The 'problem' was very obviously directed at politically correct English people who have no idea what the word means in other languages.
Also, people don't have a problem with the 'git' brand, somehow?
Also, people don't have a problem with the 'git' brand, somehow?
Do you have a source? As of now this is still in the roadmap[1] and I saw no information about removing it from there.
[1]: https://github.com/coq/ceps/blob/coq-roadmap/text/069-coq-ro...
Outside of France, most users of Coq are in the US where it is taught in many universities. I am sure there were no female professors or TA whose job was made harder purely due to being "the coq teacher" (this is sarcastic, multiple such professors and TAs have mentioned having this type of issues on the Coq mailing list).
I don't doubt this is true, but I question the worth of complaints.
And in my opinion multiple such accounts coming up are a good reason to proceed with a name change: the problem shows up as a pattern rather than isolated incidents, and a reasonable fix is identified.
But in my experience this simply causes some giggling in the classroom for a few days and that's it, which is not the experience I have seen recounted regarding Coq in the US.
There are multiple differences between these cases:
- The word "bit" is mostly used when speaking English, not in a French sentence (we use "octet" - I don't know the history here but I wouldn't be surprised that this is specifically because of the French meaning of "bit"). Coq, being the name of the tool, is used as-is in English sentences. [This is wrong, I somehow confused bit and byte here]
- Even when used in a French sentence, the gender is different ("un bit" vs "une bite"), removing ambiguity
- Bits are just one fraction of the curriculum, not the name of the tool used in every single lesson of the course
I will refrain from commenting further on this topic, as it has been rehashed many times already and distracts from the work on rust-to-coq translation.
And besides lame jokes when 14 years old hear it for the first time (both male and female, btw), it's fine.
It's essentially a problem of American puritanism (and likely also a problem of misogyny among students, but the solution to that really isn't to change the project name!)
GIMP and Git are words that most non-native English speakers don't have a strong association with. So they get a pass in most of the world.
But cock is as universal a swear word as you will find on this planet.
If I do a retreat in the village of Fucking, and write a compiler there, and then call it TFC -- the Fucking compiler, I know what I am doing.
Funnily enough, they have renamed it to Fugging in 2021 because of annoying tourists.
is it?
Are you confused with Dick? the name of course...
Ironically the word dick comes from the German language, meaning "dominant ruler"
Frankly I'd welcome more rejection of corporate safetyism. We're adults, not kids in a "Christian Minecraft server"
It's not, though. Come to France, say "coq" - people will wonder why you're talking about roosters all of a sudden. Holy Anglo-centrism, Batman...
I think you missed my point. "As universal as you will find" does not mean universal. It means There is nothing "more universal" - no word understood as a swear word by more people. There is no absolutely universal swear word. Obviously.
But English is spoken by a lot of people, most of them not native, most of whom don't have a native word that sounds like cock as a first association.