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.
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.
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 at the other end. It fucking sucks.
Now, we're just being pedantic. I guess this is what we do on a lazy Saturday morning when we all just have to be offended and aghast at something.
I don't even know what you're talking about with "soul crushing it can be to see this kind of behavior in the workplace". What behavior? naming a tool "bro"? Are you serious?
I work with grown ups. Men and women of every age, background, and geography. They would take issue with cat-calls, gross innuendo, propositioning, and many other things. Not a single one of them would lose their shit over "bropages". You know, because we're all adults and have developed this sense of "things that matter" and "things that are trivial" and "things that don't even register".
Of course, this seems to be half the current content of HN. Every day, long diatribes about the horrors of sexism that restate the same old bullshit and gets everyone worked up with no further understanding or patience derived from them.
To be fair, some people actually use "bro" as an neutral term. I call my wife "bro" all the time, she called one of her (female) students bro, etc.
And I'm not trying to downplay any bad behavior by people you've had to interact/work with. Pretty much anything can be used in a negative way in a specific context, and people can be huge jerks. I'm merely trying to say that words which you think are offensive to one gender, can be used as a completely neutral term without any subtext other than friendliness. It's really a shame that this word has become so negative to you.
It's really a shame that in the community with which you are currently participating, the word has acquired so many negative associations; I agree.
I also call my (female) SO "bro" – in addition to a broad range of friends and family – in specific contexts. But I would never consider the word neutral or inclusive in the context of the tech community. Too much baggage. If any of the people I call "bro" were programmers plugged into the same world we are currently plugged into, I would not do it, period.
The fact that everyone in this thread came into this with knowledge of the term "brogrammer" suggests to me that there shouldn't be much of an argument, but I guess that's just wishful thinking.
As soon as I saw the title I knew there'd be this brouhaha. For over twenty years my circle of male friends have been calling each other "bro", my female pals call their brothers "bro". All this was way before "bro" was misappropriated as a term of offence just because of one word - "brogrammer". This thread has seriously deviated into the twilight zone of reductio ad absurdum.
Must be an American thing then, I'm European, for me "bro" is just short for brother and it is a term of endearment. It's not hard for english speaking humans all around the world to arrive at a natural abbreviation such as "Bro" without being exposed to isolated pockets of misuse. We certainly did.
I'll continue to use the word "bro" because in my timezone (and on a few on either side) it's not a term of offence.
I appreciate your intent, but this line of reasoning about the implications of the term "bro" seems like a huge stretch to me. Being a male, should I likewise feel personally offended by the Emacs woman command, which is a similar and equally "exclusive" pun on man pages?
You're shitting us right? Manpages referred to manuals, not men.
But given that I'm obviously swimming against the tide here at HN I'll just cave .....
Word, brah! Like, totally right on! We should be making like 'sispages' next with like only explanations and shit. Get it? For like the sissy-grammers! Awesome dude. You da bomb!
I can't tell if people here are being intentionally thick or not.
"Is bro supposed to be sexist or is it meant to be ironic?"
"Man referred to manual, not men!"
I can't even imagine many of you people watching a stand-up comic. Your heads must verge on exploding. The diagram for the pun/humor here would be about as simple as a diagram could be.
Well, bad comedy is still bad. Much like the naming of this idea.
The term is already reserved for a subgroup that celebrates itself for being exclusionary, crass and insistently unreflective about its privilege in society.
It has been a casual term of friendship and acknowledgement between guys for even longer than it has been a douche-bag-frat-boy-sleazy-programmer reference, however. There's not really any need to associate every occurrence of the word "bro" with that, unless it is clearly intended to do so (which, maybe this is, I wouldn't know).
I just know that getting irate over this, at the moment, is like losing your crap over someone including a "manifest" file with their software.
People gotta calm down and not be so jumpy. There's enough intentionally offensive and exclusionary stuff going on in our world without assuming everything else is, too.
Not to say I disagree with you about the way it is often used, though. Nothing more grating than playing a game and hearing a bunch of teenagers say "bro" and "brah" thirty-seven times per minute.
> It has been a casual term of friendship and acknowledgement between guys for even longer than it has been a douche-bag-frat-boy-sleazy-programmer reference, however.
In my entire life, I have only heard "bro" come from the mouths of bullying douche-bag frat-boy sleazes, usually while telling me the assault they just committed against me was "just a joke". It has never come from anyone I would willingly subject myself to.
And in my _entire life_ (including a lot of time spent with friends in fraternities and at frat parties in colleges), I've never heard "bro" used as anything but a shorter form of the term of endearment "brother", or at worst an ironic reference to the stereotype of the super-fratty popped-collar bro. Obviously both usages are prevalent, but your contention is that the term can't POSSIBLY be referring to anything but your usage. Why exactly is that?
Ha oh I see, you're one of those simpletons who thinks that all people who meet a certain arbitrary criterion must be exactly the same. I've never even been close to the jock/douchebag-frat stereotype (I actually can't think of a single trait that I have that fits: short, unfashionable, hell I didn't even party that much in college). But hey, whatever helps you get over the trauma of getting constantly stuffed in lockers in high school.
I've never been near a frat or anything related to an American college and I lots of my female and male friends use the word 'bro' to greet/reference each other.
It's terrible that you've had such a shitty life, but it'd be great if you didn't push your stupid 'I'm offended by everything' agenda down everyones throat.
It'd be great if you could demonstrate actual compassion and understanding of other human beings instead of pushing your stupid "I should be able to say whatever I want without social consequences" agenda down everyone's throat.
I've got plenty of compassion and understanding, thanks.
Using your logic, why don't we just get rid of the word 'frat' while we're at it, since you've had such a bad experience with people associated with them. Do you see the slippery slope you're on here?
I'm glad we live in a society where everything isn't geared to appease people like you. Those that I do have compassion for are people with real issues, not feigned concern over the name of an application you had nothing to do with being a word that might trigger a panic attack because you got your ass beat in college.
> I've got plenty of compassion and understanding, thanks.
Only for yourself.
> Maybe you should try therapy for that.
Maybe you should try not being an asshole.
By the way, your comments have numerous factual errors. You've assumed a great deal about my life rather than seeking actual understanding of it. Amusingly, even if your assumptions were correct, it would just make you an even bigger asshole.
> In my entire life, I have only heard "bro" come from the mouths of bullying douche-bag frat-boy sleazes, usually while telling me the assault they just committed against me was "just a joke".
My bad. I shouldn't have assumed to know the type of assault you experienced. I apologise for that.
Unfortunately though, your life isn't the topic of conversation here, and frankly it's none of my business.
Like overgard said in a comment replying to your original post, you appear to be offended because someone used the word bro.
If that is the case, my belief is that ethically, your personal experience in this matter does not invalidate the use of a word across an entire culture. Like I implied in my previous comment, where does the buck stop with this type of censorship?
If you care to respond to that, I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
One of the top headlining comedians in the US talks about this. Some people will be having a great time at his show and laughing at everything. But, then when it comes around to something about them, all of the sudden it's not so funny anymore. If you don't understand how absurd that is, you don't understand comedy.
Hopefully you realize that your personal experience and everything you load into the word "bro" is not universal.
>>I can't even imagine many of you people watching a stand-up comic.
For the record, I think comedians like Louis CK & Dave Chappelle do society a disservice by making serious issues into trivial jokes but that's just me. So yeah, there are some people out there who can't watch those types of stand-up comics. I also believe the term "brogrammer" and the issues of sexism in tech has pretty much taken over the term "bro" whether you like it or not. The word "gay" originally means "happy", but it would be absurd to use it today and expect people to interpret it with that definition now.
In the world of sports, "bro" probably still just means "Come on, bro!"... but in tech, the term has taken a new definition. To officially use that term in the tech-sphere and pretend you don't know the negative ideas it brings to mind is ignorant/insensitive at best, or just plain terrible & purposely malicious at worse.
____
Disclaimer: I'm not going to debate this so don't bother replying me asking pedantic questions or setting up hypothetical situations. Everyone has a bar for sensitivity & respect. I think yours is too low, you probably think mine is way too high. I'm sure you have a bunch of friends/coworkers that agree with you and I have a bunch that agree with me. Don't know where that leaves us... but there you go. Just adding a data point. Off I go...
Why should anyone's head explode? A stand-up comic who isn't funny pisses off the audience, it's incredibly painful to watch, and the comic doesn't get invited back.
Seems to work for Dane Cook pretty well doesn't it?
Ba Dum Chhhh!
In all seriousness though "funny" is in the eye of the beholder. Jon Benjamin and Mitch Hedberg both tell what amount to non-jokes and have intentionally unfunny standup on occasion and that's actually their whole gig.
Yes, I was kidding about 'man', but my point is that 'bro' isn't that exclusionary.
In fact, I think the problem here is that a lot of geeks don't like 'bros' and I am doubting that they're hated by women as much. Personal opinion here, but: a lot of women have friends that are bros; a lot fewer geeks have friends that are bros.
No I didn't say that. I think that is completely false.
>> A lot of geeks don't like 'bros' and I am doubting that they're hated by women as much. Personal opinion here, but: a lot of women have friends that are bros; a lot fewer geeks have friends that are bros.
I think women that are geeks also have fewer 'bro' friends.
Geek is a property of men and women, it is not a mutually-exclusive group.
Nice try, trying to implicate me in sexism but I do not like it when people try to read things into what I say that I've never implied. I intended one thing, stop trying to use it against me...
What I am saying is that I think a group of non-genderised geeks define the label 'bro' by its negative connotations more so than the greater super set of non-geeks (even those which are of the female gender.) It's a case of a new set of people 'bros' joining another set of people 'geeks'; it's exactly the same group behaviour as you see when people from different cultures immigrate into a country; same us-vs-them group behaviour; same magnification and amplification of negative connotations.
A bro is just a stereotype. People are people and you should get to know them first before rejecting them (and especially if there are negative behaviours that you want to treat.)
If people are often reading sexist intent into your words maybe you ought to consider the possibility that the things you are writing are, in fact, sexist. Or be more careful.
Yes. Geek culture isn't about being a bro. When I think about "bros" I think about guys who party, and then let someone else do the work. It's about power disguised as being carefree. Geek culture is about a kind of unification of mind and action. It's also about creativity within traditions.
Brochure. Which, despite the tounge-in-cheek joke I was trying to make, actually tends to be a shorter and more example driven document about a product.
Just imagine how upset people would get if you referred to a mixed gender crowd as "ladies"
"come on now ladies lets move the tour along"
"Who you calling 'lady'!?"
Guys really is just a historically ingrained shorthand. I don't think I've ever heard it used in this sort of context to cause harm. Using "Ladies" in this way, on the other hand, could cause yourself harm.
Back in school, my sports coaches would sometimes refer to all male groups as "ladies". However, I suspect this is not what you're talking about ;)
As much as anything, I've heard many women refer to mixed gender groups as "guys" or "dudes". A lot of this "definition creep" is actually due to women themselves. Probably this is because the male identity is viewed as a source of power, and women seek this out and aim to identify with it.
In other words, I don't think the use of "guys" generically is being driven by sexist men. I think it's being driven by blurring of gender roles and definitions, and adoption of these generic terms by women.
>"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 have found out in life that women can also be dependable, fun to hang out with, and not "complicate things."
And there's nothing contradictory about that. Just because 'bro' is a man who might be all of that, doesn't mean that a woman can't be the same thing. Maybe she will not get the same nickname or term of endearment, but neither does that imply that she is qualitatively different from a 'bro'.
1. Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties. When they aren’t making an ass of themselves they usually just stand around holding a red plastic cup waiting for something exciting to happen so they can scream something that demonstrates how much they enjoy partying.
2. 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, drives a jacked up truck that’s plastered with stickers, has rich dad that owns a dealership or construction business and constantly tells this to chicks at parties...
It'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.
A 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.
> It also clumsily fails to understand the genre it's trying to reproduce, the Unix joke name. Those 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.
I'm confused. Is the bro thing showing up in this command apart from in the name?
I agree with you. People are imparting their own interpretation of the word. When I skimmed the web site, I didn't notice anything relating to the whole "brogrammer" thing.
Just because it starts with the same three letters doesn't mean anything. As already stated in many other comments, "bro" is also, and more commonly, used as a substitute for other colloquial words such as "man", "dude", "guys", and is frequently gender neutral.
These niggling complaints of offense where none was intended is indeed getting old. The author's intent is what actually matters, not how someone else interprets it. A reader gets to choose whether to be offended by a word or not, he doesn't get to choose the author's intent.
You'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.
No, 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).
It'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.
> 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".
> "Groovy" has been associated with the psychedelic-drug-using subculture, but we've had no trouble naming a programming language after it.
A lot more people object to Groovy's "G-Strings", its name for interpolated strings, than the "Groovy" name. org.codehaus.groovy's Project Manager even introduced a new operator called "Elvis" (the null-coalescing operator) in an attempt to redefine the meaning of "G-String" from the item of clothing to a string on Elvis's guitar to deflect objections but no-one's fooled.
Indeed, 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.
a) How about "brochure"? b) Someone that runs for the hills when seeing a command called "bro", will also run from "man" even before they now about eithers meaning. Of course, these poeple don't exist, because anyone using this is a grown up man or woman.
This 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.
I 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.
Like 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.
It 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.
"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."
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.
This 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.
I 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?
> 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.
I 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"
I 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.
"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.
It'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.
The 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.
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.