So, they change a perfectly valid french name, lest they annoy American puritanism...
Yah, 21st century...
Imagine for a second that your favourite programming language or the one you use at work was called "Penis"? How would that change the perceived seriousness of the language? How fun would it be when you told someone "we use Penis where I work to implement our AwesomeSoftware™?
I use Coq on a daily bases and I've gotten many funny looks when talking about "cock" to people who are not familiar with it. It doesn't bother me much but there is nothing _positive_ about a name like that.
You do know that coq is a perfectly fine french word, and also in the name of a big french sports brand, right?
Not to mention that "cock" is mere slang, the official word just means rooster.
What about the word bite (la bite) in french? Are we supposed to remove the word bit from the English language because it sounds similar to the french word for penis?
There is always going to be strange overlaps when it comes to different languages.
Coq is a bad name.
It's those that inherited the culture of the puritans they've sent away that make a fuss about it (or some words on tv or make a huge deal about a SuperBowl nip slip).
There are many similar stories about English words sounding like profanity when (badly) pronounced in Chinese.
They're bad for branding and brands avoid them.
Now, I like "Coq" and the story about the cheeky French people trying to one up anglophones, but that's not really enough to make it a good name.
Then again I recall some people calling a compiler "Stalin" so, could be worse.
Except "penis" isn't ambiguous. Coq is French for cock -- as in rooster. If you have an issue with the name Coq, chances are you're too infantile to make meaningful use of it or contribute anything of value to it whatsoever.
A name accidentally meaning something bad in one language is a lot worse than a name intentionally meaning something bad in a language that 100% of its userbase speaks and understands.
No need to imagine, "bit" is pronounced in French exactly like "bite", which means basically the same thing as "cock".
> How fun would it be when you told someone "we use Penis where I work to implement our AwesomeSoftware™?
You get used to it. Talking about "cock twiddling" sounds strange at first, and is annoying. But since we're French we can't really hope that this will change anytime soon.
Anyways, I'm all for changing the name, but hope we can keep the French origin. "LPC" for "Le Prouveur Coq" is a good idea https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names.
Also don't use the word "could" because in Dutch that sounds like a nasty word for vagina.
Thanks for being considerate. There is nothing wrong with your English language, but sometimes it sounds offensive in mine.
Nah. I'm joking obviously. I do understand that in an international project with the dominance of English it makes it easier to take these things into account. I don't blame them for looking for a new name.
But the idea that the whole world changes their values and language constructs to not offend American sexual oppressive culture is still stupid. I do blame Americans for that.
I completely agree with that. If anyone demands that then that I would certainly not agree with that. But, I don't think that is what this is about at all. It's my impression that most people who think Coq should get a new name aren't "offended", they just think it's a bad name and that Coq should have a good name.
"Pick" actually sounds like penis in my native language (danish) as well, and I'm pretty sure that a danish company launching a product for the danish market would avoid the name "Pick". I assume that if you where to launch a product in the Netherlands you would avoid naming it "Pick" as well?
Would anyone be even remotely offended? No...
Not really. But its not a fair comparision, because Coq isn't an American or British research project, its a french project. Its not even a commercial product or anything.
So i fully understand they want to change their name, but it is sad they feel forced to. Honestly, if someone is harressed by actual adults within a particular culture for using something that could somehow make a 14 year old little boy giggle, then i strongly suggest they leave whatever culture they are in, because its completely backwards.
The problem to infantile behavior and sexism in particular cultures isn't sovled by every other culture renaming their stuff to not trigger this behavior. Lets solve sexual harrassment in English speaking countries by the rest of the world avoiding doing anything that has any phonetic resembles to genitals. Does that not sound idiotic? Is that a not a weird English privilege that other languages don't get?
Again i understand and respect the decision by the project. In the end you just dont want people to get harressed. But lets not pretend the problem is the name. The problem is certain cultures lacking adult behavioral norms for men.
It would be a non-issue for people beyond middle school?
And doubly so if the term was a regular foreign word.
Are people also taken aback when somebody asks for some coke with their food?
This is far from the first "french mathematicians with a 10-year-old's sense of humor" thing, and probably won't be the last, but all this "oh it's just a word in French" is, from my undrestanding, bait.
To be honest, I'm not super convinced the process discussed the article is happening in much good faith either. But that's just my opinion and heavily biased towards my own experiences interacting with people from Inria.
In any case, it doesn't matter, because we don't need to keep having humiliating conversations about it, just change the damn name.
We don't need Coq double entendres in the workplace, but we do need smart women in the theorem proving community.
I first heard of Coq in a CS lecture, and it wasn’t at all off-putting. The professor included the obligatory “yes the name sounds funny” disclaimer and then presented an interesting walkthrough of Coq. I haven’t used Coq myself yet, but that has more to do with the difficulty of starting than the name. I’ve enjoyed the Natural Number Game (a web-based set of Lean exercises), as a good example of something which actually helps people get into theorem proving. This debate over the name of Coq is just an instance of the Law of Triviality.
(Why is it that “I am unhappy” is justified to report, but “I am alright” isn’t? Don’t we want a representative sample of opinions?)
Perhaps I'll have to go back to school and re-learn English.
I still have an installation of GIMP.
Now I'm used to the terms and don't make the connection anymore. They might as well be completely unrelated words written "mahsta" and "slehf" that just happen to sound like other bad words. In these and similar cases, I'd personally rather keep the innocent meaning of the words, and discourage the original meaning. "Slave" is just a device on I2C, why would you call a forced servant that? And why would you call somebody who committed the unthinkable crime of claiming to another human as "master"?
One very unfortunate name I'm surprized nobody has latched on to is MongoDB...
Absurd hyperbole.
“ These days, these days, right, if you say you're English, you'll be arrested and thrown in jail!”
When it comes to Coq, I have a colleague that likes to emphasize the pun. It does turn some people off when they hear him going on about it. On the other hand, there is a lot of puritanical thinking in the US and maybe we should just become more comfortable with the notion that sexual organs, like mouths and elbows are part of the body. Then maybe my friend's "joke" wouldn't even make sense. It would be like "haha nose!" and people would shrug. But that isn't the world we live in and maybe the one we live in, where people find penises funny or offensive, is more fun. I don't know.
I'm not really advocating renaming stuff or not. I see it as more of a dialog between the namers and the people who are bothered, at least with borderline cases like these. There are instances where names should be changed. Like there are ISO-639 codes that essentially use the equivalent of the N-word to refer to languages. That's really hurtful to minority communities that speak those languages. Names do have consequences. I guess it is just a question of whether people are ok with the consequences or not. And of course, you can't make everyone happy all the time.
Indeed.
I think when I'd heard of GIMP it maybe raised an eyebrow but nothing much beyond that. Anything more about it just seems like an immature and probably harmless joke, but that's just me.
When it comes to genitalia, there's literally hundreds of euphemisms - which seems to be the nature that language takes for primal things. There has to be a balance or Johnson & Johnson may need to rethink their name, too.
Swapping bits. Doing arithmetic with bits. A nibble has not one but four bits. All fascinating stuff.
Personally, I spent a semester trying Coq and I couldn't get used to it. My professor loved Coq, though. He was a mathematician, so it wasn't a huge surprise.
Mostly or overwhelmingly programming languages are written in English, but not 100%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...