Hacker News Reader

Comment by bencollier49 | Hacker News Reader

I assume that this wasn't originally created by an English-speaking dev team? Or at least a very serious and formal one?

View on HN

There are many reasons for the name: apart from being one of France's emblems, one of the people who initiated the project is Thierry Coquand and the original type system underlying it is called Calculus Of Construction (CoC).

But I know for a fact that they thought it would be good joke as well.

  Or at least a very [...] formal one

That's a good one ;)

It originated in France (see https://coq.inria.fr/about-coq). In French, 'coq' means 'rooster' - the language that implements Coq is named Gallina and the logo is indeed a rooster.

Well, no worse an homophone than 'bit' to French speakers...

The language and ideas behind it seems pretty serious. But they might consider pissing off particularly prudish Americans to be a bonus.

A few timid speakers will mispronounce it like "coke", but everyone knows they're saying it wrong.

It's pronounced identically to "caulk", though, not "cock".

More like somewhere in between, really.

Not 100% confident on how people pronounce "cock" but it's definitely not close to "caulk".

Being a french speaker, I would say pronunciation is closer to "puck" with a k, so go with "Kuck".

In my idiolect, those two words are homonyms. When I worked construction, you couldn't ask someone for caulk without raucous laughter.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/caulk

this link seems to agree, with the word represented in IPA as [kɔːk]

More information about who in the US has and hasn't merged those two sounds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...

It's the cot-caught merger.

Intentionally pissing off people is childish.

Using the name of this language in a workplace creates a hostile working environment[1]. That guarantees that no sensible person in the English speaking world will ever use the language at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_work_environment

> Using the name of this language in a workplace creates a hostile working environment[1].

Oh my, thanks for the laugh. I half imagined a Dilbert scenario when reading that.

It's weird to think of the simultaneous uptightness and childishness which would make it impossible to use this homonym in the proper context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com