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Comment by blahbhthrow3748 | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely neat but the name "gash" is... a poor choice. Gory in standard English, worse as a slang term

I don't think it's intended as that slang... I think it's probably in the scheme tradition of self-deprecating conspiratorial names... I suspect it's meant to invoke that theme.

Not to mention that "bash" sounds like a concussive injury; "gash" sounds like a slicing injury. So follows that theme also.

I would be very surprised if genitalia slang came up in the author's mind as a choice of names but I guess I don't know them.

I'm amazed how it can be possible not understand that what came up in the author's mind is not the issue at all, and irrelevant.

According to your reasoning, I can name an alarm program "cock", just as long as what was going through my mind at the time was a rooster crowing in the morning. ("Get woken up by cock!") What anyone else chooses to read into it is their problem?

Is the author of the project a fluent speaker of English?

Not everyone will be familiar with slangs in various countries.

Well, there is Coq, the interactive theorem prover. I quite like the name (and the logo, which is a rooster.)

Legend has it that Gérard Huet, who named Coq, enjoys double entendre and chose the name deliberately, just like he did with the Zipper data structure. So this might not be a great example of something that accidentally has a double meaning.

Apparently some British researchers were working on a theorem prover named Bit, which in French sounds like "bitte" (slang for penis). So the French researchers who worked on Coq cheekily chose a French word with a double-entendre meaning in English.

But all these anecdotes counteract what Wikipedia says, which is that Coq was named for one of its authors, Thierry Coquand, and for his "calculus of constructions" (CoC).

>But all these anecdotes counteract what Wikipedia says, which is that Coq was named for one of its authors, Thierry Coquand, and for his "calculus of constructions" (CoC).

It being named after Coquand is unsourced and even states something that is outright wrong (Coquand is not Coq's "principal author", the best fit would be Huet and Christine Paulin, but even then it was developed by a team, they just lead it. Source: Coq's history page).

"cock" is not a very good example. Gash, as slang, is nowhere near as often used as "cock". Gash's meaning as "a long, deep cut" is, by far, the most used meaning. Whereas "cock", nowadays, the slang term is pretty much the only used meaning. Peach, rod, purse, knob, sheath, pocket, meat, etc. All these words have alternate slang meanings as well. Should we stop using their original meanings? Like I said in another comment, language is all about context. I've only ever heard 'gash' used as slang in the U.K. I would imagine a very large chunk of the English speaking population only know the non-slang meaning.

> I'm amazed how it can be possible not understand that what came up in the author's mind is not the issue at all, and irrelevant.

Oh my, then you better not ever venture into the humanities! At least in musicology they spent the past 3 decades wresting free from the idea that evidence of the author's intentions are the only relevant thing.

Stallman's fanbase can call themselves the Bash Gash Terror Crew.

Why do you pronounce it like that, though? I pronounce it like "geesh" or "guish" or "guiche" (not sure how to write it phonetically). It is just the Catalan word for "chalk".

Not Guix, Gash: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gash

Gash is a slang term for the female sexual organ.

Not a good name for a project.

If we were to reserve every word that is also used as slang for sexual organs we'd be out a lot of words. Peach, purse, shaft, sheath, tool, pocket, etc, these are all slang as well, yet we still use these for their original meaning. It's all about context. I'd also say 'gash' is quite regional. I've only ever heard it used in the U.K.

Australia too. Quite vulgar but not especially common nor especially rare.

Not the name of the project (which is pronounced 'geeks') but the implementation of the shell and coreutils, as from the text in the article. This implementation is called 'Gash'.

oook... yes, this is arguably a not-so-good name.

It's amazing that in 2020 people still use relatively common English words to name their software. Apart from all the confusion (context needed to understand what is being meant) and issues such as those you mentioned, the projects will be hard to google, risk collisions with other projects, have domain and trademark conflicts etc. ... Just make up artificial words, concatenate several terms etc. people. Though in this particular case, conventions like "has to end with 'sh' because ... cargo cult" and "must be easy to type" probably played a role.

"gsh" or "gush" would be as clear and less awkward to discuss.

I wrote a toy shell using guile back in school and the jokes practically wrote themselves.

I like gash though. Where bash is a bludgeoning shell gash is more of a cutting one, if we want to be cute about it.

I'd thank you for not making HN a worse place by bikeshedding. You may not care about this project, but some people here do.

It's not bikeshedding. The open source community has opened its eyes to how poor a job of inclusivity it's done, and one of the changes that resulted was a social taboo against names and terminology that serve as microaggressions, including "master", "slave", "blacklist", "cop", and "gimp". Given the context in which "gash" is often used in ordinary language, it's reasonable to at least question its use as a project name.

No reasonable person thinks "woman" when she encounters the word "gash". I'd wager there are fairly few unreasonable people who think that, but of course it only takes one to kick off a spriraling pointless bikeshedding thread. It's good that we've got this inanity flagged to the bottom, but when I commented it was at the top.

I would suggest "gnash" as a much more appealingly playful alternative

Already taken[1].

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

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