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! :)
Absolutely, lets throw away our sense of humor and wordplay because there are theoretically people that might be offended (maybe, kindof. You know. In theory.).
(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?
It's not about offending people. It's never about offending people.
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.
Another offended man checking in. Why is it so hard to accept that sexist language and actions are offensive to men?
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.
Sure. It's just one drop of water out of a clear blue sky. The sort of thing that is easily tolerable, hardly even a nuisance really. Maybe you don't have many female friends, maybe none of your female friends work in tech, and maybe you've never had any female coworkers. The fact is, for women in tech it's been raining, it's been raining every single day for decades. One drop is tolerable, but it's the unrelenting deluge that makes life miserable. Every day there's a thousand little pinpricks reminding women that they are the outsider, that they don't belong, that they are an intrusion, an afterthought. It ranges all the way from overt sexual harassment at conventions and in the workplace to sexualized images of women being used in slide decks at programming conferences to thousands of little locker room humor "jokes" floating around everywhere and being made every day.
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.
I took a poll of the other person in our hackerspace right now: she thinks this is funny.
>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.
I am not offended on anyone else's behalf, but am personally offended, and I am a man. Don't pretend I don't exist because it's inconvenient to your worldview.
English is not my mother tongue so maybe that's why I don't get the humor here, what wordplay are you talking about ?
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.
It's less "in theory" and more "in practice" when lots of people are telling you it's not funny, it's offensive. Also, it's not funny, it's immature, it's offensive.
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,
No, let's merely be aware of what we come up with when we use our sense of humor and wordplay.
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.
You really think that this is just something that people "maybe, kindof. You know. In theory." might be offended about? To me, this is on par with the titstare fiasco. Seriously, people. Grow up and get a life. Not everyone in the world is a "bro".
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.
A higher standard? How about an individual having backbone and integrity to stand firm, hold the line and not supplicate?
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.
As a society, we need to get over the chivalrous notion that something is automatically bad if it might trigger negative emotions in 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.
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.
For this comment I'm going to assume that you are a man. I apologize if this isn't the case.
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?
Let me get this straight. The previous comment pointed out that naming this program in a gendered way that references the sexist concept of "brogramming" is unnecessary/stupid. You interpreted this as an attack on the right for men to take pride in their manhood? Really?
I'm not a woman and I had an instant instinctive rejection reaction to the title of this post. I made a conscious effort to click anyway to see what this was about, and now that I have I still have a rejection reaction to the name.
Eh, I dunno. I'm definitely not one of those people whose champion cause is gender issues, and to be totally honest I rarely even think about it much. My general philosophy is "be professional", not "lol check ur privilege." That being said, I think you're off here.
> 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?
Or they aren't (over)thinking any of that above, and to most people it is a funny play on words since the tool is related to 'man' pages.
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.
> ...aren't thinking any of that ... funny play on words
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.
Unless you're going to tell me that 'fsck' was intentionally named to conjure up the idea of the word 'fuck' when mentioned, your example is completely unrelated and only a red herring. 'bro' is a tool that was explicitly named 'bro' because it's a play on words with 'man', and so there was an explicit choice made to associate the tool with 'bro' and 'brogrammer', etc. If you can't see the difference, I really have to wonder about the average quality of commenter on this site anymore.
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.
"fsck" is also distinctly non-gendered and it is not dated. It's actually kind of clever because it's not in the least an obvious name for a filesystem check, of all things.
"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.
i think the more subtle point, which you're free to disagree with, is that the word 'bro' has a ton of baggage around it from the offest. the word 'man' isn't chosen because it's trying to remind people who need help of the patriarchy's stranglehold on information, it's just short for manual, which i think most people can stomach.
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:
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.
Sorry, risking a crusade comes to my doorstep and downvote me to the minimum, here is a true rant:
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...
The use of [Debatably Volatile Term] (hereafter DVT) is poor branding for a project or product, unless the cultural baggage associated with DVT aligns with the purpose of the project/product.
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.
Intent doesn't matter? I hope you don't mean that. If someone truly does not mean to be offensive and uses a term either out of ignorance or because they don't associate the word with the same things you do, they are not a "bad person". If you're the most sensitive person in a room or office, do you set the rules of speech? This comment just makes you sound like one of those people that would relish taking someone down over a word choice, regardless if they are actually racist/sexist.
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.
Actually, when I think of man pages I think about pompous neckbeards who get mad at plebians who are having a hard time understanding something rather than helping them with examples. So bro pages to me sound much more friendly; man pages that are aimed at the every day "bro".
Agreed on the first part, I recall my RTFM days and not so fondly. I also recall how inaccessible most man pages were (and are).
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.
Yeah, man pages could go a long way in terms of providing some common use examples and more legible syntax to help out inexperienced users.
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.
So call the tool 'human'[1], or something else that implies friendliness without also implying a beer-swilling, knuckle-dragging, women-hating subculture[2].
[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.
Yeah, it's a concept/great project, but I agree that 'bro' just carries way too much negative connotations (even besides the gender politics, I think the idea of "brogrammers" is pretty divisive).
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)
I disagree. There is nothing wrong with 'bro' just like there is nothing wrong with a programming language 'Julia'. They are both gender specific and you as an individual can infer whatever you like about the term.
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.
Hm. I always assumed Julia referred to Gaston Julia.
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".
I don't get your (or anyone's) qualm with the phrase 'bro'. As a foreigner that mainly knows American culture from TV, both 'bro' and 'man' are things hippies use in phrases.
Both me and my girlfriend work in tech and she wasn't offended by the name 'bropages'. Furthermore, she disagreed with your comment completely. She doesn't feel excluded or discriminated from the name 'bropages'. Hell, I even call her dude all the time and it doesn't bother her in the slightest.
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.
women especially, who infer that on top of all the technically difficult stuff they'll have 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
The first part of your sentence sounded unintentionally demeaning, which seems antithetical to your cause.
So would you have been happy if it had been named "woman"? (I imagine not, "oh, there is a version of man pages that only shows simple examples and you decided to name it 'woman'?")
Yes, the name is goofy at best, but I'm guessing it was a play on "man" pages. I would have thought a small format "man" page would be a "boy" page, but that still has the gender connotation.
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).
I quite like "pam" [pamphlet] as an alternative - not the manual just a short pamphlet of examples ... or maybe just "ex" or "eg"?
[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]
Did you consider that perhaps the name has nothing to do with "locker-room atmosphere," and is merely a pun on the "man" command, which itself has nothing to do with gender?
Agreed. Some of these comments are depressing. They're probably the same kind of people who sit at their TV/computer with a pen and notepad to jot down anything they find "offensive" and complain.
I absolutely agree. I don't think the creator intended to create a constant reminder of an unbalanced subculture, but I think that a similar tool named differently would be more widely used. As a dude, I would feel awkward installing bro, honestly.
That said, it looks fucking handy so I think I'm gonna. ;)
While your point isn't invalid at all, it's worth noting that UNIX naming is full of these in-jokes. All the way from UNIX being a play on Multics, less is more, the recursive GNU is Not UNIX, WINE is not an emulator, etc.
While originally names were chosen to be concise for technical reasons, they've been at the whims of geek humour since time(0).
I don't feel excluded by the name, but I did think the tool must be a joke rather than something that could actually be useful. Surprised to find it's the latter.
It is fascinating how hard some people work to be offended at most trivial things. Of course "bro" is offensive - it is about males. Of course "babe" would be offensive too - it's a sexist term for a woman. Of course "professional independent highly achieving woman" would be a much better name - and still offensive, since it obviously implies the only thing such women are good for is to be the help for men who do the real work, just bringing them manuals or delivering stuff from here to there, not contributing anything of substance. And to think we use such tools as BROwsers... No wonder women don't use the internet. What? They do? Well, they must be feeling awful anyway, especially when they see HIStory staring right at them from the screen, constantly reminding them that "NO GIЯLS ALOUD".
We have companies with names like Yahoo and products named like gimp and git, but of course something named "bro" can't be good.
Aside from agreeing that the idea for the service is great, I think there's an important distinction to make about why 'bro' has gotten people riled up. The issue, in my mind, is not that it has a gender bias, after all there are examples of feminine terms in computing that nobody seems to mind (e.g. programming languages like Ada, Julia, Miranda, etc...). We should feel fine about using masculine terms too.
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?
It must always be the act, not merely a description of an act, for which you judge. Words are expression. Meaning must always be expressed, not simply fabricated.
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 am sorry. I know I might be heavily down-voted or banned but i just cannot resist. 'bro' is so friendly, egalitarian and non-discriminatory compared to:
Its a bad name because it draws attention away from the actual content and towards meaningless debate that we all love so much. I prefer the github style naming that just describes what something is.
The name doesn't do that. All the Social Justice Warriors that have invaded HN are doing that. If they spent more time actually programming something they'd be less time to moan about the name of a command line tool.
Much as I dislike the word 'bro' (and jock and nerd ftm), there are two huge assumptions here - 1. the language we use has that kind of subliminal power, and 2. that unintended offence is something given rather than taken.
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.
Awesome idea. Shame about the humorless nature of this community.
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.
I'm not feeling oppressed. The problem isn't me feeling oppressed, it's other people feeling oppressed.
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.
> I'm not feeling oppressed. The problem isn't me feeling oppressed, it's other people feeling oppressed.... You aren't the one who gets to decide when other people feel uncomfortable.
Do you realize how patronizing it is when white males get preemptively upset over something instead of letting women and minorities speak for themselves?
> You aren't the one who gets to decide when other people feel uncomfortable.
> 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.
We should compile in a Wiki (or something similar) everything that might make someone uncomfortable.
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.
Why would this hypothetically offended person not by offended by "man"? They would not use it(as offended as they are), therefore they'd never learn it meant "manual", just as they wouldn't learn that "bro" is short for "brochure"....right?
It used to be the case that social justice warriors getting offended whenever their pet cause is looked the wrong way had an overwhelming presence in comments and impressions. With such ridiculous think-of-teh-womynz brouhahas breaking out every few weeks, it is telling (and encouraging) that more people of the generally neutral silent majority start speaking up against the silliness. Keep it up, "bro" :)
You got it all wrong, the name of a command has to be practical and be related the actual use of the command.
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.
While I cannot speak for the parent, and while I am not offended by people thinking something is a bad name, I find it to be perhaps the right sentiment directed in the wrong direction. Yes, we want to encourage more woman -- heck, more people -- into our industry. I think this is done through different means. I think it starts off when people are young and they get exposed to programming. If I knew someone left our industry because they were offended by the naming of command line tools, I would be baffled.
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.
Oh oh! Did you really just say "A few people continued to RAG me about it"? I know you think you are very language sensitive and not a mysoginst. But to use the word 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.
I was basically done with this thread, but your comment is sufficiently interesting.
Compare two programmers. One believes that code must be perfect right out of the gate or else it is very embarrassing. The other believes continuous iteration is the normal state.
If presented with a major design challenge ("This UX doesn't work at all for people using screen readers"), I posit that the first developer is motivated to explain why the code as it stands is a good idea ("Those users aren't our market.") The first programmer views the idea of being wrong as deeply embarrassing, and wants to avoid feeling shame, or weakness, or whatever it is that involves saying "I was wrong."
The second programmer makes changes and carries on without worrying about it.
And so it is with a word. If you are deeply embarrassed at the notion of having to change, you make up all sorts of reasons why you are right and the people pointing out another way are wrong.
Whereas if you believe that development is all about iteration, you make the change and move along.
I am the second kind of writer. Many times I have blogged something, been called out about some technical or social point, and simply edited my posts. To me, iteration is a sign that things are working properly.
So... If HN allowed me to edit my comment to remove a word I now know is inappropriate, I would do so without worrying about it. I wish more people would take the same attitude: "Oh, this may make things inaccessible for someone? Let's change it and move on without drama just as we change our code and move on without drama."
I don't think this is accurate, in British english at least. Dictionary.com shows the etymology as unknown in the sense of to scold or to tease, but it gives the date as 1790 to 1800.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rag?s=t
It's usage as a synonym for tampon is show in word usage as dating from the 1930s.
I don't think it's remotely fair to assume it could be taking in the above context as derogatory towards women.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, we should also remember that sometimes (not always, but sometimes) people do have a choice in what they're offended by, and how they react to those feelings of offence. A lot of the people in this thread aren't even saying that they find it offensive personally, but that they feel that they ought to find it offensive on behalf of other people, which is very much a conscious decision on their part. If you react to the mere fact that some people complain about something without considering whether they might be wrong, you'll self-censor unnecessarily. And that makes it more difficult for others to resist self-censorship later.
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.
Your point has been raised elsewhere in this thread as well as many, many times in the last fifty-plus years when debating the effect of language on exclusion. I don't think I can add something new to the debate, so I'll direct you to do some research and find out why people do not accept your argument as axiomatically true.
Furthermore, the point that you're replying to says little about whether 'bro' or even 'white power' is offensive, it says that the debate about 'white power' was a distraction to a point about CoffeeScript.
And thus, my advice to the project authors is to change the name. Agree or disagree with whether it's offensive, it wasn't written to provoke you and I into discussing exclusionary language, it was written to help people be more productive.
The name works against that. Fair, unfair, what's the difference if your goal is to make people more productive?
>I thought I could get away with calling my post "White Power."
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.
Is the "bro" intended to be ironic, or are the creators actually not aware that the term is used to represent the worst (most misogynistic, most crass, least mature, least dependable) people currently flocking to the industry? It is by its very definition exclusionary.
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.
I have found out in life that women can also be dependable, fun to hang out with, and not "complicate things."
Using "bro" is offensive because it excludes others by their gender. It's an awful exclusionary term and you shouldn't think it funny or ironic. You're not taking this serious. I'm guessing because you haven't any idea of how soul crushing it can be to see this kind of behavior in the workplace when you're at the other end. It fucking sucks.
1. Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties. When they aren’t making an ass of themselves they usually just stand around holding a red plastic cup waiting for something exciting to happen so they can scream something that demonstrates how much they enjoy partying.
2. An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer, drives a jacked up truck that’s plastered with stickers, has rich dad that owns a dealership or construction business and constantly tells this to chicks at parties...
It's a play on words. This oversensitive, over analytical take on sexuality is getting old. What would you have preferred, the hu-man pages? But that would be exclusionary to people in the industry who don't consider themselves human! <hyperbolic>What next, are you going to suggest that parents name their children gender neutral names so they don't have to chaff at it if they change gender?</hyperbolic> You can infer everything, from anything if you try.
A play on words is ok, as long as it's not a running joke that keeps coming up. That's distracting.
The key to the Unix joke name genre is that the jokes are encoded laconically into the name and only the name (e.g. "less") and then have the good taste to immediately expire. They don't get old because they don't overstay their welcome.
I agree with you. People are imparting their own interpretation of the word. When I skimmed the web site, I didn't notice anything relating to the whole "brogrammer" thing.
Just because it starts with the same three letters doesn't mean anything. As already stated in many other comments, "bro" is also, and more commonly, used as a substitute for other colloquial words such as "man", "dude", "guys", and is frequently gender neutral.
These niggling complaints of offense where none was intended is indeed getting old. The author's intent is what actually matters, not how someone else interprets it. A reader gets to choose whether to be offended by a word or not, he doesn't get to choose the author's intent.
You're missing the actual joke, which is that "man" was the colloquialism for "dude" or "bro" in the 1970s, when `man` was created. So it only makes sense that a "man for modern times", or maybe a "man with less formality" would be called `bro`.
Personally, I've aliased `man` to `dude` on my shell, so my laptop fits in better with its peers.
It's a pun on "man", almost surely. It's certainly possible that someone might not have the same interpretation of "bro", which is short for "brother", as the average internet addict. There's nothing inherently bigoted about the term, and it has a long history of use divorced from any puerile or irresponsible behavior.
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.
> If saying "bro" makes some people uncomfortable, the bottom line is that it just makes a lot more sense to change it.
I don't want to advocate obnoxiousness and misogyny, but there are many things that can make people uncomfortable. Making it a rule to avoid everything that make more than two individuals uncomfortable is one of those ideas that seem good and empathetic until they become the norm and stifle freedom of expression for everyone, including oppressed groups.
EDIT: Case in point — naming your repo "nigger", "cracker", "chink" etc is going out of your way to be an asshole, but surely there are people who are uncomfortable with drugs or had bad experiences with the psychedelic drug culture, and would object to "groovy".
> "Groovy" has been associated with the psychedelic-drug-using subculture, but we've had no trouble naming a programming language after it.
A lot more people object to Groovy's "G-Strings", its name for interpolated strings, than the "Groovy" name. org.codehaus.groovy's Project Manager even introduced a new operator called "Elvis" (the null-coalescing operator) in an attempt to redefine the meaning of "G-String" from the item of clothing to a string on Elvis's guitar to deflect objections but no-one's fooled.
Indeed, man is short for manual. It has nothing to do with men, or beards or bros crushing code. The term "bro" when it comes to programming really needs to go away.
a) How about "brochure"? b) Someone that runs for the hills when seeing a command called "bro", will also run from "man" even before they now about eithers meaning. Of course, these poeple don't exist, because anyone using this is a grown up man or woman.
I think the tool itself is a bit tongue in cheek, because some would say that doing things by example is definitely a brogrammer thing to do, instead of understanding everything that makes up a command.
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.
Like the "bro" IRL, this "bro" cuts through the tedious BS explanations given by the mainstream PC "man" and gets straight to the point what a real "man" needs to know to get the job done.
"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.
It comes across to a lot of people as schoolyard BS though.
I see the funny side of the whole bro thing, but I think a culture of it is poisonous for a broad ranging professional environment, as it pisses off as many people as it endears, not to mention the tendency of people who identify with the stereotype to be hung-over until lunch, when they start drinking. Certain individuals do seem to be fully capable of doing this and getting the work done, but you do not want it to be your overall culture. I've seen it. It is fucking messy and very expensive.
"Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties."
"An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer"
"A usually white young male, found commonly in places like san bernardino county in california, as well as orange county."
"Deeply racist, yet vulture-ize black culture with attempts to be "down", while living as far from any ghetto as humanly possible."
> are the creators actually not aware that the term is used to represent the worst (most misogynistic, most crass, least mature, least dependable) people currently flocking to the industry?
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.
I figured it was called bro because brogrammers maybe don't care about how anything works - they just want the answer..?
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"
I agree, this is a really poorly thought concept. I almost skipped this entry because it's started with bro which is a word used to describe some really despicable and stupid attitude. I did click because it said man pages which are really useful.
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.
"bro" is a short mnemonic/memetic context which makes the command easier to remember and use. I don't think it has any relation to the intended audience or constitutes an endorsement of the "bro" culture by any means.
It's an interesting example of choosing a name. Some people obviously don't care about $NAME, others have a strong aversion to $NAME. Should the creators consider a name change? What if the product is something you're looking to get funding for?
The advice to "pick anything that isn't going to get us sued for trademark infringement and that doesn't mean 'penis' in some other language" needs some expanding.
The tool is open source (although, with no license specified). Maybe someone will fork it and change the name. I think it's a neat idea that could potentially be really awesome. But yeah, the name is unfortunate.
I'm a woman, and I think it's hilarious and not at all sexist. Had to stop myself from laughing out loud because I'm in a library.
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?
"Lighten up" doesn't solve anything. I'm not against jokes but the implying man in man pages means male and not an abbreviation of manual is exclusionary.
On the other hand, taking everything so seriously can make the situation worse. I'm a woman in tech, and I don't want the men in tech to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells so as not to offend me. I think that the name "bro pages" is kind of funny, for what it's worth, and all of the protest against the name is the only thing making me uncomfortable.
"Lighten up" might be her pet peeve. My personal pet peeve is "someone might get offended". Just as she is tired of being told "lighten up" I'm somewhat tired of always having to be careful lest someone gets offended.
I think it's fundamental difference in personalities. Some also want really heavy age limits of software and video. Some also want to censor the internet and some do not.
I'm actually tempted to name personal projects with similar names as the 'bro' project, not because I would actually endorse the culture, but because I dislike those that come barging in saying that someone might get offended even more.
I get pretty much as annoyed of offended persons as I do with those that would seriously dismiss anyone based on their gender.
The entire Unix command line is exclusionary. If it wanted to be inclusive 'man' would be called 'help'. We're not using 300bps dumb terminals any more, I fail to see the value in forcing everyone to learn commands like cp and mv instead of copy and move.
Maybe most people's first reaction to the man command is that it refers to men. Maybe the man in manual is interpreted in early programmers heads as meaning men. Maybe it's part of the nomenclature that is the fabric of the current, male dominated programming scene.
Maybe naming this tool 'bro' is a satire of both bro culture and rtfm style exclusionary patriarchy. I dunno. Maybe not.
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.
This thread has opened my eyes to the sexist atrocities carried on throughout the tech industry. The first obvious one is my current language of choice, Python. That is the worst and most sexist name for language. Why should female programmers have to put up with it? Python == Snake == Slang for male genitalia. It is so obvious! Ladies, I'm sorry for all those years of oppressive code that I've spent writing. But let's continue. What about Unix. Yeah, Unix. Doesn't it sound like the word Eunuch? Which is a term used for a castrated man that guards a harem (full of sexual slaves). How could I have missed it? Amazing. Ever since the 1970s, we have been making women interact with a system that was named after a sexual slavery term. Just awful. I wish I were done, but no. There are still many terms out there that are just offensive. What about the server Gunicorn? It is a play on the word Unicorn, which we all know is a fictitious (I hope) animal that features an enlarged horn on its forehead. That darn horn just looks like a penis, doesn't it? Well, that's is offensive to women. I'm gonna email the Gunicorn team to give them an earful. What were they thinking? Worst is that this is just a small collection of samples. What does C stand for? Cunt? Wait, what about F? Fellatio? Oh man/woman, we need to really reconsider sexism in this industry. Cause bro, its simply not working out.
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]
I've often wished for something like this. Most of us learn by example.
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.
Token woman in tech here, with the disclaimer that I do not speak for "women" or anyone else but myself.
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.
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.
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.
People, calm the f@#k down.
This tool appears to be very useful and its intent is to make your life easier.
If you feel the name bothers you so much that you can't use it then that's your prerogative just like it was the developer's prerogative to name it whatever he/she wanted
>If you feel the name bothers you so much that you can't use it then that's your prerogative just like it was the developer's prerogative to name it whatever he/she wanted
If you think something is a bad idea then saying so in a public forum is also your prerogative.
For real? Someone does a play on words with man pages and we end up with a 546 comment thread about SJW bullshit?
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 a shit-fest in the comments. Why am I here... I don't even know what this website is about. I like the idea of examples though. That has always been one of the major ways for me to learn, even though my superiors throughout my educational career seemed to think it ruins the learning process.
To the OP: Brilliant product.
About the name: Brilliant marketing. Extreme hatred or disgust is better than indifference :) Enjoy all the PR. Those who find the this useful will care less about the name you give it.
Man pages are nice sometimes but oftentimes they have a lot of options and no examples. For advanced usage of some commonly used commands it's far easier to just look it up online, or perhaps with this tool. Example good man page is ps, and an example difficult to use one is gcc. Even though the gcc man page has all the options, it's very difficult to figure out which ones you need, whereas something like this (or commandlinefu) might show you the exact command you need with a description of how the different flags interact.
My pet hate is man pages where the tool has a lot of options, and in the manual the options are listed neither alphabetically nor by semantic grouping. "Hrm, what does '-l' do. I guess I'll search for it, and hit every other -l along the way..."
As someone who's written man pages, at least GNU is fucked unless you can get stuff directly into a distro bypassing upstream, the guy who runs the man pages project won't let you modify anything in case Paul Vixie returns from the dead and decided he cares about adding examples.
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.
I still maintain Debian has the best man pages of the Linuxes. If you ever try to man a program on a Debian system and there is no man page then it'll mention "man 7 undocumented" asks the user to file a bug report on the package. They encourage package maintainers to write man pages when the upstream package does not include them.
When I've had the misfortune of using RHEL or Centos is when I notice the quality of the Debian man pages—Redhat seems to lack Debian's drive to document upstream stuff.
The only time I've seen Debian's man pages regress is with the ImageMagick package. Its man pages used to be adequate (I believe it might have been a text conversion of the web site/detailed html docs), but now they are not (try to figure out the syntax for the -geometry option using only the man pages).
Back in the day I was impressed by the OpenStep man pages. They had pages for the kernel drivers which I really liked (ie, "man mt" or "man cu"), which showed all the IOCTLs you could call and explained how the interface worked. That might have been a BSD thing, I haven't seriously used a *BSD lately so I can't compare.
I always loved the man pages in OpenBSD because they do provide useful examples for most commands. Whether it's the OS for you... ymmv, I wouldn't choose an OS on this one feature, but I wish more man pages had built in examples.
The concept is great and should be promoted: so many times I've just needed a basic example and been unable to find one.
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. :(
At this point it's not about taking offense (I think everyone understands the pun now, and it's funny the first time.) We can assume good intentions but it's still okay to say this is bad marketing.
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
I know the "man" in "manpages" is short for "manual", but when I first saw this site, I took the "bro" in "bropages" to be short for "little brother". If the "man"-page is the old, official, formal documentation for a command, the "bro"-page was the young, informal, still-evolving version of the documentation. In this sense, the name is rather apt.
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.
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.
Woman in tech here. I almost skipped reading the post because I instinctively thought "bro pages", like man pages but for bros. There are lots of bad ideas out there, shame this is a great idea with a name that inadvertantly sabotages it.
The fun of programming languages and open source software is, guess what, you can change it. You don't like it? Write an alias in your bashrc.
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.
You can always change it, but having to change the default of bro (gender positive) to a gender neutral (eg, ex) makes our community feel like a boys club.
You're missing the point. It's not about being offensive but about being self-explanatory. For this initiative to be successful it needs to have a wide support and large user base which is not gonna happen with a name based on an insider joke only.
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.
if you see naming a tool with a clever play on the command "man" as perpetuating a "boys only" culture you almost certainly need more human-to-human interaction away from the computer and away from tumblr or whatever terrible place has brainwashed you.
If this tool was invented 20 years ago, before the whole brogrammer thing took over the term bro, everyone would have thought it was a clever play on man pages. Seems the word bro itself has become offensive, even if used in a non-offensive context.
I think it's a real shame that the whole discussion here seems to be about the name the author chose for this project, rather than the actual project. Surprisingly, the discussion on Reddit seems to be much more constructive and interested in talking about the project itself.
Why don't man pages have more examples, is it because of space, or the work to maintain them (including making sure they still work?)
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.
Great! 'man' usually is a good reference but one of the worst place to start.
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!
"Bro" can have many meanings [1] [2]. Most of the complaints seem to be coming from people who are aware of just one of these, which is not the one most people think of when the term is used.
This is a neat idea. I won't comment on the name--but observations on the tool:
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.
A very nice idea and I hope it will gain a lot more examples (at least I will try to add further examples)!
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?
The problem is that "bro" summons up the image of the hyper-masculine culture of college fraternities in the United States which has, to some extent, infiltrated the tech world in recent years. Some unfortunate aspects of this culture include:
- 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.
So, we apply the 'American Fraternity Guy' definition to a word that has existed for longer than the USA as a country has and is used cross culturally to mean many different things (usually just 'friend' in my experience).
HN ought to be closed down if this kind of ridiculous rhetoric continually overtakes actual technical content. If it doesn't happen sooner or later everyone interested in actually discussing technical topics will move elsewhere.
A good idea, but I see it taking some backlash for the name, which would be unfortunate because, aside from the name, it really is not perpetuating "bro"gramming, etc.
The name is ironic and whimsical. I don't see what the problem is. I'm puzzled by people (and I don't necessarily mean the parent in this specific sub-thread, but everybody who has raised concerns over the name in the thread) who seem to think that if a name has any perceived negative connotation whatsoever it should not be used. Would you make the same judgement call with regard to, say, Dogecoin?
I take the name in jest as well. Unfortunately, a lot of people are easily set off by it. Would hate to see a neat idea get flack and not be used over silly perceptions.
Think of the standard frat douche "bro". Yeah, it's completely reductionist stereotype. Now give him a job as a programmer with less verbal filter than you'd expect from a guy in a strait-laced office.
Now take this "brogrammer" label and start assigning it to programmers who's actions you don't like and fit the "bro" mold. Actions anywhere on the spectrum from legitimately despicable to just acting like a guy fresh out of college. Is that a wide and imprecise net? Don't overthink it, we're playing in stereotypes that are OK to openly deride.
Why do so many of the arguments on this page seem to think that "bro" is part of male culture?
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.
Before opening this HN article, I had a 'faint' fear that people might be discussing some made up sexist issues here rather than what it is about. Oh, how my fears were fiercely true.
- 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
I think that a command giving terse examples of unix command usage has the potential to be really useful, and I was excited when I saw there were 614 comments.
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.
Good idea, but to really supplement man-pages it should also support sections e.g. "bro 2 write" for getting common-case example how to use write function.
Great idea and the name is funny, but it seems to me that the obvious name, just sitting there waiting to be used, is help. Another option would simply be to subvert man (since this is far more useful than man) so e.g. man gives you the examples but gives you a keystroke option to switch to the original man page in the case you actually want it.
I seriously can't fathom why so many people have a problem with the name (because it may or may not affect a third party, however has not directly affected the person writing the post. Wat). Y U mad, bro?! [1]
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!
In the silly discussion, I do have a couple questions.
Can this be used in a machine that's not always connected to the internet?
Considering the ranking method is decided via votes, won't (theoretically) results change from one day to the other?
With a user provided content database, you have a problem: users can input crap content. So you devise a way for user to sort the crappiest from the less crappy and now you have two problems, and so on.
A nice touch in PowerShell is that this kind of thing is already included, as the cmdlet help is structured into different sections, one of which is examples. So Get-Help Get-Foo -Examples gives you them directly.
There's another tool pretty similar to this that I really like. Many of the entries actually have a pretty extensive "EXAMPLES" section (I remember the `tar` one actually being super thorough in its examples). Some of them don't, but they typically have a thorough explanation of what every flag for that specific command actually does (I'd rather...you know..learn how something works rather than just copy and paste a bunch of commands and flags). I can't remember what it's called.
This looks like a cute productivity hack that I will probably use.
So sorry for OP that people getting offended by words and tipping fedoras is more serious than creativity.
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
I seriously can't fathom why so many people have a problem with the name (because it may or may not affect a third party, however has not directly affected the person writing the post. Wat). Y U mad, bro?! [1]
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!
I think the point is that `man` pages usually don't have enough examples. I've started switching to `info` for commands I don't know the first thing about. But a step further in the direction of examples would be helpful, especially for newbies.
I called it wtf - it was keyword driven. Things like
wtf deep copy array in php
or
wtf add disk to a raid array
people would add recipes with keyword laden titles and there was votes on them.
You could also download the entire db and use it locally for quicker response time. Also, this was because we weren't living in an "internet is everywhere" age back then.
This looks rather useful, though man pages should also contain examples, but a desperate command to just reach the examples would be nice. I would have called it "how."
This is neat; I want[1] something similar for Go types as well.
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)
I'd love to see a random sample data of that type, e.g.:
(*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"),
}),
(A couple of them, putting the most commonly occurring samples on top, etc.)
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.
I don't see any gender implications here. When I first read the word bro pages, I thought it was simply a play of words on man pages, since man pages are kind of serious and verbose, bro pages will be a bit informal and have only examples. Maybe boy pages would've been better. Though I like the sound of tin pages as well, which someone here suggested...
Great idea; shame about the name.
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.
Absolutely, lets throw away our sense of humor and wordplay because there are theoretically people that might be offended (maybe, kindof. You know. In theory.).
(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?
It's not about offending people. It's never about offending people.
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.
38 replies →
Another offended man checking in. Why is it so hard to accept that sexist language and actions are offensive to men?
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.
191 replies →
Sure. It's just one drop of water out of a clear blue sky. The sort of thing that is easily tolerable, hardly even a nuisance really. Maybe you don't have many female friends, maybe none of your female friends work in tech, and maybe you've never had any female coworkers. The fact is, for women in tech it's been raining, it's been raining every single day for decades. One drop is tolerable, but it's the unrelenting deluge that makes life miserable. Every day there's a thousand little pinpricks reminding women that they are the outsider, that they don't belong, that they are an intrusion, an afterthought. It ranges all the way from overt sexual harassment at conventions and in the workplace to sexualized images of women being used in slide decks at programming conferences to thousands of little locker room humor "jokes" floating around everywhere and being made every day.
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.
6 replies →
I took a poll of the other person in our hackerspace right now: she thinks this is funny.
>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.
5 replies →
I am not offended on anyone else's behalf, but am personally offended, and I am a man. Don't pretend I don't exist because it's inconvenient to your worldview.
11 replies →
English is not my mother tongue so maybe that's why I don't get the humor here, what wordplay are you talking about ?
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.
7 replies →
It's less "in theory" and more "in practice" when lots of people are telling you it's not funny, it's offensive. Also, it's not funny, it's immature, it's offensive.
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,
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Not_a_woman
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/You%27re_the_sexist#.22Ta...
41 replies →
No, let's merely be aware of what we come up with when we use our sense of humor and wordplay.
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.
1 reply →
I'm not offended by it. It just sounds stupid.
The hostility towards bros in this thread makes me feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.
I never understood the idea of being offended. It's probably because I'm nigh unoffendable (?).
Also, I share the sentiment of Steve Hughes - "So what? be offended! nothing happens!"[1]
[1]: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b48_1305790944
> Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?
Literally no-one said anything of the sort; the fact that this is where your mind went speaks volumes about your attitude towards women.
You really think that this is just something that people "maybe, kindof. You know. In theory." might be offended about? To me, this is on par with the titstare fiasco. Seriously, people. Grow up and get a life. Not everyone in the world is a "bro".
Point.
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.
Who are these vocal misogynists in this industry? I've never heard of them or seen them...
6 replies →
A higher standard? How about an individual having backbone and integrity to stand firm, hold the line and not supplicate?
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.
4 replies →
> It's a funny joke, I love the name. Change it.
Women everywhere will appreciate your valiant display of chivalry. They shall chant "Thank you Pxtl, for saving us from male privilege!".
33 replies →
As a society, we need to get over the chivalrous notion that something is automatically bad if it might trigger negative emotions in 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.
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.
For this comment I'm going to assume that you are a man. I apologize if this isn't the case.
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?
1 reply →
Let me get this straight. The previous comment pointed out that naming this program in a gendered way that references the sexist concept of "brogramming" is unnecessary/stupid. You interpreted this as an attack on the right for men to take pride in their manhood? Really?
I'm not a woman and I had an instant instinctive rejection reaction to the title of this post. I made a conscious effort to click anyway to see what this was about, and now that I have I still have a rejection reaction to the name.
Eh, I dunno. I'm definitely not one of those people whose champion cause is gender issues, and to be totally honest I rarely even think about it much. My general philosophy is "be professional", not "lol check ur privilege." That being said, I think you're off here.
> 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.
2 replies →
Or they aren't (over)thinking any of that above, and to most people it is a funny play on words since the tool is related to 'man' pages.
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.
> ...aren't thinking any of that ... funny play on words
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.
28 replies →
Unless you're going to tell me that 'fsck' was intentionally named to conjure up the idea of the word 'fuck' when mentioned, your example is completely unrelated and only a red herring. 'bro' is a tool that was explicitly named 'bro' because it's a play on words with 'man', and so there was an explicit choice made to associate the tool with 'bro' and 'brogrammer', etc. If you can't see the difference, I really have to wonder about the average quality of commenter on this site anymore.
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.
1 reply →
"fsck" is also distinctly non-gendered and it is not dated. It's actually kind of clever because it's not in the least an obvious name for a filesystem check, of all things.
"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.
Fsck is funnier to a much wider group of people.
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.
7 replies →
i think the more subtle point, which you're free to disagree with, is that the word 'bro' has a ton of baggage around it from the offest. the word 'man' isn't chosen because it's trying to remind people who need help of the patriarchy's stranglehold on information, it's just short for manual, which i think most people can stomach.
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4484526
1 reply →
The problem with your argument is that 'fsck' has nothing to do with 'fuck' and everything to do with 'File System ChecK'.
You're just further proving the OP's point.
I think the name is dumb because even with "touch; unzip" jokes, I still think of manpages as manual pages unless someone is trying to make a joke.
Could your statement be more wrong ?
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.
Why would you do that? Both men and women can appreciate the importance of a good fsck.
"most people it is a funny play on words"
No it's just dumb. It's not offensive, not biased or anything else, it's just plain dumb.
Sorry, risking a crusade comes to my doorstep and downvote me to the minimum, here is a true rant:
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.
The use of [Debatably Volatile Term] (hereafter DVT) is poor branding for a project or product, unless the cultural baggage associated with DVT aligns with the purpose of the project/product.
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.
3 replies →
> 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.
So if we just stop complaining, things will magically get better.... because that has worked so well for marginalized groups in the past.
3 replies →
Brogrammers are not the in-group. They are an out-group - which is why this whole thread is about excluding them for various reasons.
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.
Intent doesn't matter? I hope you don't mean that. If someone truly does not mean to be offensive and uses a term either out of ignorance or because they don't associate the word with the same things you do, they are not a "bad person". If you're the most sensitive person in a room or office, do you set the rules of speech? This comment just makes you sound like one of those people that would relish taking someone down over a word choice, regardless if they are actually racist/sexist.
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.
How about: don't use if you don't like it?
> [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.
Actually, when I think of man pages I think about pompous neckbeards who get mad at plebians who are having a hard time understanding something rather than helping them with examples. So bro pages to me sound much more friendly; man pages that are aimed at the every day "bro".
Agreed on the first part, I recall my RTFM days and not so fondly. I also recall how inaccessible most man pages were (and are).
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.
Yeah, man pages could go a long way in terms of providing some common use examples and more legible syntax to help out inexperienced users.
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.
So call the tool 'human'[1], or something else that implies friendliness without also implying a beer-swilling, knuckle-dragging, women-hating subculture[2].
[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.
1 reply →
Yeah, it's a concept/great project, but I agree that 'bro' just carries way too much negative connotations (even besides the gender politics, I think the idea of "brogrammers" is pretty divisive).
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.
Also a Big Lebowsky reference.
I disagree. There is nothing wrong with 'bro' just like there is nothing wrong with a programming language 'Julia'. They are both gender specific and you as an individual can infer whatever you like about the term.
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.
Hm. I always assumed Julia referred to Gaston Julia.
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".
1 reply →
Unless you're trying to market a new product, in which case how people feel really does determine how your product is.
I don't get your (or anyone's) qualm with the phrase 'bro'. As a foreigner that mainly knows American culture from TV, both 'bro' and 'man' are things hippies use in phrases.
Both me and my girlfriend work in tech and she wasn't offended by the name 'bropages'. Furthermore, she disagreed with your comment completely. She doesn't feel excluded or discriminated from the name 'bropages'. Hell, I even call her dude all the time and it doesn't bother her in the slightest.
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.
women especially, who infer that on top of all the technically difficult stuff they'll have 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
The first part of your sentence sounded unintentionally demeaning, which seems antithetical to your cause.
Good point; fixed. Thanks.
1 reply →
So would you have been happy if it had been named "woman"? (I imagine not, "oh, there is a version of man pages that only shows simple examples and you decided to name it 'woman'?")
Yes, the name is goofy at best, but I'm guessing it was a play on "man" pages. I would have thought a small format "man" page would be a "boy" page, but that still has the gender connotation.
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).
I quite like "pam" [pamphlet] as an alternative - not the manual just a short pamphlet of examples ... or maybe just "ex" or "eg"?
[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]
2 replies →
How about "min" pages - minified manual pages?
Did you consider that perhaps the name has nothing to do with "locker-room atmosphere," and is merely a pun on the "man" command, which itself has nothing to do with gender?
"Did you consider" that by using 'bro' as a pun on 'man', it inherently makes it about gender?
You're looking to be offended. Bro isn't offensive. Get over it.
Agreed. Some of these comments are depressing. They're probably the same kind of people who sit at their TV/computer with a pen and notepad to jot down anything they find "offensive" and complain.
I absolutely agree. I don't think the creator intended to create a constant reminder of an unbalanced subculture, but I think that a similar tool named differently would be more widely used. As a dude, I would feel awkward installing bro, honestly.
That said, it looks fucking handy so I think I'm gonna. ;)
Adding additional information can be done in parentheses or additional paragraphs, not by pretending to be sources.
They're footnotes. Footnotes are used both to cite sources and to make remarks that are relevant but would break up the flow of the prose.
Tone argument[0] much?
[0]: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument
8 replies →
While your point isn't invalid at all, it's worth noting that UNIX naming is full of these in-jokes. All the way from UNIX being a play on Multics, less is more, the recursive GNU is Not UNIX, WINE is not an emulator, etc.
While originally names were chosen to be concise for technical reasons, they've been at the whims of geek humour since time(0).
I thought the name was stupid. "Bro" brings up a lot of negative stereotypes about guys.
So if we name them girlpages will that have the affect of attracting more women into tech?
Interesting point, just want to point out that changing the name is as simple as
sudo echo "bro $*" > /usr/bin/explain
No it's not. sudo echo "bro $*" > http://bropages.org doesn't work and "gem install explain" neither.
sudo echo foo > bar doesn't work, instead use echo foo | sudo tee bar
While we're at it, let's please rename touch, finger and fsck. These names are horribly suggestive.
I don't feel excluded by the name, but I did think the tool must be a joke rather than something that could actually be useful. Surprised to find it's the latter.
It is fascinating how hard some people work to be offended at most trivial things. Of course "bro" is offensive - it is about males. Of course "babe" would be offensive too - it's a sexist term for a woman. Of course "professional independent highly achieving woman" would be a much better name - and still offensive, since it obviously implies the only thing such women are good for is to be the help for men who do the real work, just bringing them manuals or delivering stuff from here to there, not contributing anything of substance. And to think we use such tools as BROwsers... No wonder women don't use the internet. What? They do? Well, they must be feeling awful anyway, especially when they see HIStory staring right at them from the screen, constantly reminding them that "NO GIЯLS ALOUD".
We have companies with names like Yahoo and products named like gimp and git, but of course something named "bro" can't be good.
I'm late to the party but I'm genuinely surprised that I haven't seen this reply yet:
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?
Aside from agreeing that the idea for the service is great, I think there's an important distinction to make about why 'bro' has gotten people riled up. The issue, in my mind, is not that it has a gender bias, after all there are examples of feminine terms in computing that nobody seems to mind (e.g. programming languages like Ada, Julia, Miranda, etc...). We should feel fine about using masculine terms too.
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?
U mad bro?
How is man pages better? Before i knew what it stood for, i thought it was sexist.
Man is a pager interface to system documentation, the content is written y knowledgeable people and is actual documentation.
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.
come on bro, lighten up
It must always be the act, not merely a description of an act, for which you judge. Words are expression. Meaning must always be expressed, not simply fabricated.
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 agree that the name sucks. For some reason, I think boy pages would have been just as funny without the same baggage.
According to this, you're the one who's making it worse for women: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121942
I found that pretty amusing, and aligns with my expectations.
I am sorry. I know I might be heavily down-voted or banned but i just cannot resist. 'bro' is so friendly, egalitarian and non-discriminatory compared to:
unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes, fsck, fsck, umount
Its a bad name because it draws attention away from the actual content and towards meaningless debate that we all love so much. I prefer the github style naming that just describes what something is.
The name doesn't do that. All the Social Justice Warriors that have invaded HN are doing that. If they spent more time actually programming something they'd be less time to moan about the name of a command line tool.
Monoculture is bad [1]
https://speakerdeck.com/garann/bacon-is-bad-for-you
ln -s /bin/sis /bin/bro
Problem solved.
Big brofist to you, my man!
Would it be better if they were 'woman' pages?
Much as I dislike the word 'bro' (and jock and nerd ftm), there are two huge assumptions here - 1. the language we use has that kind of subliminal power, and 2. that unintended offence is something given rather than taken.
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...
I'd have named them "spartan" pages.
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.
>The only way to fight moralfags
That does wonders for your argument.
Its a free world...if you don't like it, fork it? Isn't that the open source approach, rather than telling volunteers what to do?
Awesome idea. Shame about the humorless nature of this community.
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.
I'm not feeling oppressed. The problem isn't me feeling oppressed, it's other people feeling oppressed.
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.
Your attitude and remarks are creating a hostile and uncomfortable environment for me. I demand that you stop immediately.
12 replies →
> I'm not feeling oppressed. The problem isn't me feeling oppressed, it's other people feeling oppressed.... You aren't the one who gets to decide when other people feel uncomfortable.
But.. you.. are?
Do you realize how patronizing it is when white males get preemptively upset over something instead of letting women and minorities speak for themselves?
1 reply →
> You aren't the one who gets to decide when other people feel uncomfortable.
> 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.
I wonder how many female programmers actually feel oppressed by this?
1 reply →
We should compile in a Wiki (or something similar) everything that might make someone uncomfortable.
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.
Why would this hypothetically offended person not by offended by "man"? They would not use it(as offended as they are), therefore they'd never learn it meant "manual", just as they wouldn't learn that "bro" is short for "brochure"....right?
You aren't the one who gets to decide when other people feel uncomfortable.
... because that's your job, I suppose?
You sure felt uncomfortable all over the comments page. Yuck bra.
> Poor choice of language can set up an exclusionary environment.
Do you have any examples of this assertion to help understand what you are getting at and how it relates to this?
It used to be the case that social justice warriors getting offended whenever their pet cause is looked the wrong way had an overwhelming presence in comments and impressions. With such ridiculous think-of-teh-womynz brouhahas breaking out every few weeks, it is telling (and encouraging) that more people of the generally neutral silent majority start speaking up against the silliness. Keep it up, "bro" :)
You got it all wrong, the name of a command has to be practical and be related the actual use of the command.
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.
Perhaps you are unaware of the history of unix.
>If you're feeling oppressed and excluded by a command name, your real problems lie elsewhere.
Similarly, why are you so offended by people thinking something is a bad name and expressing those sentiments?
While I cannot speak for the parent, and while I am not offended by people thinking something is a bad name, I find it to be perhaps the right sentiment directed in the wrong direction. Yes, we want to encourage more woman -- heck, more people -- into our industry. I think this is done through different means. I think it starts off when people are young and they get exposed to programming. If I knew someone left our industry because they were offended by the naming of command line tools, I would be baffled.
My experience is this:
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.
Oh oh! Did you really just say "A few people continued to RAG me about it"? I know you think you are very language sensitive and not a mysoginst. But to use the word RAG!
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.
I was basically done with this thread, but your comment is sufficiently interesting.
Compare two programmers. One believes that code must be perfect right out of the gate or else it is very embarrassing. The other believes continuous iteration is the normal state.
If presented with a major design challenge ("This UX doesn't work at all for people using screen readers"), I posit that the first developer is motivated to explain why the code as it stands is a good idea ("Those users aren't our market.") The first programmer views the idea of being wrong as deeply embarrassing, and wants to avoid feeling shame, or weakness, or whatever it is that involves saying "I was wrong."
The second programmer makes changes and carries on without worrying about it.
And so it is with a word. If you are deeply embarrassed at the notion of having to change, you make up all sorts of reasons why you are right and the people pointing out another way are wrong.
Whereas if you believe that development is all about iteration, you make the change and move along.
I am the second kind of writer. Many times I have blogged something, been called out about some technical or social point, and simply edited my posts. To me, iteration is a sign that things are working properly.
So... If HN allowed me to edit my comment to remove a word I now know is inappropriate, I would do so without worrying about it. I wish more people would take the same attitude: "Oh, this may make things inaccessible for someone? Let's change it and move on without drama just as we change our code and move on without drama."
I don't think this is accurate, in British english at least. Dictionary.com shows the etymology as unknown in the sense of to scold or to tease, but it gives the date as 1790 to 1800. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rag?s=t
It's usage as a synonym for tampon is show in word usage as dating from the 1930s.
I don't think it's remotely fair to assume it could be taking in the above context as derogatory towards women.
So how do you plan to repent? ;)
To play devil's advocate for a moment, we should also remember that sometimes (not always, but sometimes) people do have a choice in what they're offended by, and how they react to those feelings of offence. A lot of the people in this thread aren't even saying that they find it offensive personally, but that they feel that they ought to find it offensive on behalf of other people, which is very much a conscious decision on their part. If you react to the mere fact that some people complain about something without considering whether they might be wrong, you'll self-censor unnecessarily. And that makes it more difficult for others to resist self-censorship later.
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
Your point has been raised elsewhere in this thread as well as many, many times in the last fifty-plus years when debating the effect of language on exclusion. I don't think I can add something new to the debate, so I'll direct you to do some research and find out why people do not accept your argument as axiomatically true.
Furthermore, the point that you're replying to says little about whether 'bro' or even 'white power' is offensive, it says that the debate about 'white power' was a distraction to a point about CoffeeScript.
And thus, my advice to the project authors is to change the name. Agree or disagree with whether it's offensive, it wasn't written to provoke you and I into discussing exclusionary language, it was written to help people be more productive.
The name works against that. Fair, unfair, what's the difference if your goal is to make people more productive?
1 reply →
Thank you Raganwald. You are comment #500 on this page, I've read them all with an angry feeling, and you are the first one who touches me.
You've made a decisive point in a 500-comment HN flamewar. Congrats.
>I thought I could get away with calling my post "White Power."
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.
Most _north americans_. This is a uniquely north american phenomenon, let's hope this cancer doesn't spread worldwide.
Is the "bro" intended to be ironic, or are the creators actually not aware that the term is used to represent the worst (most misogynistic, most crass, least mature, least dependable) people currently flocking to the industry? It is by its very definition exclusionary.
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.
Brogrammer is just a stereotype, brah.
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.
I have found out in life that women can also be dependable, fun to hang out with, and not "complicate things."
Using "bro" is offensive because it excludes others by their gender. It's an awful exclusionary term and you shouldn't think it funny or ironic. You're not taking this serious. I'm guessing because you haven't any idea of how soul crushing it can be to see this kind of behavior in the workplace when you're at the other end. It fucking sucks.
63 replies →
I'm not sure where you got this idea that bro means "friend". To me it's more like what the urban dictionary says http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bro
1. Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties. When they aren’t making an ass of themselves they usually just stand around holding a red plastic cup waiting for something exciting to happen so they can scream something that demonstrates how much they enjoy partying.
2. An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer, drives a jacked up truck that’s plastered with stickers, has rich dad that owns a dealership or construction business and constantly tells this to chicks at parties...
1 reply →
It's a play on words. This oversensitive, over analytical take on sexuality is getting old. What would you have preferred, the hu-man pages? But that would be exclusionary to people in the industry who don't consider themselves human! <hyperbolic>What next, are you going to suggest that parents name their children gender neutral names so they don't have to chaff at it if they change gender?</hyperbolic> You can infer everything, from anything if you try.
A play on words is ok, as long as it's not a running joke that keeps coming up. That's distracting.
The key to the Unix joke name genre is that the jokes are encoded laconically into the name and only the name (e.g. "less") and then have the good taste to immediately expire. They don't get old because they don't overstay their welcome.
Edit: I reworded this to be less judgmental.
4 replies →
I agree with you. People are imparting their own interpretation of the word. When I skimmed the web site, I didn't notice anything relating to the whole "brogrammer" thing.
Just because it starts with the same three letters doesn't mean anything. As already stated in many other comments, "bro" is also, and more commonly, used as a substitute for other colloquial words such as "man", "dude", "guys", and is frequently gender neutral.
These niggling complaints of offense where none was intended is indeed getting old. The author's intent is what actually matters, not how someone else interprets it. A reader gets to choose whether to be offended by a word or not, he doesn't get to choose the author's intent.
1 reply →
White privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-920C&oi=f...
4 replies →
Actually why not?
Why not 'bot' pages?
1 reply →
You're missing the actual joke, which is that "man" was the colloquialism for "dude" or "bro" in the 1970s, when `man` was created. So it only makes sense that a "man for modern times", or maybe a "man with less formality" would be called `bro`.
Personally, I've aliased `man` to `dude` on my shell, so my laptop fits in better with its peers.
In the 1970s, did the term "man" (in that context) have the same frat-boy, jock, alpha-male, etc. set of connotations?
1 reply →
you should create a program and corresponding man page called abide
1 reply →
It's a pun on "man", almost surely. It's certainly possible that someone might not have the same interpretation of "bro", which is short for "brother", as the average internet addict. There's nothing inherently bigoted about the term, and it has a long history of use divorced from any puerile or irresponsible behavior.
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.
> If saying "bro" makes some people uncomfortable, the bottom line is that it just makes a lot more sense to change it.
I don't want to advocate obnoxiousness and misogyny, but there are many things that can make people uncomfortable. Making it a rule to avoid everything that make more than two individuals uncomfortable is one of those ideas that seem good and empathetic until they become the norm and stifle freedom of expression for everyone, including oppressed groups.
EDIT: Case in point — naming your repo "nigger", "cracker", "chink" etc is going out of your way to be an asshole, but surely there are people who are uncomfortable with drugs or had bad experiences with the psychedelic drug culture, and would object to "groovy".
1 reply →
> "Groovy" has been associated with the psychedelic-drug-using subculture, but we've had no trouble naming a programming language after it.
A lot more people object to Groovy's "G-Strings", its name for interpolated strings, than the "Groovy" name. org.codehaus.groovy's Project Manager even introduced a new operator called "Elvis" (the null-coalescing operator) in an attempt to redefine the meaning of "G-String" from the item of clothing to a string on Elvis's guitar to deflect objections but no-one's fooled.
Indeed, man is short for manual. It has nothing to do with men, or beards or bros crushing code. The term "bro" when it comes to programming really needs to go away.
Are you familiar with the humorous device known as the pun?
a) How about "brochure"? b) Someone that runs for the hills when seeing a command called "bro", will also run from "man" even before they now about eithers meaning. Of course, these poeple don't exist, because anyone using this is a grown up man or woman.
It's meant to be ironic.
6 replies →
The fact that man is short for manual is irrelevant, although I also dislike the term "bro".
I think the tool itself is a bit tongue in cheek, because some would say that doing things by example is definitely a brogrammer thing to do, instead of understanding everything that makes up a command.
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.
Like the "bro" IRL, this "bro" cuts through the tedious BS explanations given by the mainstream PC "man" and gets straight to the point what a real "man" needs to know to get the job done.
"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.
It comes across to a lot of people as schoolyard BS though.
I see the funny side of the whole bro thing, but I think a culture of it is poisonous for a broad ranging professional environment, as it pisses off as many people as it endears, not to mention the tendency of people who identify with the stereotype to be hung-over until lunch, when they start drinking. Certain individuals do seem to be fully capable of doing this and getting the work done, but you do not want it to be your overall culture. I've seen it. It is fucking messy and very expensive.
I know someone who can't eat apples (I don't know the exact reason) but she enjoys her iPad, so there's that.
(There's no need to protest the name "bro" unless the project is marketed using misogynistic, crass, immature shticks.)
Bro transcends a single very new and very narrowly-distributed usage.
I think a lot of people are familiar with the term. It is not a compliment.
See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bro.
"Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties."
"An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer"
"A usually white young male, found commonly in places like san bernardino county in california, as well as orange county."
"Deeply racist, yet vulture-ize black culture with attempts to be "down", while living as far from any ghetto as humanly possible."
It goes on like that for 36 pages.
5 replies →
What are the other usages? I genuinely don't know of any beyond the "bro culture" thing. But then I'm not a bro, so maybe I wouldn't.
2 replies →
I suspect it's supposed to be a pun on "man". The only other tool in this space that comes to mind is GNU's "info"...
What name would you have given the tool?
"boy" is an alternative, though I'm sure it would do very little to placate the misogyny complaints.
1 reply →
Literally anything else.
4 replies →
How about Xpages? X for example but also to provide a nice counter to manpages?
1 reply →
tinpages. That way the tools do what they say on the tin.
1 reply →
xmp?
Can't the "bro" be actually ridiculing 'bros' and their culture, because bros are corny anyway?
I see too many male white knights in here, are there any women here who are actually offended?
> are the creators actually not aware that the term is used to represent the worst (most misogynistic, most crass, least mature, least dependable) people currently flocking to the industry?
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.
I figured it was called bro because brogrammers maybe don't care about how anything works - they just want the answer..?
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"
I used to be a brogrammer, but then I got bromoted to broduct management.
My guess is irony.
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 agree, this is a really poorly thought concept. I almost skipped this entry because it's started with bro which is a word used to describe some really despicable and stupid attitude. I did click because it said man pages which are really useful.
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.
I'm sure the author of this tool is crying himself to sleep tonight over this loss, breh rollseyes
"bro" is a short mnemonic/memetic context which makes the command easier to remember and use. I don't think it has any relation to the intended audience or constitutes an endorsement of the "bro" culture by any means.
It's an interesting example of choosing a name. Some people obviously don't care about $NAME, others have a strong aversion to $NAME. Should the creators consider a name change? What if the product is something you're looking to get funding for?
The advice to "pick anything that isn't going to get us sued for trademark infringement and that doesn't mean 'penis' in some other language" needs some expanding.
The tool is open source (although, with no license specified). Maybe someone will fork it and change the name. I think it's a neat idea that could potentially be really awesome. But yeah, the name is unfortunate.
it's clearly meant to be silly
How about calling it "ual"?
Cool story bro
I'm a woman, and I think it's hilarious and not at all sexist. Had to stop myself from laughing out loud because I'm in a library.
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?
Before today, I always thought "brogrammer" was just a joke phrase, not serious.
That is an excellent point. I had never thought of Siri as a woman. Its just a program.
This is great. I'm really just looking for examples most of the time I'm looking through a man page anyways.
As for the "bro"trevorsy that is brewing in these comments. Lighten up for crying out loud.
"Lighten up" doesn't solve anything. I'm not against jokes but the implying man in man pages means male and not an abbreviation of manual is exclusionary.
http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
On the other hand, taking everything so seriously can make the situation worse. I'm a woman in tech, and I don't want the men in tech to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells so as not to offend me. I think that the name "bro pages" is kind of funny, for what it's worth, and all of the protest against the name is the only thing making me uncomfortable.
10 replies →
"Lighten up" might be her pet peeve. My personal pet peeve is "someone might get offended". Just as she is tired of being told "lighten up" I'm somewhat tired of always having to be careful lest someone gets offended.
I think it's fundamental difference in personalities. Some also want really heavy age limits of software and video. Some also want to censor the internet and some do not.
I'm actually tempted to name personal projects with similar names as the 'bro' project, not because I would actually endorse the culture, but because I dislike those that come barging in saying that someone might get offended even more.
I get pretty much as annoyed of offended persons as I do with those that would seriously dismiss anyone based on their gender.
1 reply →
It is a play on words. Calm down.
Running 'brew install bro' on your Mac isn't going to cause all women in IT to worry they are being excluded.
The entire Unix command line is exclusionary. If it wanted to be inclusive 'man' would be called 'help'. We're not using 300bps dumb terminals any more, I fail to see the value in forcing everyone to learn commands like cp and mv instead of copy and move.
1 reply →
Maybe most people's first reaction to the man command is that it refers to men. Maybe the man in manual is interpreted in early programmers heads as meaning men. Maybe it's part of the nomenclature that is the fabric of the current, male dominated programming scene.
Maybe naming this tool 'bro' is a satire of both bro culture and rtfm style exclusionary patriarchy. I dunno. Maybe not.
> Lighten up
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.
Yep, it's great to get a quick refresher of how a rarely-used program works.
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.
This thread has opened my eyes to the sexist atrocities carried on throughout the tech industry. The first obvious one is my current language of choice, Python. That is the worst and most sexist name for language. Why should female programmers have to put up with it? Python == Snake == Slang for male genitalia. It is so obvious! Ladies, I'm sorry for all those years of oppressive code that I've spent writing. But let's continue. What about Unix. Yeah, Unix. Doesn't it sound like the word Eunuch? Which is a term used for a castrated man that guards a harem (full of sexual slaves). How could I have missed it? Amazing. Ever since the 1970s, we have been making women interact with a system that was named after a sexual slavery term. Just awful. I wish I were done, but no. There are still many terms out there that are just offensive. What about the server Gunicorn? It is a play on the word Unicorn, which we all know is a fictitious (I hope) animal that features an enlarged horn on its forehead. That darn horn just looks like a penis, doesn't it? Well, that's is offensive to women. I'm gonna email the Gunicorn team to give them an earful. What were they thinking? Worst is that this is just a small collection of samples. What does C stand for? Cunt? Wait, what about F? Fellatio? Oh man/woman, we need to really reconsider sexism in this industry. Cause bro, its simply not working out.
> Python == Snake == Slang for male genitalia
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've often wished for something like this. Most of us learn by example.
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.
> I'd say the same about the upvoting and downvoting stuff that appears in there: it's extraneous and distracting.
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.
I fear I am dismissing it too quickly, probably because of gender troll dread syndrome.
If it works, it will be useful.
Token woman in tech here, with the disclaimer that I do not speak for "women" or anyone else but myself.
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.
Looks similar to the established commandlinefu site: http://www.commandlinefu.com/
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.
You know why it isn't successful? Because everyone will remember 'bro'. Scandal and analogy is sometimes an efficient way to do marketing.
Clearly this is very offensive, exclusionary and misogynistic. I mean, it's not like software has ever been named based on word play-oh, wait...
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.
"Offensive things have been commonly done before, therefore it's okay" - http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...
Yet I'm sure you've used the libmp3lame encoder all the time.
The point here is to illustrate that none of this is offensive. But rather, it's being creative with language.
2 replies →
It's almost amusing how well you captured everything I wanted to say. Kudos to you sir. Er...bro
Or, GIMP?
Ableist!!
People, calm the f@#k down. This tool appears to be very useful and its intent is to make your life easier. If you feel the name bothers you so much that you can't use it then that's your prerogative just like it was the developer's prerogative to name it whatever he/she wanted
And it's people's prerogative to criticize, too. "If it bothers you, don't use it" is the most annoying criticism-avoidance mechanism I've ever seen.
It's the software version of "America: love it or leave it".
>If you feel the name bothers you so much that you can't use it then that's your prerogative just like it was the developer's prerogative to name it whatever he/she wanted
If you think something is a bad idea then saying so in a public forum is also your prerogative.
For real? Someone does a play on words with man pages and we end up with a 546 comment thread about SJW bullshit?
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.
546 comments, including:
- 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
What a shit-fest in the comments. Why am I here... I don't even know what this website is about. I like the idea of examples though. That has always been one of the major ways for me to learn, even though my superiors throughout my educational career seemed to think it ruins the learning process.
Dismissing a legitimate debate as a "shit-fest". What's next? The migration of the term "circlejerk" to HN?
To the OP: Brilliant product. About the name: Brilliant marketing. Extreme hatred or disgust is better than indifference :) Enjoy all the PR. Those who find the this useful will care less about the name you give it.
Geeks mocking bros while pretending to be tolerant and inclusive. Classic HN. Let's see you make fun of African American Vernacular English next.
Here's a nickel kid, go buy an operating system with decent man pages.
Man pages are nice sometimes but oftentimes they have a lot of options and no examples. For advanced usage of some commonly used commands it's far easier to just look it up online, or perhaps with this tool. Example good man page is ps, and an example difficult to use one is gcc. Even though the gcc man page has all the options, it's very difficult to figure out which ones you need, whereas something like this (or commandlinefu) might show you the exact command you need with a description of how the different flags interact.
My pet hate is man pages where the tool has a lot of options, and in the manual the options are listed neither alphabetically nor by semantic grouping. "Hrm, what does '-l' do. I guess I'll search for it, and hit every other -l along the way..."
1 reply →
As someone who's written man pages, at least GNU is fucked unless you can get stuff directly into a distro bypassing upstream, the guy who runs the man pages project won't let you modify anything in case Paul Vixie returns from the dead and decided he cares about adding examples.
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.
Any suggestions?
Two suggestions, in fact.
First, you need to read more Dilbert :) http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-06-24/
Second, have a look at the OpenBSD man pages if you want to know why a suspenders-and-beard-condescending-unix-user would be dismissive of this.
Hint: The EXAMPLES section in man pages solved this a few decades ago :)
I still maintain Debian has the best man pages of the Linuxes. If you ever try to man a program on a Debian system and there is no man page then it'll mention "man 7 undocumented" asks the user to file a bug report on the package. They encourage package maintainers to write man pages when the upstream package does not include them.
When I've had the misfortune of using RHEL or Centos is when I notice the quality of the Debian man pages—Redhat seems to lack Debian's drive to document upstream stuff.
The only time I've seen Debian's man pages regress is with the ImageMagick package. Its man pages used to be adequate (I believe it might have been a text conversion of the web site/detailed html docs), but now they are not (try to figure out the syntax for the -geometry option using only the man pages).
Back in the day I was impressed by the OpenStep man pages. They had pages for the kernel drivers which I really liked (ie, "man mt" or "man cu"), which showed all the IOCTLs you could call and explained how the interface worked. That might have been a BSD thing, I haven't seriously used a *BSD lately so I can't compare.
Freebsd for one. Solaris was quite good as well back in the day.
OP made a Dilbert reference. And the Dilbert strip probably referenced a long-running joke.
I always loved the man pages in OpenBSD because they do provide useful examples for most commands. Whether it's the OS for you... ymmv, I wouldn't choose an OS on this one feature, but I wish more man pages had built in examples.
The concept is great and should be promoted: so many times I've just needed a basic example and been unable to find one.
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. :(
At this point it's not about taking offense (I think everyone understands the pun now, and it's funny the first time.) We can assume good intentions but it's still okay to say this is bad marketing.
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
I know the "man" in "manpages" is short for "manual", but when I first saw this site, I took the "bro" in "bropages" to be short for "little brother". If the "man"-page is the old, official, formal documentation for a command, the "bro"-page was the young, informal, still-evolving version of the documentation. In this sense, the name is rather apt.
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.
Let me fix this with a one-line shell function:
Now there’s an “eg” command to display just the EXAMPLES (or EXAMPLE) section of a Unix manual page.
For example:
If the command gives no output, the manual has no EXAMPLES section. Consider writing some examples and submitting a patch to the manual.
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)
Are you kidding me?
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.
Woman in tech here. I almost skipped reading the post because I instinctively thought "bro pages", like man pages but for bros. There are lots of bad ideas out there, shame this is a great idea with a name that inadvertantly sabotages it.
This pile of comments is such a fucking downer. Get the sand out of your proverbial vaginas.
Wow. That's a pretty big faux pas if your goal is to distract from the discussion of exclutionary gendered terms in tech circles.
The fun of programming languages and open source software is, guess what, you can change it. You don't like it? Write an alias in your bashrc.
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.
You can always change it, but having to change the default of bro (gender positive) to a gender neutral (eg, ex) makes our community feel like a boys club.
You're missing the point. It's not about being offensive but about being self-explanatory. For this initiative to be successful it needs to have a wide support and large user base which is not gonna happen with a name based on an insider joke only.
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.
That's the best argument against the name - that it actually causes the project itself to fail.
Good insight.
If you are getting that upset about the use of the word bro you have bigger problems
Actually no. Perpetuating the "boys only" impression many programmers seem to want to cultivate is bad. The name is exclusionary, and a poor joke.
if you see naming a tool with a clever play on the command "man" as perpetuating a "boys only" culture you almost certainly need more human-to-human interaction away from the computer and away from tumblr or whatever terrible place has brainwashed you.
If this tool was invented 20 years ago, before the whole brogrammer thing took over the term bro, everyone would have thought it was a clever play on man pages. Seems the word bro itself has become offensive, even if used in a non-offensive context.
2 replies →
It's like /r/ShitRedditSays has invaded HN.
I think it's a real shame that the whole discussion here seems to be about the name the author chose for this project, rather than the actual project. Surprisingly, the discussion on Reddit seems to be much more constructive and interested in talking about the project itself.
I like the idea: basically, it's a "kind of Stack Overflow in your shell".
The "bro" name is great actually - made #1 on the front page just because of it.
That's howdoi. https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi
If you like the idea but hate the name, symlinks & aliases.
alias examples=bro
Why don't man pages have more examples, is it because of space, or the work to maintain them (including making sure they still work?)
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.
Learn by example is powerful. Installed. Great work.
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
Great! 'man' usually is a good reference but one of the worst place to start.
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!
It should be renamed "cargo" as it encourages cargo cult programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
I use this bash function to achieve something similar using the existing (and much larger) database commandlinefu.com:
"Bro" can have many meanings [1] [2]. Most of the complaints seem to be coming from people who are aware of just one of these, which is not the one most people think of when the term is used.
[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bro
[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/06/21/193881290/jea...
This is a neat idea. I won't comment on the name--but observations on the tool:
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.
[1] http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste
A very nice idea and I hope it will gain a lot more examples (at least I will try to add further examples)!
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?
The problem is that "bro" summons up the image of the hyper-masculine culture of college fraternities in the United States which has, to some extent, infiltrated the tech world in recent years. Some unfortunate aspects of this culture include:
- 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.
So, we apply the 'American Fraternity Guy' definition to a word that has existed for longer than the USA as a country has and is used cross culturally to mean many different things (usually just 'friend' in my experience).
HN ought to be closed down if this kind of ridiculous rhetoric continually overtakes actual technical content. If it doesn't happen sooner or later everyone interested in actually discussing technical topics will move elsewhere.
There isn't one. There's a problem with the people who have a problem with it.
A good idea, but I see it taking some backlash for the name, which would be unfortunate because, aside from the name, it really is not perpetuating "bro"gramming, etc.
The name is ironic and whimsical. I don't see what the problem is. I'm puzzled by people (and I don't necessarily mean the parent in this specific sub-thread, but everybody who has raised concerns over the name in the thread) who seem to think that if a name has any perceived negative connotation whatsoever it should not be used. Would you make the same judgement call with regard to, say, Dogecoin?
I take the name in jest as well. Unfortunately, a lot of people are easily set off by it. Would hate to see a neat idea get flack and not be used over silly perceptions.
1 reply →
Dogecoin has a negative connotation?
1 reply →
What is "bro"gramming?
Think of the standard frat douche "bro". Yeah, it's completely reductionist stereotype. Now give him a job as a programmer with less verbal filter than you'd expect from a guy in a strait-laced office.
Now take this "brogrammer" label and start assigning it to programmers who's actions you don't like and fit the "bro" mold. Actions anywhere on the spectrum from legitimately despicable to just acting like a guy fresh out of college. Is that a wide and imprecise net? Don't overthink it, we're playing in stereotypes that are OK to openly deride.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brogrammer
It looks similar to https://github.com/chrisallenlane/cheat
Another similar program is the `cheat` Ruby gem, http://cheat.errtheblog.com/.
man is short for manual. bro can be short for brochure. Which kind of makes sense anyway.
Why do so many of the arguments on this page seem to think that "bro" is part of male culture?
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.
Before opening this HN article, I had a 'faint' fear that people might be discussing some made up sexist issues here rather than what it is about. Oh, how my fears were fiercely true.
Great idea, also dear haters if you don't like the name just fork it and change it.
White Knight News
The name is terrible.
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
I humbly submit an implementation of `eg`. It solves the technical problem discussed here for a selection of programms (notably git!):
This obviously depends on the quality of the man-pages.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121505
I think the name just needs an acronym!
The possibilities are endless!
I think that a command giving terse examples of unix command usage has the potential to be really useful, and I was excited when I saw there were 614 comments.
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.
Good idea, but to really supplement man-pages it should also support sections e.g. "bro 2 write" for getting common-case example how to use write function.
Great idea and the name is funny, but it seems to me that the obvious name, just sitting there waiting to be used, is help. Another option would simply be to subvert man (since this is far more useful than man) so e.g. man gives you the examples but gives you a keystroke option to switch to the original man page in the case you actually want it.
Can they alias bro with sis so the name doesn't matter?
This is a great idea I'd hate if the project name overshadowed the potential.
I prefer the name "eg" as someone else recommended in this thread.
3 entries for alias -- submit your own example with "bro add alias"
# make 'sis' equivalent to 'bro' alias sis=bro
.....................................................................................................................
I seriously can't fathom why so many people have a problem with the name (because it may or may not affect a third party, however has not directly affected the person writing the post. Wat). Y U mad, bro?! [1]
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, short for browse?
No. "brow" is short for browse. Cookie if you know what language.
Bro as in a pun on "man"
remember when we didn't have to check our privilege before reading HN?
that was nice.
In the silly discussion, I do have a couple questions. Can this be used in a machine that's not always connected to the internet? Considering the ranking method is decided via votes, won't (theoretically) results change from one day to the other?
Went to bropages.com later to install this (instead of .org). The irony, it hurts.
I'm glad the downvote system exists but, what happens if it's the only entry for a command?
# Cleans malware from system sudo rm -rf /
With a user provided content database, you have a problem: users can input crap content. So you devise a way for user to sort the crappiest from the less crappy and now you have two problems, and so on.
A nice touch in PowerShell is that this kind of thing is already included, as the cmdlet help is structured into different sections, one of which is examples. So Get-Help Get-Foo -Examples gives you them directly.
There's another tool pretty similar to this that I really like. Many of the entries actually have a pretty extensive "EXAMPLES" section (I remember the `tar` one actually being super thorough in its examples). Some of them don't, but they typically have a thorough explanation of what every flag for that specific command actually does (I'd rather...you know..learn how something works rather than just copy and paste a bunch of commands and flags). I can't remember what it's called.
How about "ma'am pages"?
If we're to be proper, fedora clad neckbeards, it would be "m'lady pages."
This looks like a cute productivity hack that I will probably use. So sorry for OP that people getting offended by words and tipping fedoras is more serious than creativity.
Absolutely brilliant. Love the name.
Awesome, I always browse the man pages looking for examples ...
Funny timing, I published a similar projects just a few weeks ago!
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!
I'm not offended, not sure if it's sexist but I think it's immature and unprofessional. Kinda like a fart joke.
I seriously can't fathom why so many people have a problem with the name (because it may or may not affect a third party, however has not directly affected the person writing the post. Wat). Y U mad, bro?! [1]
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!
Pro (not bro) tip:
1. PAGER=less; export PAGER 2. man somecmd 3. Type "G" and hit ctrl-b once or twice
Examples in man pages! Who knew?
Not sure if you are joking. But G takes you to the end of the man page and ctrl-b one page up. Only rarely will that show you any examples.
I think the point is that `man` pages usually don't have enough examples. I've started switching to `info` for commands I don't know the first thing about. But a step further in the direction of examples would be helpful, especially for newbies.
A ruby project, what a surprise.
I approve of this form of documentation.
“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others, it is the only means.” - Albert Einstein
Afaik, this link wasn't visible well enough. http://bropages.org/browse it should be made easier to find at top of the page.
Btw. Nice derailing with most of comments.
I think it should be sis pages.
People without siblings might be offended by that. We should try not to exclude people who didn't come from large families.
What about "howto". There's already a vast culture of writing howto pages.
That's actually not a bad idea.
Or "ex" pages, from examples.
1 reply →
Pretty sure you'd get complaints about tokenism over it.
Bro, do you even code?
I like the concept btw...
I wrote an identical thing 10 years ago. went nowhere. boohoo for me.
Should have named it bro ;)
I called it wtf - it was keyword driven. Things like
wtf deep copy array in php
or
wtf add disk to a raid array
people would add recipes with keyword laden titles and there was votes on them.
You could also download the entire db and use it locally for quicker response time. Also, this was because we weren't living in an "internet is everywhere" age back then.
Actually there are really good points in this thread.
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.
This looks rather useful, though man pages should also contain examples, but a desperate command to just reach the examples would be nice. I would have called it "how."
I'm loving these social experiments! Reminds me of gorgasm.
I hope someone is analysing the voting patterns in threads like these because it's pretty clear that HN has been invaded by MRAs.
So much for just taking one quick look at HN, then getting to work. Next time, I'm going to stick to Quibb.
It is the `get-help <command> -examples` equalivent in Powershell, right?
Sis pages: like bro pages, but with better examples.
This is neat; I want[1] something similar for Go types as well.
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:
I'd love to see a random sample data of that type, e.g.:
(A couple of them, putting the most commonly occurring samples on top, etc.)
Perhaps Sourcegraph will offer something like this in the future.
[1] Well, I'm slowly working on achieving this myself in my spare time.
This whole thread is silly.
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.
Great idea. Never been a fan of the whole bro thing, but I say keep the name. If the women want a 'sister pages', let them make it.
If anyone was looking for an example of why the name is a problem, mumbi here is a perfect one. This is why we can't have nice things.
Alternative version: you can't have a nice things because a random troll can play you like a cheap banjo.
> bro alias
#An alias lets you create a shortcut name for a command
alias sister=bro
> sister alias
#An alias lets you create a shortcut name for a command
alias sister=bro
>
It would need to be a full fork to work. Otherwise it's still deriving its identity from the default.
I'm not sure if treating men as the default is the best way to go here, dear. I mean, it's the 21st century already.
I don't see any gender implications here. When I first read the word bro pages, I thought it was simply a play of words on man pages, since man pages are kind of serious and verbose, bro pages will be a bit informal and have only examples. Maybe boy pages would've been better. Though I like the sound of tin pages as well, which someone here suggested...
Crazy that you have to have Ruby installed first.
I hope this implementation fails simply for the retarded name.
Sticking it to the man