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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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, lets throw away our sense of humor and wordplay because there are theoretically people that might be offended (maybe, kindof. You know. In theory.). (N.B. the people that seem to be offended so far are offended on other peoples behalf..) Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?

English is not my mother tongue so maybe that's why I don't get the humor here, what wordplay are you talking about ? man is short for manual following a unix tradition, bro is a word associated with despicable attitude and stupid behavior holding those as life goals which has absolutely no link with its actual use. There is no way I'm sharing my library of command examples I built for myself over the years with this…

As far as I (from the UK) can tell, this is largely a US (North American?) term, rather than one with much use in any other English-speaking country. Some example usage: the phrase "bro's before hoe's" is a hilarious exchange amongst a group of 'men', implying that men are to be valued above women, who are all sexually promiscuous anyway (and, by the way, that's bad when it comes to women, as opposed to being something to be admired in a 'bro').

Those are the kind of connotations conjured in my mind when I see the name of this software tool.

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

#512
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…

ln -s /bin/sis /bin/bro

Problem solved.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well now you're making an ad hominem fallacy. Can you please read the actual pages I linked and tell me why you disagree with their arguments or why the arguments they are debunking don't apply to what you wrote?

An ad hominem is an attack on the messenger. The poster merely gave reasons why the credibility of said link shouldn't be taken at face value.

[deleted]

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

#514
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…

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…

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.

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

#515
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…

How is man pages better? Before i knew what it stood for, i thought it was sexist.

Man is a pager interface to system documentation, the content is written y knowledgeable people and is actual documentation.

Bro is a user provided database of one liner command which you have no idea if they will do what they claim when they do work.

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

#516
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…

Actually, when I think of man pages I think about pompous neckbeards who get mad at plebians who are having a hard time understanding something rather than helping them with examples. So bro pages to me sound much more friendly; man pages that are aimed at the every day "bro".

So call the tool 'human'[1], or something else that implies friendliness without also implying a beer-swilling, knuckle-dragging, women-hating subculture[2].

[1] Yes, that's also not a great name, but that's not the point [2] I love the double-meaning of the term 'subculture' when describing this whole frat-boy pack; seems perfect.

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

#517
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point. It's such a shame that gender politics have created so many thorny issues in our industry, but you can't bury your head in the sand and pretend they're not there. If we had good female representation in the industry and we didn't have a small cluster of vocal misogynists, we'd be able to make cute jokes that play on gender. But sadly, we don't live in that world. Yes, we need to hold ourselves to a higher stan…

Who are these vocal misogynists in this industry? I've never heard of them or seen them...

Here's a recent example. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/business-inside...

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

#519
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…

Sorry, risking a crusade comes to my doorstep and downvote me to the minimum, here is a true rant: I want to express my paranoia here. I really hate when people have to bring up this gender issue in every discussion a name that sounds male-only. I am just saying: "stop raising the issue like we are on a crusade." The author has the right to choose a name and it can be that the author's geninue intent to use the name…

> No I am not ignoring sexism, I am saying the only reason we have sexism is because we are so conscious and so paranoid about it.

So if we just stop complaining, things will magically get better.... because that has worked so well for marginalized groups in the past.

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

#520

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're missing the point. It's not about being offensive but about being self-explanatory. For this initiative to be successful it needs to have a wide support and large user base which is not gonna happen with a name based on an insider joke only.

Just look at the effort and energy dispersed in discussing the name here that could have been used to improve their database if they had chosen a good name for their tool.

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