There was also a movement to spell woman "womyn," but that didn't catch on.

I think the change chairman -> chair, fireman -> firefighter, etc. was an important part of a successful campaign to open access (somewhat) of parts of society to women from which they had been excluded.

@MichaelE2 I wanted search and find this the other day for the discussion, but I just found it now: This always makes me smile

It's a linguist replying to one of the self-educated language experts. Excerpt:

@halirutan The same happened in Latin, only earlier. "Homo" meant a human being irrespective of gender, but a late Latin came to be used to signify a male human being.

eh i suggest you guys to never browse woke twitter, you would lose all your faith in humanity.

womyn is actively used nowadays

@Alucard One of my favorite albums is "Myn ynd Wymyn." But whereas in the news and in the work documents and emails of my uni, you see "chair" not "chairman" and generally un-manned verbiage as well as pronoun preferences, etc., you don't find "womyn."

Very off-topic, but I'm working on this problem: mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/212960/… and am working through the necessary stuff to project Graphics3D primitives into collections of 2D primitives with appropriate perspective and all that junk

Working with this set of lectures: youtube.com/watch?v=Xks1v4GNUiY

Do other people imagine they'd want to use that kind of thing? (2D-ify a 3D scene)

It just changes how opaque I make my code

The planned interface will look like Fake3DGraphics[{objects}, opts]

Where most things will be inherited from Graphics and friends

Since it's gonna format as a Graphics anyway

What I imagine will be kinda cute is that you'll be able to create some sort of Manipulate so that you can "rotate" these things, but I cannot promise great performance

@MichaelE2 ah no i meant it is actively used on twitter usually by angry feminists or trolls. either it will never reach academia ( i hope) or it's just too soon

Maybe my constructed form of a FakeGraphics3D will precompute its camera transforms and stuff...

can you make something like a 2d-fied dna chain?

Potentially, I figure. Once you have a reasonable occlusion algorithm you can work from there to put extra layers where the lines in the DNA would overlap, giving the impression of 3D.

But I'm not at that stage yet. I've got the 3D -> 2D projection stuff mostly down, but after that you need to work through occlusions, and then finally the conversion of visible surfaces to 2D primitives

The last one can be done in a modular way, e.g. you can "register" some transformation that will take a Cylinder to a Rectangle and a Disk

And so different primitives can get different transforms

sounds like a mess tbh

Well yeah

It's fake 3D graphics

No way to make that work nicely and without corner cases

@JimB Maybe I'm being naive.. But I think when one feels offended by other's words, it's more important to confirm if there is a real hostility or not, than to concentrate too much on one's personal feelings.

Also I guess maybe I'm not a native English speaker, so I can't feel the tension between the two words "man" vs. "woman". Being never lived outside China, I'm not even a good non-native English speaker. So my real feeling on this topic is a deep afraid of speaking in English-driven communities, that I tried really hard to make my words free of syntax/grammar error, but it's even harder to make them offending free, I just don't have the time to follow up the rapidly changing standards.

@Silvia I think most that care of it are either baizuo - making up problems to seem important and powerful over matters that really aren't relevant - or afraid of that group. I wish people wouldn't need to concern themselves with this group that apparently is very eager to use false etymologies, for instance, to support their project. At the same time, I do consider the gendered person pronouns (he/she) something that could go away (most languages handle lack of such division just fine).

@JimB (If my wording sounds harsh I must apologize in advance. Some of them came from dictionary or translator.)

@kirma I agree most of your words. But I guess as long as we human race hasn't upload ourselves to Matrix, there will be biological differences between different individuals, either gender or height or something else, and we will still need words to describe them. BTW what is "baizuo"?

@Silvia I understand that eradicating man/woman would be very strange indeed, but dichotomy of he/she is technically quite needless. For instance, Finnish, and as far as I understand Chinese works just fine without specifying the gender of the third person.

@Silvia "White left", the recent Chinese neologism for these people...

Chinese is something in the middle. :) 她(she) and 他(he) is written differently, but share the same pronunciation.

@kirma Oh that... I heard of it. I'm not really enthusiastic in social medias... It feels more like a young people's world..

@Silvia As far as I've understood writing them differently was something that was coined by intellectuals rather recently (100 years ago or so?) and actually introduced as a result of looking at European languages... or am I mistaken?

@kirma They exist in the ancient time, but as spoken words used only by "lower class". "Educated class" use genderless words exclusively.

Something like "汝", "尔", "彼".

@Silvia Oh, interesting! I'd assume there would be different pronunciation for them then... in earlier times?

@kirma That I can't say for sure! It could well be introduced from other languages. I think novels from Ming dynasty were starting to use lots of She and He.

@Silvia So... it's more complicated than I thought. Actually, I thought it was more complicated than I thought. :)

I just looked the dictionary ( zdic.net/hans她 ), apparently in really ancient time (maybe Han dynasty?), 她(She) is the same meaning as 姐(elder sister), which is the same meaning as 母(mother).

But one can definitely live well without explicit he/she. (Only problem as a Finn speaking English is that I tend to mix them together, and when I'm talking carelessly, accidentally refer to my friends with wrong gender because it really doesn't have a meaning on my thoughts of expressing the relation.)

@Silvia Hmmm.... maybe I have to make my GF elaborate the matter to me. ;)

I know what you mean. Once I referred Ray Bradbury with "her", still feeling the awkward :P

:)

(BTW 他(He) originally means "snake or worm", "other thing/ 3rd party". Indeed nothing to do with gender.)

@kirma Need to go now. Thanks for the interesting chat!

@Silvia Thanks for informative insight too! :)

@Silvia No offense taken. It has been a good discussion (although admittedly more than a bit off topic for a Mathematica forum). The use of words certainly change over time. But underlying all of this is not just how folks feel but how folks actually get treated (restrictions in buying a house or getting credit, access or lack thereof to privileges that others take for granted, etc.).

And for whatever it's worth this forum have been great about rational discussions. Other forums (Mathematics SE, for instance) far less so.

Does anyone know who made this?

github.com/njpipeorgan/MathCompile

Hm, it seems it already has a lot of stars, many from users here.

Was there an announcement I missed?

@Szabolcs community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1830592

I would have thought the unit testing framework would work nicely with packages. I've been using it for a couple of months, but not since the beginning of January. I came back to it today, but some of my tests failed. On some runs they all failed. What seemed to be happening is that the package symbol, instead of being found in the package context, was created in the global context. But not all the time.

The CellEvaluationFunction blocks $ContextPath. Does that mean I have to put Needs["MyPackage`"] in every input cell in the testing notebook? Seems like a PIA.

I guess it was working because myPkgFunction returned to the top level unevaluated until $ContextPath became unblocked. Except when it was evaluated as a "Global`" symbol, not a package one. I guess.

@MichaelE2 See this answer from Kuba:

@LukasLang Thanks! Looks like the right thing...

You know, I've given up on packages several times over the last 25 years because they're such a PIA sometimes. A tar pit waiting for you to step in.