Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by richrichardsson 298 days ago
In spite of search engines being a thing, this comment could have done with a bit more information. I assume you're talking about this: https://docs.tuist.dev/en/
1 comments

Yes. There's no ambiguity, no other project uses the name
It was not at all obvious to people that haven’t heard of tuist (presumably the intended audience of your post) that tuist is a product. I thought it was a typo or even possibly an insult (same form as racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, etc)
Glad we've cleared it up
> I thought it was a typo or even possibly an insult (same form as racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, etc)

That is on you, though.

Another non-iOS developer here. It was absolutely not clear what you meant with a single word reply, and one that honestly looked like a typo or some kind of insult (short + -ist) I didn’t get.
What I meant is that people who are non-ableist, non-racist, etc. do not have racism et al. popped up in their mind.

Why does everything have to do with those things in people's minds? It is tiring, and I am starting to believe they are the racists.

It never crossed my mind based on the name of a project. It is ridiculous.

If you’re not familiar with the experience of browsing the internet and then suddenly having deeply-held parts of your identity deemed undeserving of respect, it’s the kind of thing that the mind naturally develops habits to avoid, in much the same way that you might start to walk differently through a city after getting mugged. It is indeed tiring for everyone, but the solution is not to blame people for doing what they feel like they need to do to protect themselves.
I completely agree with you that if I had wanted to I could have put in the effort to decipher the meaning of the post. However, the post left me with absolutely no desire to decipher it's meaning, so I did not. If instead the author had written simply "I use tuist for that" the meaning would have been immediately clear for someone like me, and I would have been much more likely to look up the product.

I don't mean to imply that there is some sort of "should" to this. The author is not required to want their meaning to be understood, even though I'm not really sure what other purpose they would have for posting. But I do think that this class of miscommunication is both common and reasonably avoidable by building up a bit of a mental model of the intended audience. I was trying to provide anecdotal evidence to build up that mental model.

We are talking about a project's name. Why did racism (and friends) came up in your mind, or an insult? Why is this the default norm, now? People are free to down-vote me, but they cannot deny there is no truth to what I am saying. I would have never thought that a project's name was intended to be racist or cause any sort of harm. Why did you?
> We are talking about a project's name. Why did racism (and friends) came up in your mind, or an insult?

Please don’t take what I said as any kind of allegation that you were being insulting. Those associations were from trying to parse the word as English, which resulted in some unknown word from the family of words relating to prejudice presumably relating to textual user interfaces vs graphical. Context would have made it clear that it was a project name, in which case the word doesn’t need to be parsed.

Because it was a single word ending in -ist, the common English suffix for a prejudice or preference? There was no context indicating that it was the name of a project.