Comment by res0nat0r
11 years ago
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.
Is it so obvious? I live far from the west coast, and the only reason I know the term "brogramming" at all is because I read HN and some other Silicon Valley-oriented blogs.
I am the only programmer I know at work or in my personal life that does so. The entire thing is a completely alien concept to me given what I've seen in real life. I hasten to say I absolutely do believe it's a real thing, just something I assume is centered around Silicon Valley.
The first thing I thought when I saw it was not "brogrammer." It is entirely plausible in my mind that the creator wasn't thinking of brogramming. Indeed, I could see myself or someone I know naming the tool that without any idea that brogramming was a thing.
So you glazed over the point in the original post:
the problem is not with what you are thinking when you read the word "bro", but with what other people, especially newcomers, are thinking.
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Except that your argument has the same flaws has res0nat0r's argument: neither of you know what the author was thinking when he named it. Was the creator thinking of brogramming? Was the creator thinking of it being the "bro"ther of the man pages? None of us know, so it is useless to argue about it.
No.
1) A big part of my point is that it doesn't matter what an author is thinking when it comes to discussing how others will react to it. I won't restate here my arguments on that topic.
2) We can safely say that the creator was thinking of brogramming. Aside from the fact it would be an astonishing coincidence, the original page uses as one of its examples "curl --header "X-GirlsAreBrosToo: 1" www.bropages.org". Calling this "bro" was not some sort of innocent accident.
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The author's intention matters when assigning blame. It doesn't matter if we're debating whether this is a good name to use from a marketing perspective.
My first guess upon seeing it was that it was poking fun at self-identified "brogrammer" hip trendy automation tools that just show you a few examples of a slick simple demo usage, and then leave you to dig through the source code to figure out the rest of the syntax and side effects, rather than even attempt to provide a comprehensive reference of any sort. "We're iterating too faaast for docs, man!"
>Was the creator thinking of brogramming? Was the creator thinking of it being the "bro"ther of the man pages?
What does intent matter? If the discussion on a tool is overtaken by the discussion on the gender trolling in the name, then feedback that the name is off putting to a portion of the potential audience is valid.
If I was marketing a product in a foreign language, I would be open to feedback that the name has some bad connations even though obviously I had none in mind.
(Incidentally, based on the single example being 'bro curl' as in "Do you even lift bro?" curls, I think brogrammer was in fact the origin of the name)
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We're so used to the "man" command that I think it's hard to judge how it would sound if someone invented it today. There might very well be calls to rename it.
We're okay with it because we're used to it, it's from a different time, and it's far too late to change it now. Those aren't good excuses for a new project.
The 'man' command is named that because its short for 'manual', it has nothing to do with 'men'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_pages
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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.
It would be extremely surprising to me if fsck wasn't recognized to be tongue-in-cheekly profane when it was originally named. It could easily have been called ckfs, chkdisk (as it was on other systems), etc. Fsck first appeared on Version 7 UNIX, which means it dates to the early 80s, long after "fuck" had been established as one of the most popular profanities in English. It's context of usage, when the filesystem had become corrupt and the administrator was in a state of annoyance or anger, is also suggestive.
"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.
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.
It's important to draw the distinction between the usage of the term to
(1) describe oneself and one's peers and create an ingroup
as opposed to
(2) describe (and often criticize) others
I don't see a lot of unironic usage of (1), aside from the odd tone-deaf fratboy.
I see a lot of criticism of "brogrammers" and "dudebros" by self-styled "progressives" on the internet and social media.
The question is, what is the actual intent of this project name - is it just a "ha-ha, man refers to male people, bro is a different word to refer to male people"? If so, then there's no problem with it and people offended by it are overreacting.
If it's intended to exclude females from contributing or participating (though I don't see how), then that's a problem. It's not clear that this would actually be an issue - a man who didn't want to participate in a project because the gem was called "estrogen" or "sister" or something would rightly be criticized for having some issues.
I agree with (1) and (2). I know the first thought I had when I saw "bro pages" I thought is was a pun on "man pages." Turns out I was right. As others have noted, no one seems oppressed with "/sys" or that since jewelry is mostly a feminine product, that using "gem" is hostile. Or Julia. Etc. I'm sure the argument is something akin to being that because we are in a male dominated space, that feminine gendered words cannot be exclusionary.
What I really came here to post is that I am curious to hear from the _women_ who are offended by it and why. I am under the impression that most (all?) of the comments are from social justice white males picking up on something that they feel bolsters their ability to say, "look, I support woman in tech!" without actually doing anything real and concrete to, you know, actually support woman in tech (like working to get young woman interested in coding, working towards hiring practices that don't bias resume screening by removing names, or something similar).
I'm sure that I have phrased something completely sans sensitivity above and will be thoroughly lambasted. Hopefully it will be from a woman who can explain it to me, though, if we are to believe some of the comments above, then woman are actively avoiding this site due to sexist comments. Perhaps there is something so overtly sexist in what I wrote that I am part of the problem. However, I don't _think_ so. /me braces for down voting.
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(1) is exactly the context of bropages though, which is the topic of this thread, so it definitely exists.
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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
Come to think of it, 'otto' would have been a brilliant name.
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.