Comment by dewitt
11 years ago
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.
Now, we're just being pedantic. I guess this is what we do on a lazy Saturday morning when we all just have to be offended and aghast at something.
I don't even know what you're talking about with "soul crushing it can be to see this kind of behavior in the workplace". What behavior? naming a tool "bro"? Are you serious?
I work with grown ups. Men and women of every age, background, and geography. They would take issue with cat-calls, gross innuendo, propositioning, and many other things. Not a single one of them would lose their shit over "bropages". You know, because we're all adults and have developed this sense of "things that matter" and "things that are trivial" and "things that don't even register".
Of course, this seems to be half the current content of HN. Every day, long diatribes about the horrors of sexism that restate the same old bullshit and gets everyone worked up with no further understanding or patience derived from them.
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To be fair, some people actually use "bro" as an neutral term. I call my wife "bro" all the time, she called one of her (female) students bro, etc.
And I'm not trying to downplay any bad behavior by people you've had to interact/work with. Pretty much anything can be used in a negative way in a specific context, and people can be huge jerks. I'm merely trying to say that words which you think are offensive to one gender, can be used as a completely neutral term without any subtext other than friendliness. It's really a shame that this word has become so negative to you.
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I appreciate your intent, but this line of reasoning about the implications of the term "bro" seems like a huge stretch to me. Being a male, should I likewise feel personally offended by the Emacs woman command, which is a similar and equally "exclusive" pun on man pages?
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/woman/ind...
Are you winding me up?
Was man also misogynistic?
Besides:
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My female friends and I all call each other "bro" "dude" and "guys".
Do you also get mad when people use the word "guys" to refer to more than one person of either sex?
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"Using "bro" is offensive because it excludes others by their gender."
You must have a huge problem with "him" then.
How have you been dealing with the existence of man pages thus far?
>"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.
Well gee, I wonder why.
broseriously.
>It's an awful exclusionary term and you shouldn't think it funny or ironic.
"Don't like things I don't like under any circumstances."
> I have found out in life that women can also be dependable, fun to hang out with, and not "complicate things."
And there's nothing contradictory about that. Just because 'bro' is a man who might be all of that, doesn't mean that a woman can't be the same thing. Maybe she will not get the same nickname or term of endearment, but neither does that imply that she is qualitatively different from a 'bro'.
Thankfully we live in an age where gender is independent of sex so anyone can be a bro if they want to.
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...
Before all you youngsters and your urban dictionary came along, it meant brother or friend. Thanks for ruining another word.
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.
> It also clumsily fails to understand the genre it's trying to reproduce, the Unix joke name. Those 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'm confused. Is the bro thing showing up in this command apart from in the name?
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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.
Just wrote something similar. I wholeheartedly agree. Context and Intent are everything when it comes to language.
White privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-920C&oi=f...
Not everyone's from the US, bro.
Actually why not?
Why not 'bot' pages?
Actually as I wrote it, I realized it wasn't that bad an idea. Hah!
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?
No, it is clear that it did not. The usage of 'man' referenced upthread was, probably somewhat earlier than that time, transitioning from 'generic term of address for a male person' to 'means of communicating emphasis when addressing someone (not necessarily male)'. It wasn't used as a labeling term for 'type of man'; rather 'man' was, of course, as it still is, the generic label for 'adult male person'. I still hear vocative and emphatic usages of 'man' though the vocative usage seems somewhat old-fashioned to me.
My assumption has been that the vocative usage of 'man' was originally associated particularly with urban African-American speech and got picked up by youth culture during the 1950s and 1960s, much as was happening with other urban African-American slang and dialect usages.
The trajectory of 'dude' in the 1980s (possibly given a significant push by the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High) was somewhat similar to that of 'vocative->emphasis man', though 'dude' of course had been a term that had earlier on been used as a label for certain categories of men (e.g. the 'surfer dude' and the much earlier usages that go back to the 19th century).
you should create a program and corresponding man page called abide
Alias sudo
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".
Last sentence of this comment objected to "ether".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041947
> "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.
I don't like it to be honest. It seems a bit kiddish really. Great idea though, but I would have preferred something else. Maybe `eg`?
eg ls, eg cat, eg less etc.
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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.
Anything to do with gender on urban dictionary has been vote brigaded by feminist blogs for years now.
See: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=man
Here's the number one entry:
Things With Penises who tell women anything just to get intercorse
"timmy is like most men he tells tina he loves her so he can get ass then he never speaks to her again."
The number two entry is about how real men love feminism and have big dicks, seemingly as a result. Apparently men who don't love feminism aren't men at all and have small dicks.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=feminist
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=misandry
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=masculinity
The site hasn't been 'urban' for a while.
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Yeah, it can mean all that, or it can just mean "friend"...
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I don't get it. If someone made a command called "bi###", people would feel that it was hostile towards women - and understandably so. But then someone creates a command with a name that - by your account - is hostile towards a certain kind of male archetype, that name is... hostile towards women?
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.
It's short for brother. People sometimes refer to their brothers as "bro."
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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.
Nothing will placate the misogyny complaints, which is why they are best ignored.
Literally anything else.
Are you man enough to use `girl` pages?
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How about Xpages? X for example but also to provide a nice counter to manpages?
There is already a software product owned by IBM called Xpages probably wouldn't be allowed due to copyright
tinpages. That way the tools do what they say on the tin.
I really like this. I'm going to go ahead and add it to my ~/.bashrc, because I feel weird about typing bro a lot:
alias tin='bro'
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