For some strange reason, no one ever says "brother city." The term "sister city" is very common. "Twin city" is also conventionally used. I do think it's a bit strange to say "sister city" but not "brother city," and it forces me to think about gender in a context where I do not want to think about gender. So I like the term "twin city" better. "Sibling repo" preferred to "sister repo" for the same reason (if I was reading this Github documentation, having to think about a repo as female gendered would be a highly distracting diversion while I'm trying to concentrate on source code).
Right. I'm just pointing out that it's fine to name software something gendered or something associated with obnoxious, disrespectful people. See Julia and Git, respectively, for examples of the above that seem to be working out just fine.
The real problem is that 'bro' is inherently masculine in a male-dominated industry - which has unfortunate implications if we're trying to be inclusive of women. That's it. If people use it enough as a technical term for a piece of software, maybe 'bro' - like 'man' - will stop feeling weird when you type it into the command line.
Until then, it absolutely is offensive and unwelcoming.
Shouldn't "Male and called Steve" be an option? As in: among all programmer populations the number of women is roughly equal to the number of men called Steve.
I am a man, but I don't think that's why I think it. I'd be perfectly fine with a ".girl" or ".chick" or ".fem" or ".sis" extension, or any similar variation, if it happened to be a valid acronym for some technology.
Unless the issue is that "bro" has some other kind of objectively offensive connotations, which I completely disagree with. Many women (and some men) use "sis" (or, much more rarely, "dudette"), in the exact same way as "bro".
"fsck" is also distinctly non-gendered and it is not dated. It's actually kind of clever because it's not in the least an obvious name for a filesystem check, of all things.
"Bro" is painfully obvious, gendered, and dated. It comes from a rather specific subculture/zeitgeist.
Yes, I realize I'm bikeshedding. No, I'm not proud. Yes, it's hard to come up with good names.
As mavam said earlier: (Disclaimer: Bro team member).
For a project named "Bro", I believe that we have a very open and inclusive community. We do play with the word a lot but it's all in the name of fun and very convenient since the name lends itself toward so much word play. There have been times where people have started to use it in the more modern pejorative sense and we've actively yet quietly made it stop. None of us on the core team like that behavior and with the name "Bro" we have to be extra careful with how it's used within the community.
There has been a number of women that have passed through our community and several that are actively involved at the moment (I could say the same about men, our team isn't very large).
I really like that people on this thread have been digging quote out of Vern's original paper about the lineage for the name. That's easily the best response to all of the "Why Bro?" questions.
I like the term fellow. Like, “fellow feeling” or “hey, fellows!” While mostly used for refer to men, it’s originally gender neutral and has a nice vibe about it.
I recently interviewed at a place where the interviewers kept calling me bro or dude, so maybe they'll match with each other at some point.
Without wanting to get into a discussion of the gender-neutrality of those words, I'm not a man and everyone that I talked with there was, and it just felt odd.
It's not the most common, but some people do go by they/them and still use certain gendered terms like boyfriend/girlfriend where appropriate. (Full disclosure that I'm one of them, lol.)
I think part of it is that there isn't a great neutral word to take its place. "Partner" is probably the best option overall, but it can mean anything from "person I've been married to for 15 years" to "person with whom I opened an LLC," whereas boy/girlfriend is pretty specific. And the only neutral term of that specificity I've seen proposed is "joyfriend," which I find unbearably silly because I'm not 15 years old :P
You pretty much can't win in that culture. You're a man, so you can't even grasp what it's like to be a woman, but trust us, it's horrible. And if you wouldn't mind if it were "sis", that's because you haven't been oppressed by women.
I understand there are gender issues, but if you have to overcorrect so much that you're changing an abbreviation to avoid the short form of "brother", you've gone wrong.
I am very thankful that my culture doesn't have this gender hostility and easy offense that's prevalent mostly in the US.
Good point, contexts were definitely conflated, sloppy reasoning. A better example would have been a programming language or software tool with a female name or slang. Of course, that wouldn't be sexist by definition and I wouldn't find it exclusionary either. But, the word "bro" in this thread has been compared to racial slurs so someone out there would probably have an issue with it.
For men: I'm hanging with the "guys" or "bros."
For women: I'm hanging with the "girls." (you can't say "ladies" in this context, you can't use "sisters," you could use "gals" but it would sound like you were from Texas).
Aside from agreeing that the idea for the service is great, I think there's an important distinction to make about why 'bro' has gotten people riled up. The issue, in my mind, is not that it has a gender bias, after all there are examples of feminine terms in computing that nobody seems to mind (e.g. programming languages like Ada, Julia, Miranda, etc...). We should feel fine about using masculine terms too.
The issue instead is with the negative connotation that has built up around the word 'bro'. The solution I'd like to add to the pile is to change the name from 'bro' to 'boy', keeps the joke intact, just as quick to type, and no negative connotations. What do you think of that name?
I'm not sure what difference you think gender makes, unless you think women are delicate flowers that must be sheltered from bad language, but I do agree that it would be better named something more office friendly. I'd suggest 'argh', 'grr' or 'gah'.
For some strange reason, no one ever says "brother city." The term "sister city" is very common. "Twin city" is also conventionally used. I do think it's a bit strange to say "sister city" but not "brother city," and it forces me to think about gender in a context where I do not want to think about gender. So I like the term "twin city" better. "Sibling repo" preferred to "sister repo" for the same reason (if I was reading this Github documentation, having to think about a repo as female gendered would be a highly distracting diversion while I'm trying to concentrate on source code).
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