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Comment by jimmy2times | Hacker News Reader

Love the name (though I'm sure many would consider it sexist).

(because it is)

Can you elaborate on why? It's an honest question, because I genuinely don't understand why. Good to see the 'ole downvote-without-discussion at work, too.

I understand sexism to be about discriminating based on gender. Does it also mean "naming software a body part a certain gender happens to have?" If I name my software "penis", or "testicle" (a great name for a tongue-in-cheek test suite) am I going to be accused of being sexist toward men?

As for "clit", can I understand potentially offensive to certain people who are sensitive to sexual matters? Sure. Demeaning or discriminatory to women? Please convince me of it. I think the sexism brush is getting really loose, and it's such a strong, legally-damaging word to throw around.

It's not my job to teach you Sexism 101, so I'll be brief. It reinforces to the minority of women in tech that they will be routinely otherized by their colleagues.

I'll ignore the pointless first statement just as you ignored several of my questions. If you don't want people questioning your opinions, don't share them publicly.

How, exactly, does the choice of name minimize women? If a woman wrote 'clit', would you say the same thing? If a woman wrote 'dong', would we call her sexist? I understand the problem, but we're really throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. An effective solution to stamping out sexism in the workplace does not, in my opinion, hinge upon commanding people to ignore the presence of their sexual organs and doing so is, I think, more damaging.

I don't want to live in a world where the mere mention of a body part launches an accusation of sexism. Neither do several women in tech that I know. Can we agree that in certain cases, we're being a touch too sensitive when it comes to fixing the problem, and we should really choose more important battles than accusing a dev of sexism due to the name of a one-off, pointless Twitter client that he's not billing as the next Tweetdeck?

Fix sexism: Treat everybody equally, regardless of gender identity.

Don't fix sexism: Pretend gender identity and, by extension, sex, doesn't exist.

With a universe of possible ASCII combinations to choose from - just because a particular iteration is witty, it does not automatically exclude it from offending one or more groups of people (whatever the reasoning).

If you want widespread adoption of your tool, your best bet is to try to offend as few groups as possible.

Agreed, but, that's not really an answer to the question I'm asking. I also don't think OP, the author of 'clit', intends for it to supplant Tweetdeck ... it seems like a one-off that he slapped a name on and threw on Github.

"If you want widespread adoption of your tool, your best bet is to try to offend as few groups as possible."

I don't agree with this at all. Sometimes things are successful for the very fact that they're divisive. If your priority is to not offend anyone, you run the risk of being forgotten by everyone.

It was just an exercise. Maybe I'll name the next one "xfwkl".

you can't fix sexism (or racism, or classism) by pretending they don't exist. this isn't the venue for a debate on the topic, but you can read up on male privilege if you'd like to know more

"Titter" is a word having nothing to do with gender.

"None could laugh, though the Ape-man had a chattering titter." The Island of Doctor Moreau, HG Wells

Following the comment thread, it would appear that the original 'sexism' comment was referring to https://github.com/ricardobeat/clit

CLI is the recognized, time-honoured, universal abbreviation for "command line interface". Given that, I don't see a problem with using it as a prefix.

No, it isn't. I'm not a big fan of dictionaries but they must serve when basic English literacy fails, so here:

"titter: to laugh in a nervous, affected, or partly suppressed manner : giggle, snicker"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/titter

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