[lokr]

It is misguided to ban all homonyms that offend English speakers. How would you even do it in practice?

1) The last name of the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant is pronounced like "cunt". How do they give a philosophy Kant course in the US?

2) Why do French girls have to say "bit twiddling" but American girls need to be protected from "Coq"?

3) The reason for the rename initiative is apparently a misunderstanding by an Uber driver when hearing the word. I'd humbly suggest not to use the word in a cab, just as you wouldn't say "I'm taking a Kant course in college" in a cab. Context matters.

4) It is not up to Americans to eradicate European words in European projects.

[8fGTBjZxBcHq]

No one's trying to ban all potentially offensive homophones though, where did you even get that? I don't see any sort of proposal for what that would look like or how it would work.

This is the case of one project changing its name because the reality of using that name causes frustration and embarrassment FOR THEM. It's not even about politics or pressure external to the project. They are just annoyed and want to change it and its theirs so they can. What exactly is your beef here lol.

[93AGSbY]

You haven't seen a trend to ban anything remotely offensive to US citizens in the past few years?

The coq-club archives seem to have vanished, but a Reddit thread suggests that the initial thread title was:

"Why is the Coq logo made to look like a penis? This year, I had a student point out to me the 'flesh-colored logo with what looks like a mushroom top'."

Apart from the fact that the logo looks like a strange chess figure at best, this qualifies as extreme pressure in the current climate. In such discussions only one side speaks up freely in public and maintains that this is the general view of the project.

If 100% of the Coq contributors are genuinely annoyed (i.e. without having had a "little chat" with their university administrations), the situation is different. I doubt that this can be established, as no one has voiced support on discourse at all and the coq-club archives are no longer public.

[8fGTBjZxBcHq]

OK it seems like this is some sort of like culture wars type issue for you which I'm not really into.

[infinitezest]

I can't figure out what this comment is trying to say. Do you disagree that the trend exists? Or that it's not a bad thing? Either way, this strikes me as awfully dismissive. If you just didn't want to engage, why reply at all?

[8fGTBjZxBcHq]

When I posted the first one in this thread, I didn't realize there was some previous discussion about this decision by this project. I read the post, then came in here and saw a comment that had jumped from that post to a conspiracy-ish project to ban all "offensive" words or something. I didn't have the context at the time to hear the dogwhistle so to speak so it seemed purely ridiculous.

Now that it's clear what they are actually worried about, yes it was meant to be dismissive. I'm not convinced this trend is real or that it's a problem if it is.

[kangalioo]

1) The last name of Kant can't be retrospectively changed, plus the field of philosophy is not nearly as English-centric as computer science.

2) The language of computer science is English. A technical word being offensive in English has much more weight than being offensive in another language, because it affects so much more people.

3) Yes, ideally, people would abstain from snickering about the unintended sound of Coq in conversations. Unfortunately, that is just not happening. "harassment or awkward situations, reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning / using Coq because of its name." You will not be able to completely eradicate all those awkward situations involving "Coq" by pointing out that "context matters".

4) Coq is very widely used in an English context, seeing as computer science itself is largely English. When (presumably) the majority of users of a project is American, it does make sense to cater to them to some extent.

We should not downplay the absolutely real problems that Coq's current name causes.

[ballpen]

Many open source projects started in Europe in the 1990s and had mostly European contributors.

When they became famous, US corporations started monetizing them, buying contributors and slowly dictated everything.

Languages like Python, which started in Europe and have at least 75% non-US contributions, are completely governed in the US. European and Asian opinions are ignored and sometimes derided, all while pretending to foster an "inclusive" environment.

Projects moving to GitHub have caused many contributors to stop. No one cares, because the "right people" use GitHub and the others don't matter.

Perhaps Academia is isolated from these issues to some extent, but make no mistake: In the current climate a renaming is highly political; in my opinion French students should revolt to protect their identity, it is the straw that breaks the Caml's back.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "A technical word being offensive in English has much more weight than being offensive in another language, because it affects so much more people."

Rather ethnocentric, don't you think? I don't think the rest of the world, which outnumbers the English speaking world, will take kindly to such reasoning.