In article <2013101623133337485-owenjacobson@grimoireca>, Owen Jacobson <owen.jacob...@grimoire.ca> wrote:
> * SexMachine (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/SexMachine/0.1.1 - an > attempt to detect the gender of names, which⦠well, ask the nearest boy > named Sue - or girl named Leslie) I'm not sure what you're objecting to here. Is it the name, or the functionality? As for the name, I guess different people have different reactions, but I (as a male) find this only mildly offensive. I can see why some people might have a stronger reaction to it. Perhaps not the best name one might have come up with, but certainly not anywhere near the list you cited. I would not have picked the name myself, but I also would not want to see us go so far as to forbid something with that name from being listed on pypi. As for the function, guessing gender from names is important in the advertising world. Everybody knows that some names are ambiguous. And that sometimes names that you would think of as unambiguously associated with a particular gender are used by the other. And a zillion other ways the guess can be wrong. Still, it's worth real money in on-line commerce and advertising to know (even with a certain degree of uncertainty) somebody's gender. So it's not surprising people are writing tools to guess that from names. Nor do I think it's inappropriate. Full disclosure: I work for a company which makes money selling on-line advertising. If we can provide accurate gender information to our advertisers, we can charge them more per impression.
-- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list