Renaming Coq

Announcements
1

Dear members of the Coq community,

The Coq development team acknowledges the recent discussions (started on the Coq-Club mailing list) around Coq’s logo and name.

We wish to thank everyone that participated in these discussions. Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations, reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning / using Coq because of its name, were all very important so that the community could fully recognize the impact of the current name and its slang meaning in English, especially with respect to gender-diversity in the Coq community.

For these reasons, the Coq development team is open to a renaming.

Many proposals have already been added to the wiki page https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names. Please keep adding new proposals and listing advantages / drawbacks of the current ones. They will be important to elaborate a shortlist.

Later on, when this first phase is over, we will prepare a community survey which will include questions about naming, but not only. This survey will also ask questions about demographics, applications, pain points… Many things that should help learn more about the community and plan for the future of Coq. To prepare this survey, we will need the help of the community, so we will come back to you with a call for participants to a dedicated working group.

A final decision will be made based on this survey.

Note that this plan is not set in stone. Also note that this is not yet a commitment toward a renaming. This will all depend on the community feedback (especially with the survey). The only thing that is clear at this point is that we cannot just ignore the issue and do nothing.

For further discussion on this topic, besides the wiki page we recommend using the Zulip stream https://coq.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/237655-Miscellaneous/topic/Official.20name.20of.20Coq

Théo Zimmermann, on behalf of the Coq development team

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2

If it happens, … what a shame. What a shame. It would leave me wordless, speechless, disgusted. Coq is a perfectly fine name, and if English aware people has problems with it, first they should open their minds to the existence of other languages; secondly they should read it beeep or whatever their childish sensitivity prefers (or whatever their silly environment, idiotic coworkers or alike, implicitly suggests), e.g., maybe they can spell it like “Cee O coo”. It remembers me of an episode of the TV show Friends, where Joey giggled each time Ross, who was speaking in a scientific conference, said a specific word which was funny for the simple Joey’s mind, because of its resemblance to a “funny” word, or something like this. In the show it could have been hilarious. In real life, it’s just plain stupidity which we need to frown upon, and of course reject any attempt to change those words because in some language (dominant or not) it’s derogatory or whatever.

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