lets consider Mocha and Nightwatch; neither of which have innuendos:
See? No innuendos. No HR problems.
Actually, no. As I said above, I and my clients couldn’t care less if other companies want to publish porn or banana plugins. We’re not asking or telling anybody else to do anything.
What we are doing, is raising the bar and leading by example. We’re putting out an alternative testing solution that doesn’t have inappropriate language. And we’re stating that, going forward, we’re staking out a moral high-ground, and offering an alternative solution that is FDA compatible, and doesn’t have APIs or packages that have language that can be construed as having sexual or harassing overtones.
And we think that should be reflected in the Meteor Guide.
Just so you know, when you say “I and my clients could care less”, that means that do care about it to some degree and could in fact actually care a little less about it. I believe the phrase is “couldn’t care less”.
I personally don’t see such a moral high-ground in this instance. Stringing project names together to form innuendos is simply unfair imo. When I say the word Cucumber, I don’t see phallic imagery, the same way the story of Troy & a trojan horse don’t suggest sexual intercourse to me. There’s a case for sexism within the tech industry for sure, no one’s denying that (I don’t see the construction trade, for example, making as much of an effort as the tech industry to correct this), but I simply can’t agree with your point. And just because I don’t agree with it, doesn’t make me sexist or a bigot like some would like to claim.
Start with that the next time a woman talks about sexism and not with the typical “Oh great, here’s comes the PC-Police…”
Dammit, I guess I just “mansplained” it again (whatever you think that is)
Yeah, because it’s ok to call other professionnals “sexist” or accusing them of using “harassing language” or being from the “dominant group”, just because they use a tool which is called Jasmine and another which is called Cucumber.
We live in a mad world.