Comment by blahedo
11 years ago
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.
I saw the name, and thought it was web pages for "bros". Right off the bat, that seemed like an idiotic idea. It's right up there with "let's make tv shows about white people."
Then when I read the short description, I wasn't impressed.
I read the page anyway. Again, interesting idea, but the joke was carried on in the example, and that pretty much killed it for me.
> 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.
The problem with that idea is that humans have this pesky thing called "free will" or "agency." We are capable of choosing how we react to things we hear others say. That makes speaking incredibly difficult if your primary concern is whether any human in the world will react by taking offense.
> We can safely say that the creator was thinking of brogramming.
Even if that's the case, is it possible that the idea is to mock the concept of "brogramming"?
you havent explained how this is related to 'brogramming' yet. the word bro in a programming context does not automatically mean it has some kind of conspiratorial relationship with the concept of brogrammers. the author even blatantly suggests reclaiming the word for both genders.
>You havent explained how this is related to 'brogramming' yet. the word bro in a programming context does not automatically mean it has some kind of conspiratorial relationship with the concept of brogrammers.
I don't think intent is relevant when evaluating whether a name is a wise choice, audience reaction is all that matters.
But in any case the single example used being a do-you-even-lift-bro 'curl' points to brogrammer inspiration.
While I agree that the name 'bro' was incredibly poorly chosen, I think the use of 'curl' may have less to do with weight-lifting analogies than the fact that it's an incredibly complex command with a 2280-line manpage.
1) Catering to every person's sensibilities is impractical. The whole argument about it being offensive comes from ignorance of word play, anyway. In that regard it is unjustified.
2) Of course it wasn't an accident. `man` is a shorthand for manual that led to plenty of jokes. `bro` serves a complementary function to `man`, and thus it humorously references its inspiration and sibling program using a diminutive.
Yet you also show ignorance of etymology. The term "bro" didn't originate with "brogramming", which is a very recent neologism and not widely known outside of hipster tech communities and feminist circles. "Bro" and "bromance" have been around for a long time. How does having a fake "X-GirlsAreBrosToo" header imply "brogramming"?
>1) Catering to every person's sensibilities is impractical.
Catering to every person, sure. But when you get enough people at some point it becomes a significant fraction of the audience instead of a few individual sensibilities, right? Based on volume you see you wouldn't say the portion of the audience with some concerns about the name is significant?
>Yet you also show ignorance of etymology. The term "bro" didn't originate with "brogramming"
I would say that the single example given, a 'bro curl' as in a do-you-even-lift-bro curl, suggests the creators of this tool were at least aware of it. Though intent doesn't matter, just how the audience responds to a name.