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Comment by kichimi | Hacker News Reader

An unfortunate name, a la Nonce Finance and Git.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/spack

For Americans who don't want to click the link: "Spack" is basically a milder British-English version of "retard". Imagine how well the "Spaz programming language" would do in your market.

I think it would probably do fine, given we have languages like Brainfuck, image editors named The GIMP, parallel-processing tools named Linda (after the star of a pornographic film), etc.

I just don't think people are that sensitive about software naming.

There used to be a relatively popular package called "System Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks." A friend of mine still has a physical copy of O'Reilly's "Protecting Networks With SATAN."

Those names dont serve to degrade people. For me, as a British person, this software is basically called Retard.

I'm not sensitive enough to care but some people will find this offensive or at least make them pause before suggesting its use. Some word filters will filter this out too.

It's certainly not milder.

FWIW “retard” is not very mild at all in US-English nowadays, it has been essentially removed from even mildly polite conversation (which is to say, if I’m hanging out with friends, and we’re all happily swearing away as one might with friends, we’d still avoid it, it is firmly in the “slur” category).

This is a moderately recent occurrence in the US; around here I want to say very strong pushback started to occur around… I dunno, 15 or so years ago?

Anyway, I’m not sure how that compares. But “less serious than retard” sets the ceiling pretty high, for the US audience.

This is definitely an international blunder. I’d say it’s more socially acceptable in the UK to call someone a c*t than it is to use this word. Can safely say it’ll get zero UK adoption due to the name. Shame.

Given that it's in use at Cambridge and several other HPC centers around the UK, I'm going to disagree. I think most people are cosmopolitan enough to set aside the UK's niche insult community to move forward with real work. I doubt there's any single-syllable morpheme which doesn't translate to something offensive somewhere.

the UK's niche insult community

It's a horrible term that was used for years to denigrate disabled people and that it is used now in cloistered and privileged academic settings is no excuse for an ignorant dismissal like that of the hurt, bigotry and exclusion it conveys.

I'm UK native and had never heard of the word as an insult. I wonder if it's a regional thing?

Perhaps a generational (and maybe class?) thing as well; it and related terms were vicious and influential enough to have motivated The Spastics Society to change their name to Scope in the mid-nineties [1]; I guess growing awareness of disability discrimination and bigotry also contributed to it being recognized as beyond the pale and disappearance from casual conversation with the corollary effect of some people outside those demographics being ignorant of how awful those terms were.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-26788607

Well the UK has done an amazing job at getting rid of almost all uses of the word "spastic" due to the campaign against it, so it could be for that reason

I'm old enough to remember that and some other derivations being very common in the playground. Just not this one.

To be fair I didn't remember it until I put the "a" on the end, like "spacka". Then I remembered

"insult community"

And then there are those of us who deal with nonce daily. I wince every time I see the word, and it's really awkward if non-technical folks hear us talking about them.

Yeah, spack(er) is really up there for an insult. You really have to be extremely vitriolic to call someone a spack.

I think the lesson is that British slang doesn't count when it comes to potentially offensive open-source software names.

Have to say I was fairly surprised by this name.

It's a fairly old-fashioned expression, but could well cause some misunderstandings.

I wouldn't say that, it sees regular use even today.

To be fair, I should ask my kids.

Interesting, the same word with the same insulting meaning is used in northern Germany…TIL it‘s in English too. Maybe a leftover of the british occupation after WWII. Spacken Spacko Spack

Then there's "MongoDB", which is also slightly offensive in German, because Mongo refers to Mongoloid, a derogatory term for people with Downs syndrome.

Mongo has the same meaning in English, but as a Millennial, I've literally never heard this used in real life, only seen it referred to as an old insult. So it's quite likely that the founders and early users of MongoDB knew it was an insult.

Agree. Terrible choice of name, very offensive in the UK; a small amount of googling should have flagged it.

Git was very intentional. Nonce and this I expect were not.

Suggestion for international workaround: pronounce as “ess-pack”?

I think it fits. It’s like spackle, that you use on walls.

Thanks for the edification. Here I was thinking it sounded too Vulcan.

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