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Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

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Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#191

Post by codygman »

jcutrell wrote: post #161

The fun of programming languages and open source software is, guess what, you can change it. You don't like it? Write an alias in your bashrc. OSS authors are not held to a standard defined by all of you - they are welcome to express themselves however they want. For instance, my mother would find Brainfuck quite offensive. That doesn't mean the author should change the name. I think the play on words is quite clever…

You can always change it, but having to change the default of bro (gender positive) to a gender neutral (eg, ex) makes our community feel like a boys club.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#192

Post by ronaldx »

The concept is great and should be promoted: so many times I've just needed a basic example and been unable to find one.

Man pages are often not fit for purpose and fail at basic pedagogy. Poor man pages (alongside poor UX generally) renders good software unusable.

It's really an important task to fix this problem - I can't begin to imagine how many hours this could save. This has the potential to make it easier for people to try software out and could lower barriers to enter computer science.

The name is clever, I suppose, but it's simply not appropriate and contradicts any goal of inclusive openness, and I find that important. I feel conflicted, but I can't contribute to this project under this name. :(

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#193

Post by theorique »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #143
res0nat0r wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 br…

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.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#194

Post by theorique »

koala_advert wrote: post #119
belluchan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Do you also get mad when people use the word "guys" to refer to more than one person of either sex?

This may be a joke, but a lot of people actually do get upset by this!

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#195

Post by misnome »

cbhl wrote: post #14
dewitt wrote: post #4

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.

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?

xmp?

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#196

Post by [deleted] »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #171
blahedo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". C…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#197

Post by bjterry »

ilyanep wrote: post #135
res0nat0r wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 t…

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.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#198

Post by KVFinn »

ihuman wrote: post #131
blahedo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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 wa…

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.

>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)

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#199

Post by primitivesuave »

blahedo wrote: post #99

Great idea; shame about the name. Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly): the problem is not with what you [0] are thinking when you read the word "bro", but with what other people , especially newcomers, are thinking. The locker-room atmosphere that stuff like this creates is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people, women especially, who infer that on top of all the technically difficu…

Interesting point, just want to point out that changing the name is as simple as

sudo echo "bro $*" > /usr/bin/explain

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#200

Post by natch »

paul wrote: post #155

Awesome idea. Shame about the humorless nature of this community. To me, a "bro" is a dumb, fratboy version of a man, which makes the name hilariously perfect. If you're feeling oppressed and excluded by a command name, your real problems lie elsewhere.

I'm not feeling oppressed. The problem isn't me feeling oppressed, it's other people feeling oppressed.

Poor choice of language can set up an exclusionary environment.

To you, this may be funny.

To me, your accusation of humorlessness reminds me of people who engage in sexually harassing "jokes" in the workplace, and then try to get away with it by using "humor" as an excuse.

You aren't the one who gets to decide when other people feel uncomfortable.

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