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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I remember weboob, and all the amusing names of the various pieces. Unfortunate that the (French) humour was killed by political correctness.

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It's not “political correctness” which killed the humor, in fact the humor was there by accident and at the beginning the creator of the project found that funny, so it stuck for a while

> When weboob was started in 2010, 11 years ago, the name was chosen, without a hidden agenda, since as a French speaker, "boob" wasn't part of my vocabulary.

> Following its release and the ensuing reactions, during its first years, the project was complemented with various provocative elements (icons, application names, English slurs in the code). This was done with the sole motive that at that time, it was seen as "fun".

But when the project gained traction he realized that the name was probably not appropriate for people building business apps with it, which he wanted to support.

> But in practice, it's been years the project isn't following this approach anymore, it's used as an essential building block of professional companies, the provocative elements are progressively removed, and the professionnalisation[sic] question is being raised.

Source: Weboob will become woob − https://lists.symlink.me/pipermail/weboob/2021-February/0016...

> since as a French speaker, "boob" wasn't part of my vocabulary.

I think this sentence has been carefully constructed to be kind of true. The original author certainly knew what "boob" mean at the time. And the name "weboob" was voluntarily chosen as a pun. Now if you ask him maybe he will deny (I have other memories, but who cares) or maybe he will simply say that we do not use "boob" on a day to day basis in french so the pun seemed completely inconsequential.

But frankly, that's not a big deal, and nobody gives a shit to begin with. Everybody has been young, and some big bosses of far bigger companies have way more annoying histories. As for his company "budget insight", IIRC they already had contracts with some banks when it was still called "weboob" with even more terrible module names available.

Perhaps cf. the theorem-proving assistant Coq, in which case the authors almost certainly knew exactly what they were doing, the idea apparently being that it is good and proper for Anglocentrism to make us uncomfortable in light of superior French scholarship. Still, the community has been quietly mulling a name change for a while [1].

[1] https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names

> I think this sentence has been carefully constructed to be kind of true. The original author certainly knew what "boob" mean at the time.

Maybe, but not certainly. Do not assume too much English proficiency in France in 2010. It has changed a lot in the past decade, with most of the French hacker spaces disappearing or fusing in the global internet, but I still remember the 2000s, when we were hanging around in French IRC channels or forums.

Are you suggesting "political correctness" is the only reason someone might be discouraged from installing a program named after toilet humor and juvenile references to specific parts of the anatomy? I've let my kids watch plenty of children's movies with fart jokes in them, but I still don't want to hear more of that when I'm trying to use a tool to access a banking service. It seems there's even still a banking module with a crude poop icon: https://woob.tech/applications/bank.html

Doesn't really inspire confidence in their professionalism or trustworthiness with handling financial transactions, if you ask me.

I see your point, but "professionalism" brings to mind things like enterprise software, which is not exactly great either. It's sterile, but just as bug-ridden and user-hostile/difficult to use.

Quirky naming and crude humour can be orthogonal to functionality.

Je suis française et cet humour était vraiment merdique

Je suis Française et je trouvais ça drôle.

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