I'm sorry but I cannot accept the argument that because its a feminine word its not an appropriate name for the language. Gender balance has been a problem for this industry and making it so all names are male so people won't feel bad to say they like it is ridiculous. I worked hard in WSO2 to create an open workplace for women and 30% engineers are women - so it is possible to make it better if you try hard. Isolating tech to male-only names is not the solution.
As James noted, I updated the blog I wrote (even though the words were not meant the way you presented them) to remove that offending bit. And indeed your points about incorporating "do not sexualize the name" are great and we'll put them into our terms of conduct.
> —we didn't originally think we'd need to say that, but it turns out people just cannot resist saying creepy, sexual shit about anything they perceive to be feminine.
Personally speaking, I knew exactly what 90% of the comments were going to be about just from the front page. Seeing that the dev team isn't from the US explained it, but yeah, it has to be hard out there for non-US teams to submit to HN.
I can tell you don't see it, but there are a multiple aspects of the ballerina site that will offend many of the people they presumably want to engage. I assume that's unintentional. The best thing for them to do is to understand the problems, fix them, and apologize to the offended people.
Dismissing the words of the person explaining the problems and providing good advice on dealing with them is a good way to remain frustrated and fail.
> That obviously starts with the Enterprise Integrator team as that is where this baby was flirted with, dated and then conceived
This is really damaging: the Ballerina in question is referred to as "baby", she is flirted with and then conceived—weird because that's an unusual order of events, but I guess this means you knocked her up and then had a baby with her? I can't continue, even dissecting this sentence feels creepy. Just don't do this. It's weird and disturbing and it will put off most women and many men who might otherwise consider using or contributing to your language.
Consider renaming the language to "Ballet", which is distinctly non-gendered and doesn't have these issues but still suggests the grace and beauty you are inspired by and aspiring to. Seriously, consider this. Yes, it's late in the game (post 1.0) and you like the name you have, but it's close enough to the current name that you won't lose much branding and you can keep the same nice logo that you already have.
If you are going keep the name Ballerina, you cannot sexualize the name and you should have a rule that others in the community not do so either. Julia has a specific rule in the code of conduct saying "do not sexualize the name of the project"—we didn't originally think we'd need to say that, but it turns out people just cannot resist saying creepy, sexual shit about anything they perceive to be feminine.