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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually not one to get offended and and I'm not going to say the author is horrible person like some jerks around here that get offended by non-PC stuff, but it comes across as possibly a tad offensive to use a wheelchair as a jab at Ruby on Rails. I know it's a play on Cobol being old, but a lot of people confined to wheel chairs are young, in the prime of their life and extremely capable in other areas of their areas of expertise. Anyways, I leave it to the author to think whether or not this has merit, because it's not really my place to judge since I'm not in a wheelchair myself.

TBH I was expecting this to be about someone actually hacking on the cobol that runs their wheelchair.

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> it's not really my place to judge since I'm not in a wheelchair myself

Yet you do a sterling job of not letting that hold you back for an instant.

It is possible to perceive something as likely to offend many without being offended yourself. I'm neither judging, nor offended, but simply stating that the choice of diction here is likely to be hurtful to others. It is not necessarily judgement to speculate on likely outcomes from actions and words.

That being said it is my place to judge you as a pedantic troll that lowers the quality of the discourse here. Furthermore, it is the place of everyone else to judge this comment of mine as one deserving of downvotes since my previous sentence makes it as useless to everyone here as your statement.

I don't think it's a case of passing judgement, but of an expression of discomfort around how the source is presented.

Like some jokes from a few decades ago, there is still value (they can be/are humorous) but at the same time the re-telling of the joke today would need to be done with some tact.

I presume you are aware of the old adage that every time you see a statement of the form "I'm not X, but Y", you can save yourself time by just ignoring everything before the "but"...

> offensive to use a wheelchair as a jab at Ruby on Rails

Fortress on Freeway, Clojure on clouds.

See also (as noted elsewhere): COBOL on Cogs http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

And INTERCAL on Interstates http://www.intercaloninterstates.org/

> I know it's a play on Cobol being old

err... just from reading the title, I assumed it was a play on cobol being disadvantaged, but being old would also imply being disadvantaged physically. metaphorically speaking it makes perfect sense on first read... You seem to be using eval() on human language

If one spent enough time, they could even find "Ruby on Rails" offensive, in some misconstrued way as the word "rails" can be derived as conformist and against free thinking as one is confined to "rails." I don't think it's any of that, but just alluding that spend enough time dissecting anything and someone is bound to find issue with it.

I think the overall gist is that we developers are not always marketing people, so we spend more time on making whatever it is and less on the name. Naming things is a hassle, especially when you have no intention on making it a marketable product.

I recently wrote about a way for developers to find "good enough" names in a short period of time.

http://blog.plague-dev.de/an-algorithmic-name-finding-proces...

It works for me and my colleagues pretty well. You could give it a try if you want.

Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out.

I thought on rails was referring to a category of first a person shooters http://www.giantbomb.com/on-rails/3015-169/

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