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Comment by glaringxc | Hacker News Reader

"Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations ..."

These re-namings always follow the same pattern. Some professionally oppressed people contact a project, provide mostly secret evidence to members of the project's progressive faction.

After the re-naming they are never heard of again.

Coq isn't pronounced like "cock" at all by the French. As a first crude approximation, it is more like "coke".

In the Oxford dictionary, "cock" means "a male bird, esp. a male domestic fowl". There's cockroach, cockpit, cockney ...

So U.S. cultural imperialism wins again.

I'm saying this as a person who had problems with the NNTP "suck" program, so I do understand aversions to names, if they are legitimate.

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> These re-namings always follow the same pattern. Some professionally oppressed people contact a project, provide mostly secret evidence to members of the project's progressive faction.

Hello, I'm the woman who chimed in with the story of the Uber driver harassing me. I'm not just a Coq expert (check my publications), but also a contributor to the proof assistant (check my Github). Every year during non-pandemic times I go to France for a week for the Coq Users & Developers Workshop, and I am quite close with the team.

I also hear "Coq" before "cock" when people say either of those words, naturally, since I spend so much time working on Coq. Unfortunately, this means that in public I frequently forget that almost everyone who has never heard of it before hears "cock," and this is what most often gets me into bad situations like in the Uber.

The problem isn't that we are community outsiders; it's that you can't imagine us being community insiders.

Surely the easier and better solution is to just give the driver a one star rating, rather than confusing anyone who has ever heard of coq and missed the re-naming. The costs you are inflicting on the software industry are very large when added up, for no good reason (people have to deal with dumb/ annoying taxi drivers all the time).

If I were the only one complaining, I'd agree (with this being unnecessary---I don't quite see how the cost here is very large). But many women in the community both in the US and in France echo my experiences and concerns, as do many men. I also view it as part of my job as incoming faculty to discuss things that students may feel too vulnerable to discuss themselves.

Also, many on the core Coq development teams at Inria just feel this is bad branding for them at this point, as it inhibits adoption of the tool internationally.

> Coq isn't pronounced like "cock" at all by the French.

Yes it is: https://forvo.com/word/coq/#fr

> As a first crude approximation, it is more like "coke".

No it isn't: https://forvo.com/word/coke/#en

I just have to thank you for this website. The pronunciation of Coke by wildlandwoman907 was interesting, and I had to click to hear some other words by this user. Turns out the same day they recorded Coke, they also recorded the words "dirtiest", "pimpmobile", and "experience". I just have to wonder...

https://forvo.com/user/wildlandwoman907/

You're wrong about the pronunciation. It's exactly the same, and not pronounced coke at all. Signed a native french speaker.

> Some professionally oppressed people contact a project, provide mostly secret evidence to members of the project's progressive faction.

> After the re-naming they are never heard of again.

Beyond all other corrections, the people complaining here are professional Coq users of both genders.

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