[highwind]

I'm Korean and if I were to write an article titled "Program like the cowboys of old west" (I've no clue what that article will be about but), would Americans be offended?

Within Korean culture, Doh (도) is a same concept as Tao but I'm not offended.

I think you are being overly sensitive.

[dhosek]

The big difference is that Tao has religious overtones to it, while cowboys of the Old West, doesn’t. I think OP was more concerned about the fact that this is grabbing something out of another culture and potentially misusing it or using it in a way that others might not approve. A perhaps more apropos analogy might be The Ten Commandments of Programming, which would be OK with most people, although the Torah of Programming, which employed Jewish stereotypes in its telling would be more problematic. And having typed that, this is where the potential issue with the article could lie: less in the title and more in the body and whether it employs stereotypes or culturally insensitive appropriations.

[foobarian]

Throw in some references to the Islamic prophet and you'd be way in inappropriate territory then.

[gopher_space]

Isn’t that basically the first edition of Wall’s “Programming Perl”?

[bafe]

Something like side effects being haram?

[lioeters]

Fundamentalist functional programmers..

[Pannoniae]

Ten Akhams of Programming maybe?

[mighmi]

The 10 commandments used to be used a lot e.g. http://textfiles.com/100/tencoms.pro

[pgeorgi]

I guess a closer analogy would be an article about file systems called "The sermon of the mount", or something.

"The ten commandments of ..." is a popular trope (https://medium.com/byte-sized-code/the-ten-commandments-of-p..., https://itnext.io/the-10-commandments-to-survive-software-de..., https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html, and so on and so on), too...

Seems all harmless enough, but I suppose the risk is that when you use imagery of a different culture, you don't know what is held near and dear to people from within that culture, that you might twist out of context in a hurtful way.

[forgotpwd16]

>Program like the cowboys of old west

That's a very cool title for an article.

[l33t7332273]

“Real gunslingers chase down rouge threads and kill them with their bare hands while the operating system and all its logs crumble around them.”

[jacinda]

The Night Watch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

> Even as we speak, systems programmers are doing pointer arithmetic so that children and artists can pretend that their x86 chips do not expose an architecture designed by Sauron.

> You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.

Really, I recommend everything by James Mickens every chance I get: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

[rvbissell]

> rouge threads

"The red threads are not the issue here, dude! ...Also, dude, that's not the preferred nomenclature. 'Native threads', please."

[HerculePoirot]

"Cracking Code on the Frontier: Lessons from the Cowboys of the Old West"

https://pastebin.com/DhdHsR3i

[matheusmoreira]

See you cyberspace cowboy...

[cglong]

> if I were to write an article titled "Program like the cowboys of old west" (I've no clue what that article will be about but)

It'd be about this! :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding

[furyofantares]

> "Program like the cowboys of old west" (I've no clue what that article will be about but)

Probably about doing things without modern sensibilities of safety precautions, skipping normal testing procedures to fix an issue quickly, editing the live production server, stuff like that.

[Jtsummers]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding

And as an American, I would not be offended. Cowboy coders might be if the article is approaching it from the derogatory perspective.

[zephyrfalcon]

I would like to read such an article...