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I was thinking of sharing this with some younger colleagues on slack and paused. Is this a little culturally insensitive by today's standards? I work with someo
by encomiast 3y ago
I was thinking of sharing this with some younger colleagues on slack and paused. Is this a little culturally insensitive by today's standards? I work with someone from China and have no idea what their thoughts on using the Tao like this would be. On the other hand, maybe I'm being overly sensitive.
- highwind 3y agoI'm Korean and if I were to write an article titled "Program like the cowboys of old west" (I've no clue what that article will be about but), would Americans be offended? Within Korean culture, Doh (도) is a same concept as Tao but I'm not offended. I think you are being overly sensitive.
- cglong 3y ago> if I were to write an article titled "Program like the cowboys of old west" (I've no clue what that article will be about but) It'd be about this! :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding
- Jtsummers 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding And as an American, I would not be offended. Cowboy coders might be if the article is approaching it from the derogatory perspective.
- dhosek 3y agoThe big difference is that Tao has religious overtones to it, while cowboys of the Old West, doesn’t. I think OP was more concerned about the fact that this is grabbing something out of another culture and potentially misusing it or using it in a way that others might not approve. A perhaps more apropos analogy might be The Ten Commandments of Programming, which would be OK with most people, although the Torah of Programming, which employed Jewish stereotypes in its telling would be more problematic. And having typed that, this is where the potential issue with the article could lie: less in the title and more in the body and whether it employs stereotypes or culturally insensitive appropriations.
- foobarian 3y agoThrow in some references to the Islamic prophet and you'd be way in inappropriate territory then.
- Pannoniae 3y agoTen Akhams of Programming maybe?
- gopher_space 3y agoIsn’t that basically the first edition of Wall’s “Programming Perl”?
- bafe 3y agoSomething like side effects being haram?
- lioeters 3y agoFundamentalist functional programmers..
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mighmi 3y agoThe 10 commandments used to be used a lot e.g. http://textfiles.com/100/tencoms.pro http://textfiles.com/100/tencoms.pro
- forgotpwd16 3y ago>Program like the cowboys of old west That's a very cool title for an article.
- l33t7332273 3y ago“Real gunslingers chase down rouge threads and kill them with their bare hands while the operating system and all its logs crumble around them.”
- rvbissell 3y ago> rouge threads "The red threads are not the issue here, dude! ...Also, dude, that's not the preferred nomenclature. 'Native threads', please."
- jacinda 3y agoThe Night Watch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf > Even as we speak, systems programmers are doing pointer arithmetic so that children and artists can pretend that their x86 chips do not expose an architecture designed by Sauron. > You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Really, I recommend everything by James Mickens every chance I get: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HerculePoirot 3y ago"Cracking Code on the Frontier: Lessons from the Cowboys of the Old West" https://pastebin.com/DhdHsR3i https://pastebin.com/DhdHsR3i
- furyofantares 3y ago> "Program like the cowboys of old west" (I've no clue what that article will be about but) Probably about doing things without modern sensibilities of safety precautions, skipping normal testing procedures to fix an issue quickly, editing the live production server, stuff like that.
- pgeorgi 3y agoI guess a closer analogy would be an article about file systems called "The sermon of the mount", or something. "The ten commandments of ..." is a popular trope (https://medium.com/byte-sized-code/the-ten-commandments-of-programming-f4b7b0863f85 https://medium.com/byte-sized-code/the-ten-commandments-of-p..., https://itnext.io/the-10-commandments-to-survive-software-development-and-software-projects-28deb6b8fcb2 https://itnext.io/the-10-commandments-to-survive-software-de..., https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html, and so on and so on), too... Seems all harmless enough, but I suppose the risk is that when you use imagery of a different culture, you don't know what is held near and dear to people from within that culture, that you might twist out of context in a hurtful way.
- zephyrfalcon 3y agoI would like to read such an article...
- aseo 3y agoEh, I probably wouldn't bat an eye, unless if you had a reputation of being culturally insensitive. If you wanna play it safe, you can postmark "... and yes, I agree, it is a bit gimmicky."
- morelisp 3y agoNot knowing enough about the thing to know if it's culturally-insensitive is largely what makes it culturally insensitive. You could fix that, but it's easier to stoke random coals on message boards.
- burnished 3y agoMaking people feel bad is what makes something culturally insensitive. Gaining the perspective necessary to tell when that might be the case isn't so simple that you should sum it up as 'you could fix that'. As you well know it can be nuanced. Worse, it just occurred to me that you're chastising some one for asking questions in order to 'fix that'. This isn't a 'just asking questions' guy topic so there is really no reason to doubt motives.
- encomiast 3y agoThis is not a fair take. To know enough about something like a different religion is not something you just go fix. It's not like reading the Wikipedia page on Taoism will give me the cultural context to evaluate how a joke about Taoism will make people feel. Give how often otherwise smart people make insensitive remarks about classes of people they should be familiar with (at least in the US, like women, native Americans, Mexicans, etc) I suspect "fixing it" is harder that you realize and an easier way is to simply ask (which I did).
- HerculePoirot 3y ago[dead]
- raincole 3y agoYou're overthinking it by a lot. Tao is not an inherently religous concept, at least for most people. Actually the use of "The Tao of..." (...之道) is somewhat common in modern writing. Source: as a native speaker. Edit: that being said you might not want to share this book with junior programmers. Not because it's offensive, but that they might think you're a snob.
- jfk13 3y agoI guess it's no more insensitive than writing a book titled "The ___ Bible" (for your choice of language or topic... there are plenty of examples).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dionian 3y agoI don't think it would be culturally insensitive. It's not really a widely practiced religion, and the word is a generic word in chinese that applies to other religions. Jesus said 'i am the way truth and life', they use Tao to translate Way in the chinese bible.
- pyinstallwoes 3y agoYou're being overly sensitive.