Within Korean culture, Doh (도) is a same concept as Tao but I'm not offended.
I think you are being overly sensitive.
That's a very cool title for an article.
"The red threads are not the issue here, dude! ...Also, dude, that's not the preferred nomenclature. 'Native threads', please."
> 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
C pointers have undefined behaviors which are not found in the machine language.
For anything that can go wrong with C pointers (and other types) in the abstract, there is some computer out there where it is an issue. That computer is usually in a museum; it's not one that understands a popular instruction set.
The problem is that the omissions in the definition of behavior done because of portability across machines turn into an optimization hint. Things that were once left undefined because they worked in reliable, but machine-spcific ways became booby traps.
To be sure your code will work with optimizations, you have to write it as if it had to be portable to machines you don't care about.
You don't have that problem in assembly language, or not on the same scale. You sometimes worry about different members of the same instruction set family, and that's about it.
It'd be about this! :D 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.
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.
"The ten commandments of ..." is a popular trope (https://medium.com/byte-sized-code/the-ten-commandments-of-p..., https://itnext.io/the-10-commandments-to-survive-software-de..., 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.
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.
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.