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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/woman/ind...

Was man also misogynistic?

Besides:

    curl --header "X-GirlsAreBrosToo: 1" www.bropages.org

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!

"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.

The term is already reserved for a subgroup that celebrates itself for being exclusionary, crass and insistently unreflective about its privilege in society.

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.

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.

Then you're most likely exactly the kind of person I'm talking about.

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.

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.

Maybe you should try therapy for that.

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.

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.

Hopefully you realize that your personal experience and everything you load into the word "bro" is not universal.

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...

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.

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.

>> 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.)

And in this case I think it was blatant and aggressive straw-manning.

I simply have no patience for people being exclusionary that accuse me of being exclusionary.

...but hey #1 on HN...

Let's call it a "growth hack", bro ;D

man is short for manual. What is bro short for?

(I couldn't resist.)

alias woman="man"

"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.

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.

You must have a huge problem with "him" then.

Well gee, I wonder why.

"Don't like things I don't like under any circumstances."

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...

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.

I'm confused. Is the bro thing showing up in this command apart from in the name?

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.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-920C&oi=f...

Why not 'bot' pages?

Personally, I've aliased `man` to `dude` on my shell, so my laptop fits in better with its peers.

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).

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.

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".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041947

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.

eg ls, eg cat, eg less etc.

http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=wheezy&arch=any&mode...

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.

"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.

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.

(There's no need to protest the name "bro" unless the project is marketed using misogynistic, crass, immature shticks.)

See 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.

See: 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=misandry

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=masculinity

The site hasn't been 'urban' for a while.

A loud and obnoxious fraternity guy with partying, acting stupid and engaging in despicable behavior as their life style.

What name would you have given the tool?

alias tin='bro'

I see too many male white knights in here, are there any women here who are actually offended?

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.

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"

Let's all enjoy a well-crafted tool with a name that is both complementary (to man) and useful without politicizing the name please :)

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.

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.