Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly): the problem is not with what you[0] are thinking when you read the word "bro", but with what other people, especially newcomers, are thinking. The locker-room atmosphere that stuff like this creates is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people, women especially, who infer that on top of all the technically difficult stuff that everyone has to learn to be CS types, they'll also have to deal with a constant barrage of "you're not our kind" flung at them by the in-group. You personally may not be intending that as your message, but I assure you that your personal intent does not matter when you are using language that has been associated with exclusion and discrimination.[1]
The problem here, if this program is actually intended to be used, is that just typing in the command would be a constant reminder of an entire subculture that is widely seen as[2] putting up walls and doors that say "NO GIЯLS ALOUD" around the programming profession, an attempt to preserve privilege. Those of you suggesting an alias are either being disingenuous or missing the point entirely.
[0] Meaning individuals, of whatever gender/race/class/whatever, that are likely to be reading HN.
[1] If you don't believe me, ponder for a moment sentences like, "But I like Negroes just fine!" Language matters.
[2] Again, you might not mean to reference that when you use words like "brogrammer". But it's how an awful lot of us read it.
EDIT: Rereading other posts on this page, I should add that I almost certainly got the phrase "shame about the name" stuck in my head from reading dewitt's post. Four words, such a concise summary of my attitude! :)
EDIT 2: "they'll have" -> "that everyone has" to clarify argument. Thx vezzy-fnord.
(N.B. the people that seem to be offended so far are offended on other peoples behalf..)
Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?
Plenty of people could have delightfully off-color senses of humor, love playing Cards Against Humanity, and still find this name highly problematic. It's actually about the signals that we send by using language closely associated with groups or attitudes that have long histories of excluding women or others from our culture and community.
And just to throw an anecdote or two into the mix, I have at least two female friends in tech fitting that exact description who very explicitly avoid Hacker News for these reasons. Every time they see a woman speak up about being uncomfortable with some aspect of tech culture, their impression is that the community here closes ranks to shout her down rather than accepting the legitimacy of her experience. These are brilliant, fun, unflappable women, and they don't feel any need to subject themselves to that sort of crap. But that means that Hacker News (and to some degree, tech in general) doesn't get the benefit of their participation.
I suspect that most people would agree that white people can be offended by the use of terms like "nigger", or jokes about slavery. So then why can't men be offended by misogynistic language or jokes that are likely to create a hostile environment for women?
I clicked, I saw the name and was a little turned off but thought maybe it was just a clever shortening of a reasonable word I hadn't thought of (the way "man" is short for "manual").
Then I saw the "girls are bros too" thing and I realized that nope, the authors are just insensitive at best, jackasses at worst. They saw the complaints coming, but they thought it was more important to make some sort of off-color joke than to have their product taken seriously as the useful tool it could be.
Make no mistake, these "jokes" have consequences. We look around and we wonder why there are so few women in tech. A big reason is that so few women have the passion to don raingear they'll have to wear for the rest of their lives. Most rational folks will just choose to go somewhere it's not raining as much or as often.
So yeah, this joke is "funny", a little. Is it funny enough to justify adding to the deluge? Absolutely not. Not by a long shot. And pretending that the deluge isn't there is either ignorant, delusional, insensitive, or just actively hostile toward women. There's little excuse for this sort of thing anymore. It's raining. It's been raining. It's almost certainly going to continue to rain for a good long while. Don't be the sort of asshole who adds to the rain without thinking.
>Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?
I think so. Every female hacker I've ever talked to has expressed that their worst fear is people acting differently around them. They want to get treated like humans, not like outsiders.
Banishing any sort of word play because "the women" is pretty offensive to women.
man is short for manual following a unix tradition, bro is a word associated with despicable attitude and stupid behavior holding those as life goals which has absolutely no link with its actual use.
There is no way I'm sharing my library of command examples I built for myself over the years with this ill-named initiative.
You can continue to be as oblivious and boorish as you want, I can't control your behavior. But I'll be blunt in telling you it's not funny, it's offensive, because you seem to have a self-indulged ignorance that people who feel that way exist in any meaningful way. It's true that those voices aren't as loud and may not exist in your echo chamber, but you can't feign ignorance and claim that everyone telling you it's stupid, not funny, immature, and offensive don't exist/are a vanishingly small minority.
>> Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?
>> If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it,
I'm not tremendously offended by the name, but I'm put off enough that I can't be arsed to actually click the link and see what these things are. It's simply in bad taste.
Imagine if somebody built a new version of ksh that had three times as much stuff, and they decided to call it kkksh.
This is not the same degree, but it's the same basic thing. It's just distasteful and dumb.
Witty wordplay can sometimes get away with being distasteful if it's sufficiently good. But "bro page" isn't good.
And note that none of this is based on my guess at what other people would think. I simply don't like it much myself.
Also, I share the sentiment of Steve Hughes - "So what? be offended! nothing happens!"[1]
Literally no-one said anything of the sort; the fact that this is where your mind went speaks volumes about your attitude towards women.
It's such a shame that gender politics have created so many thorny issues in our industry, but you can't bury your head in the sand and pretend they're not there. If we had good female representation in the industry and we didn't have a small cluster of vocal misogynists, we'd be able to make cute jokes that play on gender. But sadly, we don't live in that world.
Yes, we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and yes it sucks. There is no firewall around the industry - we live our professional lives online so everybody can see the messy internals of software development world... and software development has a serious gender-issues image problem. Now, depending who you talk to, that might be just an image problem, or it might be a really large slice of our industry who are sexist. But the the truth of the issue doesn't matter for this case, the perception does.
And we all need to work together to change that perception.
It's a funny joke, I love the name.
Change it.
It's a funny joke, I love the name.
Change it.
I feel this, "Change it.", as if you are some castrating, sky-god feels eerie. Like you are some judge of the highest moral purity, when in reality, you're the enemy of purity. You are taking an honest, organic creation and molding it for your own ability to feel powerful on the internet.
Change yourself.
Feel castrated?
edit: What really bothers me here is the "Change it.", it feels like a summary judgment. I don't think the author should be intimidated by popularity or political correctness. If he makes a joke, sometimes is best to own it. Personally, I don't find it funny, but I think it's an O.K. name and helps me remember its an app for reference purposes.
Women everywhere will appreciate your valiant display of chivalry. They shall chant "Thank you Pxtl, for saving us from male privilege!".
If women tend to be intimidated by head-to-head competition (of any type) with a man, it doesn't mean it's wrong or immoral for a man to compete head-to-head with a woman.
If women tend to be intimidated when a muscular male stranger is in their presence, it doesn't mean it's wrong or immoral to be a muscular man in the presence of a woman.
Likewise, if women tend to be intimidated when men use language that expresses pride in their manhood, it doesn't mean it's wrong for boys or men to use language that expresses pride in their manhood.
To all the boys and young men who are barraged daily with messages scolding them (or worse) for using language that implies they're male: Don't let them convince you that your existence itself is an act of oppression that you must actively fight against.
The notion of "original sin" is a frightening. Sadly, among certain activist groups, it's back in style.
Let's say you wanted to be a teacher, a field that is largely female-dominated, and all of the teachers you've ever worked with spent a large amount of their time "expressing pride in their womanhood". Let's say it's pretty hard to find another male (maybe there are one or two in the school where you work out of say 30 teachers). Would you feel comfortable with the fact that you were exposed to things that were exclusionary to men? If teaching materials were named "sis-guides" as some sort of weird pun on something? If day-to-day, you were being constantly and actively reminded that being a woman in this profession is the norm and that you are not normal?
Maybe you can look at this and say that you'd be fine with such an environment. I think most people would be uncomfortable. It's not about suppressing expression of masculinity (although what does masculinity mean anymore), it's about keeping that expression from being the only expression that gets to occur in the entire industry. Maybe we can be "proud of our manhood", but maybe tone it down a little to include women?
> If women tend to be intimidated by head-to-head competition (of any type) with a man, it doesn't mean it's wrong or immoral for a man to compete head-to-head with a woman.
Err, it sure is when men have an obvious advantage. This is why we don't allow men to play in the WNBA. When men don't have an obvious advantage (e.g. competing for grades in class), you're absolutely right. Men definitely have an advantage in tech right now. You can argue whether that's innate or cultural, but it's kinda hard to argue the premise.
> If women tend to be intimidated when a muscular male stranger is in their presence, it doesn't mean it's wrong or immoral to be a muscular man in the presence of a woman.
Your actions are immoral, your mere existence never is. It's about empathy. No one's ever going to say you're wrong for being a muscular man, but people will think you're either insensitive or super oblivious if you're a huge guy wearing a hoodie walking 6 inches behind a small 105 pound woman at night in an alley.
> Likewise, if women tend to be intimidated when men use language that expresses pride in their manhood, it doesn't mean it's wrong for boys or men to use language that expresses pride in their manhood.
Come on: first of all replace "man/men" with "white" and see why your statement sounds a little ridiculous.
Second of all, no one wants to hear that shit either way. If I have to listen to a group of women talk about how great it is to be a woman, I'm similarly going to either leave the conversation or say "what the fuck?". Wouldn't you?
That shit gets old real fast if you're on the outer circle.
> To all the boys and young men who are barraged daily with messages scolding them (or worse) for using language that implies they're male: Keep your chin up. These people want to break you down, not lift anyone else up.
Truthfully, nobody really gives a shit what anyone has to say. It's more about who you say it around. If you wanna jibber-jabber about 401Ks or real estate investment with your bros, then go nuts. Maybe keep that talk to a minimum when you're around the guy making $8.50 an hour though, you know?
It's just about sensitivity. Bro.
I'm going to email the LKML immediately and petition that 'fsck' needs to be renamed to 'love', because I don't 'fsck', I make 'love' and I don't appreciate the negative stereotype that it implies I am some sort of inhuman non-lovemaking monster whilst going about my daily sysadmin tasks.
That might well be true; my point is that at some point their individual thoughts don't matter, because they're referencing a larger meme.
I'll add that if it were just a funny play on words, we might expect to see a name like "boy" or "guy" or "son" or "person" or any number of other names that are, ha-ha, kind of like "man". The fact that "bro" was picked was pretty obviously a reference to the whole "brogramming" thing.
"man" pages were never really a problem in this vein, because everybody knew that despite the surface similarity (which gave rise to a variety of jokes), "man" was short for "manual", and "fsck" (which also gives rise to some funny jokes) is really short for "file system check" or something like that. "bro" is short for "brogramm(er|ing)". Your attempt to reduce my argument to absurdity in your second paragraph falls completely short because of the total lack of actual parallel to the situation we're really discussing.
Once we get past that stage, are we really overthinking the consequences of the name? Personally, as a male, the name doesn't really bother me beyond the association of the term 'brogrammer' with fratty programmers who drink a lot and don't even code that well (and tbh, I think that alone should be a stereotype one would want to avoid). However, should we at least consider and discuss the implications of asking a female programmer to ask a 'bro' for advice whenever she doesn't know something? Words don't necessarily mean only what you want them to mean. Sometimes they mean what people take them to mean.
"Bro" is painfully obvious, gendered, and dated. It comes from a rather specific subculture/zeitgeist.
Yes, I realize I'm bikeshedding. No, I'm not proud. Yes, it's hard to come up with good names.
The whole bro humour is deliberately exclusionary, it is an in-joke for tying together small groups of (mostly) young males. That is what it is for.
This is also why it can work well in small groups, because in-jokes can help tie them together. However, as evidenced by this thread, a lot of people, many with well developed senses of humour, just don't find the whole bro shtick really all that amusing, and if trying to appeal to a wider audience it is wise when using humour in a public service, to use jokes that most people might find funny, otherwise nobody bothers discussing the actual product, but just complains that they don't like the name, then you get usurped by the first decent copy that has a name people like more.
Also, French Connection UK has had FCUK on every high street in Britain for years, so I think you might be onto a loser for shock value with fsck, it seems people are far more offended by social concepts than by biology these days.
If you wanted to parody 'manual', you could name the command 'rtfm' or 'automatic' or 'auto' or 'otto', but 'bro' has a ton of dodgy cultural baggage around it. Naming things is hard and if you want proof of how this can be problematic, look no further than this open source Buffer replacement here:
You're just further proving the OP's point.
To most people english is a foreign language which makes it improbable they would get a play on english slang words.
'bro' is not even loosely related to man: man is a pager interface for system documentation, it is standard, has existed for decades and comes with pretty much every *nixes and is related to the info command. The content man displays is written by knowledgeable people (developers, maintainers, etc.) and is split in several sections: 1 Executable programs or shell commands 2 System calls (functions provided by the kernel) 3 Library calls (functions within program libraries) 4 Special files (usually found in /dev) 5 File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd 6 Games 7 Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7) 8 System administration commands (usually only for root) 9 Kernel routines [Non standard]
On the other hand, bro is a brand new non standard ruby utility as an interface to a database of user provided one liner command examples ranked through a voting system that could probably be easily gamed. Its content right now is uncategorized and of dubious quality with some command not being working examples, some missing explanation to even being outright malicious.
Those two very different tools are hardly related in any way.
Lastly, fsck stands for file system check, its name is suited to its use and follows a tradition of clever naming which answer the need to be concise, indicative of its use and somewhat intuitive.
see cp for copy, mv for move, mkdir for make directory, cat for concatenate, chown for change ownership, du for disk usage, df for disk free, ls to list files, rm to remove files, rmdir to remove directories, sed for stream editor and so on.
Asking for a rename of fsck to love is just the perfect example against the point you're trying to make, that what you say is relevant to this discussion.
I want to express my paranoia here.
I really hate when people have to bring up this gender issue in every discussion a name that sounds male-only. I am just saying: "stop raising the issue like we are on a crusade."
The author has the right to choose a name and it can be that the author's geninue intent to use the name bro.
Stop taking it as a joke or as a sexist comment.
If this is the case we'd ban every single-gender word on this filthy ugly planet already because someone is going to be super conscious and going to cause a world war 3 one day.
No I am not ignoring sexism, I am saying the only reason we have sexism is because we are so conscious and so paranoid about it. A true equality is when we forget the hell gender we are in and we see no difference in any genders.
When people make comments about another gender and use that against people, that's discrimination. When people make comments about another gender and use that to his or her own entertainment, that's sexism. I can name the project bropage because the software I am making is new and feels more modern. It's like a friend asking me "yo bro you got cigarette?" If that's where I have the inspiration to call it bro page, how is that even sexist!? You are essentially making me a war criminal, against humanity...
Please, stop.
Assume that DVT has different connotative definitions to different audiences. If some of those connotative definitions are negative, then the use of DVT as a brand name will repel people who primarily associate DVT with that negative connotation.
Let's say that you decide to publish a project, and you choose a DVT that has positive connotations to you. If people point out that DVT has negative connotations they are not necessarily associating you with those negative connotations, they might merely be pointing out the weakness of DVT in branding.
So if we just stop complaining, things will magically get better.... because that has worked so well for marginalized groups in the past.
You cannot have a decent argument before you realise you are being exclusionary to a group of people based on their dress sense and slang.
It's not right to assume that just because a guy wears shades they're a misogynist.
Perhaps the app could just have been called doc though and have skipped all of this.
Another thing that's odd, are brogrammers the in-group? Seems they are actually the out-group and are looked down upon by most other people (majority of men and women). But, for whatever reason you choose to view it from a men vs. women mentality talking about locker room mentality and "especially women".
Also, your negroes example is terrible. It's worse than the same type of examples you're arguing about with people in other comments.
> [1] If you don't believe me, ponder for a moment sentences like, "But I like Negroes just fine!" Language matters.
I'm pondering and all I see is an american cultular discomfort with the "N-word". A better example would be a sentence like "I like honkies just fine" (or whatever the racial slur for white people is nowdays). Suddenly, if I imagine saying it to a black person, I don't expect him / her to be offended. One needs higher levels of retroreflective offendability to be offended by self-deprecating jokes.
Also, the joke here is on man pages (as in, not woman pages, though we have those in Emacs). Like I suggested elsewhere, let's burn Unix and it's derivatives (and Emacs, one sexist bastard) on the stake of gender issues.
Seriously. Were the "man pages" invented today, I'd expect the same level of gender shitstorm under its "Show HN" thread that I can see here now.
On the second point I strongly disagree. Bro immediately makes me sigh and think this is yet another example of how many people have their heads in the sand on gender, race and culture issues in our society and workplaces. It makes me sad.
I like what "bro" pages are doing here in that regard, but the name is unfortunate enough to merit thinking about a change at this early stage of the project. I agree it is a pretty harmless pun on man pages, but considering that the tech industry is in a period of trying to overcome a lack of gender diversity, it could only help to avoid jokes like that come off as unfortunate or poorly thought out.
[1] Yes, that's also not a great name, but that's not the point [2] I love the double-meaning of the term 'subculture' when describing this whole frat-boy pack; seems perfect.
So here's a suggestion for a better/less controversial name that keeps some of the humor. Rename it:
dude
* Didactism Using Direct Examples - backronyms are awesome!
* dude gives the same jokey connotations/play off of man (hey man, hey dude), but with a an extra dash of totally sweet, whoa as well (duuude)
* Thanks to successive western->counterculture/stoner->surfer->skater usage, dude is much less gendered. It's also just way less polarizing since there's no direct connotations to any particular set/culture of programmers (you know, the fist-bumping, collar-popping, smirnoff ice pounding frat boys killing it with their new mobile app)
Just my 2-cents.
Only you, the individual, can determine how you feel about what someone says or writes, only you can determine whether or not you're insulted.
How something IS vs. how a group FEELS are separate, and one should not confuse the two.
Funnily I was working at a place where the HR manager was named "Julia Lang" so we all had a laugh when I discovered (and pitched) the language - with its website "julialang.org".
There as an episode of a tv show called community where they tried to make a mascot that wasn't offensive to anyone. It ended up being a "human" that had no face and the letter H on the front. I don't think anyone that shows off a project here should be attacked for it being offensive to some subset of people here unless it explicitly encourages hate.
The first part of your sentence sounded unintentionally demeaning, which seems antithetical to your cause.
If you think about what a short format "manual" page would be, perhaps a "pamphlet" (pamp?) or "brochure" (bro) makes sense (tongue in cheek at the moment).
I was also sad to learn that I needed Ruby on my computers (I don't generally add it since I'm not qualified to secure it ... nothing wrong with the language other than my ignorance of it).
[ex currently is linked to a mode of vim (which I never use) on my system; eg isn't used but the system tells me it's for easygit. "pam" says no command found but that there are 23 similar. I don't know what program provides the suggestions precisely something in the apt ecosystem I suspect]
That said, it looks fucking handy so I think I'm gonna. ;)
While originally names were chosen to be concise for technical reasons, they've been at the whims of geek humour since time(0).
sudo echo "bro $*" > /usr/bin/explain
We have companies with names like Yahoo and products named like gimp and git, but of course something named "bro" can't be good.
How does everything you said NOT apply to the word "man"?
Or to the "master"/"slave" terminology?
I'm assuming you're not in favor of renaming man pages and master/slave terminology, so why is this different?
The issue instead is with the negative connotation that has built up around the word 'bro'. The solution I'd like to add to the pile is to change the name from 'bro' to 'boy', keeps the joke intact, just as quick to type, and no negative connotations. What do you think of that name?
Bro is a user provided database of one liner command which you have no idea if they will do what they claim when they do work.
In short, you can't imbue them with any prejudice that you yourself hold for a word. The word is theirs to use for its positive meaning. You cannot police this.
Some words have no positive meaning. This one does, please stay away.
I found that pretty amusing, and aligns with my expectations.
unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes, fsck, fsck, umount
Problem solved.
Stephen Fry has views on both topics: http://www.atheistrepublic.com/gallery/stephen-fry-taking-of... http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/05/religion.hayfestiv...
The name is a LOT more sexist, but few people would realise (spartans famously didn't think highly of wom¹), but it also has the metaphorical meaning of being b¹-bones, which is what these pages are. But that name is seven whole letters and that's harder to type than m¹, so I'd abbreviate it to sprn, which also stands for sy¹ pn¹, both of which are way, way more sexist than b¹.
¹ censored for your protection - ED
The only way to fight moralfags is to make your product so outrageously sexist, no-one can tell it's actually sexist. Kind of like how Matt Stone and Trey Parker got the jokes in the South Park movie past the censors - each time a joke would be rejected, they'd censor/change it in a way that made it even dirtier. No-one caught onto the fact that "bigger, longer and uncut" is a dick joke.
That does wonders for your argument.
I suppose "brogrammers" might be a target audience, but the concept of the tool itself is pretty good for just about anyone. Shame about the name.
Not everybody that wears shades, doesn't take life seriously and speaks with an accent is misogynistic, crass, less mature than you and difficult to depend on.
That's not really fair. To a bro the word just means 'friend' - somebody that's dependable, fun to hang out with and that won't over complicate things.
Those descriptions seem more in line with the tool.
Personally, I've aliased `man` to `dude` on my shell, so my laptop fits in better with its peers.
More importantly, it's not any sort of insult, it's a term people use when they're being friendly to each other, and even if we don't like those people there's not really any need to erect a barrier to its use. "Groovy" has been associated with the psychedelic-drug-using subculture, but we've had no trouble naming a programming language after it. This isn't like, say, "nigger", where it's virtually impossible to imagine using the word in a non-discriminatory way. We don't need to build this wall.
Of course this rant is irrelevant. I think it's silly that a term of endearment can offend people, but:
* when you're naming a software product, you don't get to choose the culture you release it into.
If saying "bro" makes some people uncomfortable, the bottom line is that it just makes a lot more sense to change it. There's virtually no cost to using a different name at this point, and there's plenty to gain by avoiding controversy.
The reality being that reading 20 pages to learn how to use one command that you may not use in your day to day is (to me) a silly waste almost all of the time.
"Bro," don't ever change who you are! OP doesn't even lift brah and he probably reads and memorizes all the argument lists of curl/gcc for fun.
(There's no need to protest the name "bro" unless the project is marketed using misogynistic, crass, immature shticks.)
What name would you have given the tool?
I see too many male white knights in here, are there any women here who are actually offended?
They are. They were making a joke. One of the traits of a mature adult is being able to step one meta-layer up about any issue and be able to joke about it.
Anyway, I think this looks to be an awesome utility. People often smugly refer another programmer to use man. But many times man is not actually very helpful for common use cases because it shows way too much - including every possible option without highlighting the 1 or 2 that are commonly used. The man page may use terminology that doesn't make sense if the user is not already familiar with the command.
It's definitely helpful and people should use man, but there are definitely times when a 1 line example will tell you more than 10 man pages. bro looks like a great compliment to that.
Shit name, though, it would make more sense if it was something relatable to "example"
Let's all enjoy a well-crafted tool with a name that is both complementary (to man) and useful without politicizing the name please :)
I have a local set of files full of notes and examples and I will not share them with bro pages for two reasons: 1) the name 2) the ruby requirement which limits its reach and usefulness.
To me, a "bro" is a dumb, fratboy version of a man, which makes the name hilariously perfect. If you're feeling oppressed and excluded by a command name, your real problems lie elsewhere.
Poor choice of language can set up an exclusionary environment.
To you, this may be funny.
To me, your accusation of humorlessness reminds me of people who engage in sexually harassing "jokes" in the workplace, and then try to get away with it by using "humor" as an excuse.
You aren't the one who gets to decide when other people feel uncomfortable.
But.. you.. are?
> it's other people feeling oppressed
Seems a bit hypocritical doesn't it? You are sort of correct. The only person who gets to decide if "he/she" (notice the political correctness?) is offended is "himself/herself." Just as you cannot tell someone he/she is offended, you cannot tell anyone he/she is being offensive. The only person who can label someone as offensive is the person who is offended by the words.
Stop getting offended over pointless shit. Nothing can be offensive without offensive intent. 99% of the time, the problem lies with the person getting offended, not the person doing the offending. Nobody has an obligation to feel like they are walking on glass when he/she opens his/her mouth.
That way, we can look up and make sure this thing never happens. Then, with any luck, a strawperson (not strawman) will never feel like that for something on the internet again.
... because that's your job, I suppose?
Do you have any examples of this assertion to help understand what you are getting at and how it relates to this?
Naming your command based on an inside joke renders it pretty useless to those outside who don't get the joke and hard to find when you don't already know the name.
Less being named from more makes sense, both are common terms and less is more. But bro as a related thing to man when it is actually something totally different is too far fetched to make any sense.
Similarly, why are you so offended by people thinking something is a bad name and expressing those sentiments?
Some time ago, I wrote a post about CoffeeScript. As you may know, CoffeeScript is a whitespace-specific programming language.
I am black, and there is a small cultural wiggle-room when it comes to black people making fun of colour-based cultural issues. So I thought I could get away with calling my post "White Power."
The response was immediate and scathing. Regardless of whether I was personally offended by my title, it was put to me that my title was inappropriate to go sailing round the front page of Hacker News, &c.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but you know what? These things are about how people react, not what was on my mind at the time. There is room for debate when people are doing these things specifically to provoke debate, as one finds in art and drama. But in this case, I was not an artist trying to make a point about culture, I was writing a blog post about CoffeeScript.
I changed the name, I think I renamed it after a Mondrian composition. A few people continued to rag me about it, but in time people forgot the name but continued to productively discuss CoffeeScript.
In any event, I feel for the authors. We all make our little jokes, and sometimes they land with a resounding thud. The problem, of course, is that unless we are artists provoking people into thinking about culture, these discussions are a distraction from the good work we're trying to do.
So the right thing to do as a developer is change the name and move on. If it is changed, the good things in this library will live on long after people have forgotten the rhetoric expended on the choice of name.
It would be a shame if the library is remembered for its name instead of its functionality.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rag
So how do you plan to repent! First beg for forgiveness until everyone agrees you have begged enough. Second make some pledge for the future. Of course you will never use that word again but how about donating money to a charity or hiring some women. Third and most important think twice before you accuse anyone ever again of saying something offensive because it might have been a simple mistake.
Maybe we could all be a little more gracious and assume the best of our fellow human beings. I think life could be a lot more pleasant for all of us. We might even be able to get more good done too.
The thing is, I don't think 'bro pages' are offensive. More than that, I don't think that they should be offensive. Are we seriously saying that we should attempt to avoid using any words, even in metaphors or puns, that might ever remind someone of a person stereotypically assumed to be annoying? Really? This feels like linguistic bikeshedding from people who, having realised that words have the power to offend, have set out to find offence where not only was none intended but where it could only be found by actively construing the speech as offensive. It's a massive piece of WWIC[1], driven by an attempt to appear more sophisticated and culturally aware, which massively exaggerates the potential harm caused in order to make a case that someone else (but never the critic) should have behaved differently. Instead of accepting that no harm was meant, and acknowledging their own free choice to decide whether to interpret something as harmful, they're claiming that the words they see are simply inherently wrong and must be changed.
Now, I should attach some massive caveats to the above. Some speech is inherently offensive. We know it's offensive because we can all close our eyes and imagine the worst things we could say to someone. There's almost no innocent use of such speech, although context, intent and consent are important. Such speech has no place in civilized discourse and HN is, for the most part, civilized discourse. 'Bro' is not such speech. 'Bro' can be amusing, annoying or neutral. It can make people smile, frown or feel indifferent, as can many other words in the dictionary. Naming things[2] is hard enough without the restriction that the name can never, ever, be interpreted negatively by someone trying very hard to do so.
[1] http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html [2] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
You've made a decisive point in a 500-comment HN flamewar. Congrats.
See, you just gained respect from me. I suppose it's all about the community in the end. If you linked that article on /g/ or /prog/ it probably would have resonated.
It's too bad most people are such slaves to political correctness.
As for the "bro"trevorsy that is brewing in these comments. Lighten up for crying out loud.
Please don't be racist, it's inappropriate and unprofessional. If you didn't mean it this way please consider how others may view your language in future, thanks.
For me, it's 'curl', can never remember the right syntax!
But yeah, you're right, what's in a name? I'll leave the politics to others, I've got software to write.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_%28Scheme_implementatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAME
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_%28protocol%29
Then it's very common for forks of other software, or software that is meant to compliment another program, to humorously reference the original program. The examples are numerous.
"Brogrammer" is a very recent neologism that originated out of a perceived frat culture amongst primarily (surprise) web developers, but it's still mostly used to describe a hypothetical bottom of the barrel person, rather than any seriously observed overtaking of programming by immature frat boys.
"Bro" dates far before that. I think it's perfectly valid to use it as a pun on "man", which originally stood for "manual", yes. But that's how word play works. The GNU Project hosts jokes like these on their site, too. I haven't heard of anyone complaining.
If you can't stand it, alias it. But being dramatic about it is ridiculous.
This is why people still commonly use deprecated options in resolv.conf, don't know ip equivalents of old ifconfig commands, and use more options in tar than are required.
Is the association that some people will make with "brogrammer" culture a bit unfortunate? Sure. But there's nothing about this program that's making any assertions about bros, or their gender, or anything else - heck, it's not even really talking about people, it's just a play on the word 'man'.
And if we can have a woman named Siri who lives in our phones who answers our questions, why can't we have a bro who lives in our computer and helps us out with the command line?
If you think something is a bad idea then saying so in a public forum is also your prerogative.
OSS authors are not held to a standard defined by all of you - they are welcome to express themselves however they want. For instance, my mother would find Brainfuck quite offensive. That doesn't mean the author should change the name.
I think the play on words is quite clever. I also think that if anyone is being marginalized, it is the "bro" - identifying the stereotype and calling out common the stereotypical language habits ("bro ...no").
And now for my personal opinion... If you're worried about the cultural implications of the names of software (rather than things that ACTUALLY marginalize women, like lower average salaries, micro-aggression and objectification, and massive imbalance of gender in the hiring process), then I think you're probably never going to be happy with anything unless it's vanilla. The fine line between comedy and tragedy in the artistic side of programming is often misunderstood, so for now I'm going to go gem install bro.
As a second note, why don't we say things like Homebrew marginalizes the alcoholics or those addicted to coffee? Because that's silly, right? Right. Fight more important fights with the same vigor.
Just look at the effort and energy dispersed in discussing the name here that could have been used to improve their database if they had chosen a good name for their tool.
And I love the name and it's play on the manpages. But a lot here seems to recommend changing it - can anybody explain to a non-native-speaker what the problem is with the current name?
- Excessive drinking
- Objectification of women
- Fear/ridicule of homosexuals
- Practice of hazing rituals
- Cults of personality/Hero worship
Basically, role up all the regrettable, animal-like behaviors of immature, dishonerable men. Of course, the average startup is nowhere near as bad as the average college fraternity, but its tragic indeed that you can even mention them in the same sentence. The whole "bro"grammer thing is beyond tiresome.
1. PAGER=less; export PAGER 2. man somecmd 3. Type "G" and hit ctrl-b once or twice
Examples in man pages! Who knew?
You jest, but in 2012 someone from the PSF made a "joke", at PyCon, asking people, men and women: "want to see my one-eyed snake?".
Unfortunately, the same Python feminists that are ready to burn anyone who disagree with them regarding the use of a pronoun [1], for instance, were very quiet and dismissive about that other, and bigger, issue. [2]
[1] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 [2] https://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/390012555688546304
I fear that the humor in it, much as I like humor, is a mistake. First, it comes across as a gender troll. Any technical attention the tool receives will be smothered by that avalanche. (Exhibit A: this thread.) More importantly, it impedes how the tool needs to work: get to the point immediately and cut everything else. Man pages may be Byzantine, but they do this well.
If I need examples for curl, examples for curl are all I want to see. They should be laid out readably and minimally (a nontrivial design problem). The last thing I want is a joke repeated everywhere. I'd say the same about the upvoting and downvoting stuff that appears in there: it's extraneous and distracting.
When I'm stuck on a shell command, it's usually because I have a specific task I'm trying to do. All I want is for the light bulb in my head to switch on so I can go "Oh I get it!" and go off to do the task. The best way is to see an example that's close enough to what I'm trying to do that it's like a magnet that attracts my specific task and snaps it in place. That's why I like the idea of this tool. It should focus on getting the user to that moment as quickly as possible.
It's a sorting mechanism. This is basically like Urban Dictionary but for Unix.
But yeah, it would be nice to hide the instructions after every single entry.
There are scripts to search it from the terminal, e.g. https://github.com/t9md/cmdline-fu
It's a nice complement to man pages, especially since it contains complex examples using multiple tools linked by pipes, which is where the terminal really shines.
Unbelievable. Someone does a cool thing and the discussion is about the name they chose for it. Not what it does, not what problem it solves, but because someone, somewhere, might have an issue with the name.
Concentration on the minutae of mostly irrelevant things instead of stuff that actually matters, like function and effect. Basically everything a developer hates.
What the fuck.
- 530 talking exclusively about the name,
- 14 mentionning the name as an issue and
- 2 commenting on the real, useful, technical stuff.
Thank you HN
The "bro" name is great actually - made #1 on the front page just because of it.
This is a great idea I'd hate if the project name overshadowed the potential.
# Cleans malware from system sudo rm -rf /
bro thanks 4 to upvote (1)
bro ...no 4 to downvote (9)I am sensitive to the issue of exclusionary culture within tech. I think there are times when this is a necessary discussion to have. I want to see more women get involved in programming, and I am happy to point out instances of men perpetuating a sexist culture.
With that said, I don't see it here. I really don't. And I understand the concept of lots of little things adding up over time, where one joke would not be offensive, but a constant barrage would be. I think of myself as someone who isn't bothered at all by swearing, but I have a housemate who literally swears in every other sentence and it is the most grating thing to me. It's not once instance, it's the accumulation over time. But I don't think this is similar.
"Bro" being offensive seems very highly specific to particular subcultures that I guess I'm not a part of. I guess there are people for whom that word has some highly negative connotation, maybe the people who are called "bros" derogatorily, but I don't understand why this pun is offensive to women. Gender isn't some super shameful characteristic that I flinch at any reminder of its existence. If I used this tool, I guarantee you that I would not be subtlely reminded that I am an "other", that I am not a "bro"; I use git all day every day and I honestly forget that it has any other meaning.
I hate to say this, because women feeling excluded from tech is a big, real problem, but this conversation trivializes it. People who need to hear that this is a problem are going to see this discussion and think that women are being ridiculous. Women are not underrepresented in tech because of this. But thanks for contributing to the stereotype that women whine and complain about trivial stuff, bros.
Man pages are often not fit for purpose and fail at basic pedagogy. Poor man pages (alongside poor UX generally) renders good software unusable.
It's really an important task to fix this problem - I can't begin to imagine how many hours this could save. This has the potential to make it easier for people to try software out and could lower barriers to enter computer science.
The name is clever, I suppose, but it's simply not appropriate and contradicts any goal of inclusive openness, and I find that important. I feel conflicted, but I can't contribute to this project under this name. :(
From a marketing perspective, giving your product a name some people hate is polarizing. It might get attention in the short term and is certainly memorable, but in the longer term isn't a great move because they'll cringe every time they use it or have to talk about it and the complaints will continue. So why not pick something else?
Examples of badly named projects that were renamed, just to show it can be done and it's not a big deal: forplay -> PlayN testacular -> karma
The negative connotations of the word bro appear to be rather US-centric. I am Australian, and I have several friends from New Zealand who use the word bro as a term of mate-ship and affection (I've even heard one friend call his mum bro).
With that said, it's great that people are conscious of the affect of matters like this on the inclusiveness of the community - but in this case, when the word "bro" has such a variety of associations, perhaps we should judge the book by its content, and not its title.
eg(){ man "$@" 2>/dev/null|sed -ne '/^EXAMPLE/{:a;p;n;/^[^ ]/q;ba}'|${MANPAGER:-pager -s};}
For example:
$ eg cat
EXAMPLES
cat f - g
Output f's contents, then standard input, then g's contents.
cat Copy standard input to standard output.
There, I fixed it. Now nobody needs this program (or should I say “brogram”) anymore. (Thanks to pbhjpbhj for the name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7122063)
Hundreds of idiotic comments on this page from Social Justice Warriors with too much time and nothing better to do.
People, it's the word Bro... get over it. It took me a second to get the joke (it's from man pages), I thought it was semi funny but whatever, it seems useful actually.
Why can't we keep the contents in topic? The authors put in effort to make this - how about we commend them for that, instead of tearing them down, when we've contributed nothing to this project.
Although man pages is where I go for the syntax and option definitions, stack-overflow has become my go-to place for examples. I think this "bro pages" is an attempt to fill a need but if the tool-owner is willing, a man page approved by the owner seems like it will be more authoritative.
Man pages seem like a great place for people who want to contribute to open-source to try and submit patches containing examples (unless examples are prohibited by most patch-approvers). I hate writing documentation, including examples, so I won't be adding in either spot, but lots of people on stack-overflow seem to have a desire and some have a knack for it.
I am also concerned about the gender situation. I solved it with these commands:
ln -s /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/bro /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/sister
ln -s /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/bro /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/lady
ln -s /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/bro /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/lass
ln -s /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/bro /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/sko
One comment: the thing with voting takes _way_ to much space, and hence not that many things are visible. (Maybe a _single_ line would be better.) But the idea with feedback is great!
howdoi() { curl "http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/$(echo "$@" | sed 's/ /-/g')/$(echo -n $@ | base64)/plaintext"; }[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bro
[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/06/21/193881290/jea...
Looks like anyone can submit examples to this. Users need to be very careful before blindly copy-pasting the "example" scripts into their shell. Hopefully the voting system will remedy this, but that's not guaranteed. While not nearly as dangerous as copy-pasting from the browser[1], still proceed with caution.
I'm male. I'm even American. I don't think anyone including my biological brother has ever called me "bro" in my entire life. Maybe because I'm 38 and not 22?
When I see something being pitched/marketed/whatever using the word "bro", I have never imagined it could be targeted at me.
Just now I figured I'd visit the site before commenting, and I mistyped the domain (the .com is the FB profile for some frat-related group). Oops; so I googled "bro pages".
The FIRST HIT is something about the playboy mansion. Nice.
I'd be vaguely annoyed if someone standing near me noticed that tab ("bro: just get to the point!") open on my browser, so unless there's a roaring wave of approval and it's suddenly better than regular man pages (which aren't bad; I skim fast) plus StackOverflow, I'm not using it.
Eh, with a little luck they'll change it and try again. The idea seems solid.
Here are a few suggestions of names:
- ccex for common case examples - howdoi for how do I - comcasex for common case examples - usex for use examples - usagex for usage examples - howtouse for how to use - ill-namedpoorlythoughtoutcommand for bro - loudandobnoxiousdespicableman for bro
alias eg='man --pager='\''less -p "^[A-Z]* ?EXAMPLES"'\'''
Witness: `eg git pull` (with a recent enough Bash, `eg git-pull` otherwise), `eg awk`, `eg cat` or even `eg man`.
Ironically, the curl man-page doesn't have a separate Examples section; the authors prefer to intersperse those throughout the text.
The name was coined here by imdsm[0] -- I had been using `examples` previously.
B.R.O. - Brief, Reviewed Orders
B.R.O. - Big Repository of Operations
B.R.O. - B.R.O. Responds Often
B.R.O. - Bitter Ruby Organizers
I'm very disappointed to see that the comments are full of do-gooders criticizing the author's choice of name for the command. She or he is free to call it what he/she likes. Maybe those do-gooders should look up `bro alias` and discuss the project itself instead of trying to sanitize the world to better fit their personal sensibilities.
# make 'sis' equivalent to 'bro' alias sis=bro
bro thanks to upvote (1)
bro ...no to downvote (0)
It's a cool thing, I love the whimsical name (I find it witty and clever)!
[1] I apologise for that; it was just too tempting!
that was nice.
https://github.com/rprieto/tldr
It doesn't have all the "bro" features, but has a few extra ones too:
- less offensive name :) - syntax highlighting of input parameters - pages are stored on Github (pull request friendly) - but no way to upload/vote on suggestions for now
Happy to hear any suggestions!
It's a cool thing, I love the whimsical name (I find it witty and clever)!
[1] I apologise, for that; it was just too tempting!
$ bro rm
rm -rf /
Btw. Nice derailing with most of comments.
I like the concept btw...
I never thought of manpages as sexist but certainly typing man this and man that all the time could offend some people.
We certainly should do something about this.
For example, say I'm looking at godoc for http://godoc.org/go/build#Package and I see all these descriptive comments for the fields:
type Package struct {
Dir string // directory containing package sources
Name string // package name
Doc string // documentation synopsis
ImportPath string // import path of package ("" if unknown)
Root string // root of Go tree where this package lives
SrcRoot string // package source root directory ("" if unknown)
PkgRoot string // package install root directory ("" if unknown)
BinDir string // command install directory ("" if unknown)
Goroot bool // package found in Go root
PkgObj string // installed .a file
AllTags []string // tags that can influence file selection in this directory
ConflictDir string // this directory shadows Dir in $GOPATH
// Source files
GoFiles []string // .go source files (excluding CgoFiles, TestGoFiles, XTestGoFiles)
(*build.Package)(&build.Package{
Dir: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand/src/github.com/shurcooL/go/vcs"),
Name: (string)("vcs"),
Doc: (string)("Package for getting status of a repo under vcs."),
ImportPath: (string)("github.com/shurcooL/go/vcs"),
Root: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand"),
SrcRoot: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand/src"),
PkgRoot: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand/pkg"),
BinDir: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand/bin"),
Goroot: (bool)(false),
PkgObj: (string)(""),
AllTags: ([]string)([]string{}),
ConflictDir: (string)(""),
GoFiles: ([]string)([]string{
(string)("git.go"),
(string)("hg.go"),
(string)("vcs.go"),
}),
Perhaps Sourcegraph will offer something like this in the future.
[1] Well, I'm slowly working on achieving this myself in my spare time.
The "Bro" has nothing to do with brogrammer or that misogynist culture. It's a pun on "man" pages.
And most people in tech who use the term bro are not referring to the brogrammer culture. They're using the bro slang popularized by MMORPGs/MOBAs/4chan/internet memes, since like World of Warcraft 2004.