The Inclusive Language Guide for the Scala community

As members of the Scala community, we should all be committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, sexual identity and orientation, or other such characteristics.

The Scala Center aims to maintain and promote an environment that is representative of the rich diversity of our users and community. This is why, as requested by its advisory board, the Scala Center created an Inclusive Language Guide to help the community adopt a more inclusive way of communicating.

We published the guide back in November of last year. At first, we had announced it quietly, notably through our LinkedIn profile. Since then, we have made sure that the high-profile projects that we maintain made the required changes to abide by it. This included different kinds of updates, from branch renaming, to CI and deployment scripts reconfiguration, to large PRs with lots of code changes. We have also taken a habit of following the guide when writing any kind of communication, including documentation.

It is now time to advertise the Inclusive Language Guide more widely. You may find it here: https://docs.scala-lang.org/contribute/inclusive-language-guide.html

We encourage all Scala contributors, maintainers, organizers, teachers and others who work in Scala open source space to check it out. Contributions to the core Scala projects are now expected to follow its recommendations. Feel free to also use it for your own projects.