8 ms·
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 ma
by dewitt 13y 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.
- mkr-hn 13y agoBro transcends a single very new and very narrowly-distributed usage.
- dewitt 13y agoI think a lot of people are familiar with the term. It is not a compliment. See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bro 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.
- GunlogAlm 13y agoYeah, it can mean all that, or it can just mean "friend"...
- mkohlmyr 13y agoBut if we don't actively try to get offended at every little thing around us, how are we going to spend all our time?
- nailer 13y agoAnything 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 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=feminist http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=misandry http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=misandry http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=masculinity http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=masculinity The site hasn't been 'urban' for a while.
- donotsurveil 13y agoThis doesn't mean dewitt point is invalid. From the point of view of someone outside of USofA bro is portrayed in the movies and the internet exactly as dewitt and urban dictionary says. A loud and obnoxious fraternity guy with partying, acting stupid and engaging in despicable behavior as their life style.
- Dewie 13y agoI 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?
- jlees 13y agoWhat 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.
- cbhl 13y agoI 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?
- liquidzoot 13y agoLiterally anything else.
- fennecfoxen 13y agoAre you man enough to use `girl` pages?
- JonnieCache 13y agoThat would be ok. ladypages just sounds like an unsavoury euphemism.
- wonderzombie 13y agoCall them syspages (modified from suggestion from upthread).
- protomyth 13y agoSo, these 'girl pages' only have examples and not the technical explanation of the command? Yeah, I'm thinking you might want to keep looking.
- avalaunch 13y agoHow about Xpages? X for example but also to provide a nice counter to manpages?
- shaneqful 13y agoThere is already a software product owned by IBM called Xpages probably wouldn't be allowed due to copyright
- 13y ago
- belluchan 13y agoIndeed, 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.
- wyclif 13y agoIt's meant to be ironic.
- imdsm 13y agoI 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.
- stinos 13y agoThis is actually a very, very good idea. Everybody knows it, it means one thing and one thing only, and that thing also describes what it does, it probably isn't taken, and fits nicely with all other standard descriptive commands like ls/man/... Nice one.
- forgottenpass 13y agoit means one thing and one thing only, and that thing also describes what it does, it probably isn't taken http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=wheezy&arch=any&mode=exactfilename&searchon=contents&keywords=%2Feg http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=wheezy&arch=any&mode...
- pacaro 13y agoName collisions aren't the worst things in the world, you can usually alias around them. ack vs ack-grep springs to mind
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lhnz 13y agoBrogrammer 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.
- belluchan 13y agoI 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.
- lhnz 13y agoAre you winding me up? Was man also misogynistic? Besides: curl --header "X-GirlsAreBrosToo: 1" www.bropages.org
- endymi0n 13y agoit's actually the first thing a feminist programmer adds to her .bashrc: alias woman="man"
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoPlease, "their .bashrc" :-)
- chrisrhoden 13y ago> Was man also misogynistic? man is short for manual. What is bro short for?
- noname123 13y agoLike 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.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoIt 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.
- hobs 13y agoI 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.
- dictum 13y agoI 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.)
- scythe 13y agoIt'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.
- dictum 13y ago> 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".
- thwarted 13y agoLast sentence of this comment objected to "ether". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041947
- vorg 13y ago
- metadept 13y ago"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.
- DanBC 13y agoIt'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.
- joyeuse6701 13y agoIt'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.
- presorted 13y agoWhite privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-920C&oi=fnd&pg=PA188&dq=white+privilege&ots=r7-s8n1FyO&sig=3BscGpiZBP2K2m4t_EgeA1eDuGs#v=onepage&q=white%20privilege&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-920C&oi=f...
- okasaki 13y agoNot everyone's from the US, bro.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gruseom 13y agoA 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.
- kposehn 13y agoMy 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 :)
- tokipin 13y agoit's clearly meant to be silly
- tomphoolery 13y agoYou'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.
- benihana 13y agoyou should create a program and corresponding man page called abide
- zecho 13y agoAlias sudo
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoIn the 1970s, did the term "man" (in that context) have the same frat-boy, jock, alpha-male, etc. set of connotations?
- richardfontana 13y agoNo, 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).
- nowayhosay 13y agoCool story bro
- city41 13y agoThe 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.
- YokoZar 13y agoI used to be a brogrammer, but then I got bromoted to broduct management.
- pbreit 13y agoHow about calling it "ual"?
- donotsurveil 13y agoI 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.
- roel_v 13y agoI'm sure the author of this tool is crying himself to sleep tonight over this loss, breh rollseyes
- return0 13y agoCan'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?
- jakejake 13y agoI 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"
- TeMPOraL 13y ago> 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.