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Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
- ygra 13y agoA nice touch in PowerShell is that this kind of thing is already included, as the cmdlet help is structured into different sections, one of which is examples. So Get-Help Get-Foo -Examples gives you them directly.
- Deinos 13y agoA good idea, but I see it taking some backlash for the name, which would be unfortunate because, aside from the name, it really is not perpetuating "bro"gramming, etc.
- Kapura 13y agoWhat is "bro"gramming?
- teddyh 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brogrammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brogrammer
- forgottenpass 13y agoThink of the standard frat douche "bro". Yeah, it's completely reductionist stereotype. Now give him a job as a programmer with less verbal filter than you'd expect from a guy in a strait-laced office. Now take this "brogrammer" label and start assigning it to programmers who's actions you don't like and fit the "bro" mold. Actions anywhere on the spectrum from legitimately despicable to just acting like a guy fresh out of college. Is that a wide and imprecise net? Don't overthink it, we're playing in stereotypes that are OK to openly deride.
- wyclif 13y agoThe name is ironic and whimsical. I don't see what the problem is. I'm puzzled by people (and I don't necessarily mean the parent in this specific sub-thread, but everybody who has raised concerns over the name in the thread) who seem to think that if a name has any perceived negative connotation whatsoever it should not be used. Would you make the same judgement call with regard to, say, Dogecoin?
- Deinos 13y agoI take the name in jest as well. Unfortunately, a lot of people are easily set off by it. Would hate to see a neat idea get flack and not be used over silly perceptions.
- donotsurveil 13y agoThis is why you don't get a terrible name for your idea if you want it to succeed.
- icebraining 13y agoDogecoin has a negative connotation?
- dictum 13y agoSome argue [weasel words] that using pictures of animals for humor (i.e. dog memes) is degrading to those animals. You can stretch this into an argument that maybe the Shiba Inu in the doge photo didn't want to have his picture captioned with imagined dog thinking (which, come to think of it, is degrading too — what if white people made an internet meme in which they "imitate" how black people think?)
- dewitt 13y agoIs the "bro" intended to be ironic, or are the creators actually not aware that the term is used to represent the worst (most misogynistic, most crass, least mature, least dependable) people currently flocking to the industry? It is by its very definition exclusionary. I suppose "brogrammers" might be a target audience, but the concept of the tool itself is pretty good for just about anyone. Shame about the name.
- mkr-hn 13y agoBro transcends a single very new and very narrowly-distributed usage.
- dewitt 13y agoI think a lot of people are familiar with the term. It is not a compliment. See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bro http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bro. "Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties." "An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer" "A usually white young male, found commonly in places like san bernardino county in california, as well as orange county." "Deeply racist, yet vulture-ize black culture with attempts to be "down", while living as far from any ghetto as humanly possible." It goes on like that for 36 pages.
- darbelo 13y agoHere's a nickel kid, go buy an operating system with decent man pages.
- pbreit 13y agoAny suggestions?
- mkr-hn 13y agoOP made a Dilbert reference. And the Dilbert strip probably referenced a long-running joke.
- mitchty 13y agoFreebsd for one. Solaris was quite good as well back in the day.
- darbelo 13y agoTwo suggestions, in fact. First, you need to read more Dilbert :) http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-06-24/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-06-24/ Second, have a look at the OpenBSD man pages if you want to know why a suspenders-and-beard-condescending-unix-user would be dismissive of this. Hint: The EXAMPLES section in man pages solved this a few decades ago :)
- __david__ 13y agoI still maintain Debian has the best man pages of the Linuxes. If you ever try to man a program on a Debian system and there is no man page then it'll mention "man 7 undocumented" asks the user to file a bug report on the package. They encourage package maintainers to write man pages when the upstream package does not include them. When I've had the misfortune of using RHEL or Centos is when I notice the quality of the Debian man pages—Redhat seems to lack Debian's drive to document upstream stuff. The only time I've seen Debian's man pages regress is with the ImageMagick package. Its man pages used to be adequate (I believe it might have been a text conversion of the web site/detailed html docs), but now they are not (try to figure out the syntax for the -geometry option using only the man pages). Back in the day I was impressed by the OpenStep man pages. They had pages for the kernel drivers which I really liked (ie, "man mt" or "man cu"), which showed all the IOCTLs you could call and explained how the interface worked. That might have been a BSD thing, I haven't seriously used a *BSD lately so I can't compare.
- enjo 13y agoThis is great. I'm really just looking for examples most of the time I'm looking through a man page anyways. As for the "bro"trevorsy that is brewing in these comments. Lighten up for crying out loud.
- csmattryder 13y agoYep, it's great to get a quick refresher of how a rarely-used program works. For me, it's 'curl', can never remember the right syntax! But yeah, you're right, what's in a name? I'll leave the politics to others, I've got software to write.
- benatkin 13y ago"Lighten up" doesn't solve anything. I'm not against jokes but the implying man in man pages means male and not an abbreviation of manual is exclusionary. http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/ http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
- anigbrowl 13y agoThe entire Unix command line is exclusionary. If it wanted to be inclusive 'man' would be called 'help'. We're not using 300bps dumb terminals any more, I fail to see the value in forcing everyone to learn commands like cp and mv instead of copy and move.
- sharpneli 13y agohttp://meyerweb.com/other/humor/pcunix.html http://meyerweb.com/other/humor/pcunix.html Man pages are called person pages. Also history has been completely rewritten, and is now called herstory. The nice command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves priority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be nice. In System VI, the sue command is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privileged ones
- res0nat0r 13y agoIt is a play on words. Calm down. Running 'brew install bro' on your Mac isn't going to cause all women in IT to worry they are being excluded.
- mattdeboard 13y agoIf you like the idea but hate the name, symlinks & aliases.
- simpsond 13y agoalias examples=bro
- morsch 13y agoLooks similar to the established commandlinefu site: http://www.commandlinefu.com/ http://www.commandlinefu.com/ There are scripts to search it from the terminal, e.g. https://github.com/t9md/cmdline-fu https://github.com/t9md/cmdline-fu It's a nice complement to man pages, especially since it contains complex examples using multiple tools linked by pipes, which is where the terminal really shines.
- aragot 13y agoYou know why it isn't successful? Because everyone will remember 'bro'. Scandal and analogy is sometimes an efficient way to do marketing.
- Toam 13y agoIt looks similar to https://github.com/chrisallenlane/cheat https://github.com/chrisallenlane/cheat
- roryokane 13y agoAnother similar program is the `cheat` Ruby gem, http://cheat.errtheblog.com/ http://cheat.errtheblog.com/.
- csuper 13y agoBro, do you even code? I like the concept btw...
- methodin 13y agoBro, short for browse?
- maguirre 13y agoPeople, calm the f@#k down. This tool appears to be very useful and its intent is to make your life easier. If you feel the name bothers you so much that you can't use it then that's your prerogative just like it was the developer's prerogative to name it whatever he/she wanted
- srl 13y agoAnd it's people's prerogative to criticize, too. "If it bothers you, don't use it" is the most annoying criticism-avoidance mechanism I've ever seen.
- tommorris 13y agoIt's the software version of "America: love it or leave it".
- KVFinn 13y ago>If you feel the name bothers you so much that you can't use it then that's your prerogative just like it was the developer's prerogative to name it whatever he/she wanted If you think something is a bad idea then saying so in a public forum is also your prerogative.
- fleshweasel 13y agoIf you are getting that upset about the use of the word bro you have bigger problems
- scblock 13y agoActually no. Perpetuating the "boys only" impression many programmers seem to want to cultivate is bad. The name is exclusionary, and a poor joke.
- gfodor 13y agoif you see naming a tool with a clever play on the command "man" as perpetuating a "boys only" culture you almost certainly need more human-to-human interaction away from the computer and away from tumblr or whatever terrible place has brainwashed you.
- unreal37 13y agoIf this tool was invented 20 years ago, before the whole brogrammer thing took over the term bro, everyone would have thought it was a clever play on man pages. Seems the word bro itself has become offensive, even if used in a non-offensive context.
- davesque 13y agoExactly. So why, in this day and age, would someone be stupid enough to name their new tool in that way? It's kinda hard to believe that whoever created this couldn't use a lesson in tact.
- jacobtracey 13y agoBecause it's not untactful. Perhaps if people didn't live in their little USA bubble they'd realise that the word 'bro' in most countries just means 'friend' or 'brother'. Even if it is inherently gendered there's nothing offensive about it.
- NigelTufnel 13y agoI like the idea: basically, it's a "kind of Stack Overflow in your shell". The "bro" name is great actually - made #1 on the front page just because of it.
- akx 13y agoThat's howdoi. https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hodgesmr 13y agoThis is a neat idea. I won't comment on the name--but observations on the tool: Looks like anyone can submit examples to this. Users need to be very careful before blindly copy-pasting the "example" scripts into their shell. Hopefully the voting system will remedy this, but that's not guaranteed. While not nearly as dangerous as copy-pasting from the browser[1], still proceed with caution. [1] http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste
- noodly 13y agoGood idea, but to really supplement man-pages it should also support sections e.g. "bro 2 write" for getting common-case example how to use write function.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gruseom 13y agoI've often wished for something like this. Most of us learn by example. I fear that the humor in it, much as I like humor, is a mistake. First, it comes across as a gender troll. Any technical attention the tool receives will be smothered by that avalanche. (Exhibit A: this thread.) More importantly, it impedes how the tool needs to work: get to the point immediately and cut everything else. Man pages may be Byzantine, but they do this well. If I need examples for curl, examples for curl are all I want to see. They should be laid out readably and minimally (a nontrivial design problem). The last thing I want is a joke repeated everywhere. I'd say the same about the upvoting and downvoting stuff that appears in there: it's extraneous and distracting. When I'm stuck on a shell command, it's usually because I have a specific task I'm trying to do. All I want is for the light bulb in my head to switch on so I can go "Oh I get it!" and go off to do the task. The best way is to see an example that's close enough to what I'm trying to do that it's like a magnet that attracts my specific task and snaps it in place. That's why I like the idea of this tool. It should focus on getting the user to that moment as quickly as possible.
- Alex3917 13y ago> I'd say the same about the upvoting and downvoting stuff that appears in there: it's extraneous and distracting. It's a sorting mechanism. This is basically like Urban Dictionary but for Unix. But yeah, it would be nice to hide the instructions after every single entry.
- gruseom 13y agoI fear I am dismissing it too quickly, probably because of gender troll dread syndrome. If it works, it will be useful.
- geetee 13y agoThis pile of comments is such a fucking downer. Get the sand out of your proverbial vaginas.
- marvin 13y agoWow. That's a pretty big faux pas if your goal is to distract from the discussion of exclutionary gendered terms in tech circles.
- nsxwolf 13y agoGeeks mocking bros while pretending to be tolerant and inclusive. Classic HN. Let's see you make fun of African American Vernacular English next.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jjsz 13y agoI'm loving these social experiments! Reminds me of gorgasm.
- blahedo 13y agoGreat idea; shame about the name. Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly): the problem is not with what you[0] are thinking when you read the word "bro", but with what other people, especially newcomers, are thinking. The locker-room atmosphere that stuff like this creates is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people, women especially, who infer that on top of all the technically difficult stuff that everyone has to learn to be CS types, they'll also have to deal with a constant barrage of "you're not our kind" flung at them by the in-group. You personally may not be intending that as your message, but I assure you that your personal intent does not matter when you are using language that has been associated with exclusion and discrimination.[1] The problem here, if this program is actually intended to be used, is that just typing in the command would be a constant reminder of an entire subculture that is widely seen as[2] putting up walls and doors that say "NO GIЯLS ALOUD" around the programming profession, an attempt to preserve privilege. Those of you suggesting an alias are either being disingenuous or missing the point entirely. [0] Meaning individuals, of whatever gender/race/class/whatever, that are likely to be reading HN. [1] If you don't believe me, ponder for a moment sentences like, "But I like Negroes just fine!" Language matters. [2] Again, you might not mean to reference that when you use words like "brogrammer". But it's how an awful lot of us read it. EDIT: Rereading other posts on this page, I should add that I almost certainly got the phrase "shame about the name" stuck in my head from reading dewitt's post. Four words, such a concise summary of my attitude! :) EDIT 2: "they'll have" -> "that everyone has" to clarify argument. Thx vezzy-fnord.
- boyaka 13y agoWhat a shit-fest in the comments. Why am I here... I don't even know what this website is about. I like the idea of examples though. That has always been one of the major ways for me to learn, even though my superiors throughout my educational career seemed to think it ruins the learning process.
- ilyanep 13y agoDismissing a legitimate debate as a "shit-fest". What's next? The migration of the term "circlejerk" to HN?
- skybrian 13y agoAt this point it's not about taking offense (I think everyone understands the pun now, and it's funny the first time.) We can assume good intentions but it's still okay to say this is bad marketing. From a marketing perspective, giving your product a name some people hate is polarizing. It might get attention in the short term and is certainly memorable, but in the longer term isn't a great move because they'll cringe every time they use it or have to talk about it and the complaints will continue. So why not pick something else? Examples of badly named projects that were renamed, just to show it can be done and it's not a big deal: forplay -> PlayN testacular -> karma
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoClearly this is very offensive, exclusionary and misogynistic. I mean, it's not like software has ever been named based on word play-oh, wait... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_%28Scheme_implementation%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_%28Scheme_implementatio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_%28protocol%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_%28protocol%29 Then it's very common for forks of other software, or software that is meant to compliment another program, to humorously reference the original program. The examples are numerous. "Brogrammer" is a very recent neologism that originated out of a perceived frat culture amongst primarily (surprise) web developers, but it's still mostly used to describe a hypothetical bottom of the barrel person, rather than any seriously observed overtaking of programming by immature frat boys. "Bro" dates far before that. I think it's perfectly valid to use it as a pun on "man", which originally stood for "manual", yes. But that's how word play works. The GNU Project hosts jokes like these on their site, too. I haven't heard of anyone complaining. If you can't stand it, alias it. But being dramatic about it is ridiculous.
- zabraxias 13y agoIt's almost amusing how well you captured everything I wanted to say. Kudos to you sir. Er...bro
- mixmastamyk 13y agoOr, GIMP?
- Crake 13y agoAbleist!!
- ilyanep 13y ago"Offensive things have been commonly done before, therefore it's okay" - http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallacies/43-appeal-to-tradition http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...
- pencilcode 13y agoI think it should be sis pages.
- marvin 13y agoThat's actually not a bad idea.
- pencilcode 13y agoOr "ex" pages, from examples.
- teddyh 13y agoThe command “ex” is already taken by an extended version of “ed” (which would later lead to “vi”).
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoPretty sure you'd get complaints about tokenism over it.
- wildgift 13y agoWhat about "howto". There's already a vast culture of writing howto pages. howto curl howto cc howto network
- dmoney 13y agoPeople without siblings might be offended by that. We should try not to exclude people who didn't come from large families.
- whistlerbrk 13y agoCan they alias bro with sis so the name doesn't matter? This is a great idea I'd hate if the project name overshadowed the potential.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- codygman 13y agoI prefer the name "eg" as someone else recommended in this thread.
- fleitz 13y agoGreat idea, also dear haters if you don't like the name just fork it and change it.
- AznHisoka 13y agoTo the OP: Brilliant product. About the name: Brilliant marketing. Extreme hatred or disgust is better than indifference :) Enjoy all the PR. Those who find the this useful will care less about the name you give it.
- paul 13y agoAwesome idea. Shame about the humorless nature of this community. To me, a "bro" is a dumb, fratboy version of a man, which makes the name hilariously perfect. If you're feeling oppressed and excluded by a command name, your real problems lie elsewhere.
- natch 13y agoI'm not feeling oppressed. The problem isn't me feeling oppressed, it's other people feeling oppressed. Poor choice of language can set up an exclusionary environment. To you, this may be funny. To me, your accusation of humorlessness reminds me of people who engage in sexually harassing "jokes" in the workplace, and then try to get away with it by using "humor" as an excuse. You aren't the one who gets to decide when other people feel uncomfortable.
- paul 13y agoYour attitude and remarks are creating a hostile and uncomfortable environment for me. I demand that you stop immediately.
- mtrimpe 13y agoFrom the Wikipedia link in your profile I see you invented Google's "Don't Be Evil' motto. At least now I finally understand how they manage to still hold on to that. As long as you redefine evil to exclude things you don't feel other people should be hurt by you're all clear!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- paul 13y agoEvil is teaching people to view themselves as weak victims at every available opportunity.
- 13y ago
- jcutrell 13y agoThe fun of programming languages and open source software is, guess what, you can change it. You don't like it? Write an alias in your bashrc. OSS authors are not held to a standard defined by all of you - they are welcome to express themselves however they want. For instance, my mother would find Brainfuck quite offensive. That doesn't mean the author should change the name. I think the play on words is quite clever. I also think that if anyone is being marginalized, it is the "bro" - identifying the stereotype and calling out common the stereotypical language habits ("bro ...no"). And now for my personal opinion... If you're worried about the cultural implications of the names of software (rather than things that ACTUALLY marginalize women, like lower average salaries, micro-aggression and objectification, and massive imbalance of gender in the hiring process), then I think you're probably never going to be happy with anything unless it's vanilla. The fine line between comedy and tragedy in the artistic side of programming is often misunderstood, so for now I'm going to go gem install bro. As a second note, why don't we say things like Homebrew marginalizes the alcoholics or those addicted to coffee? Because that's silly, right? Right. Fight more important fights with the same vigor.
- codygman 13y agoYou can always change it, but having to change the default of bro (gender positive) to a gender neutral (eg, ex) makes our community feel like a boys club.
- donotsurveil 13y agoYou're missing the point. It's not about being offensive but about being self-explanatory. For this initiative to be successful it needs to have a wide support and large user base which is not gonna happen with a name based on an insider joke only. Just look at the effort and energy dispersed in discussing the name here that could have been used to improve their database if they had chosen a good name for their tool.
- jcutrell 13y agoThat's the best argument against the name - that it actually causes the project itself to fail. Good insight.
- stared 13y agoGreat! 'man' usually is a good reference but one of the worst place to start. One comment: the thing with voting takes _way_ to much space, and hence not that many things are visible. (Maybe a _single_ line would be better.) But the idea with feedback is great!
- RobertLong 13y agoI'm glad the downvote system exists but, what happens if it's the only entry for a command? # Cleans malware from system sudo rm -rf / bro thanks 4 to upvote (1) bro ...no 4 to downvote (9)
- donotsurveil 13y agoWith a user provided content database, you have a problem: users can input crap content. So you devise a way for user to sort the crappiest from the less crappy and now you have two problems, and so on.
- ronaldx 13y agoThe concept is great and should be promoted: so many times I've just needed a basic example and been unable to find one. Man pages are often not fit for purpose and fail at basic pedagogy. Poor man pages (alongside poor UX generally) renders good software unusable. It's really an important task to fix this problem - I can't begin to imagine how many hours this could save. This has the potential to make it easier for people to try software out and could lower barriers to enter computer science. The name is clever, I suppose, but it's simply not appropriate and contradicts any goal of inclusive openness, and I find that important. I feel conflicted, but I can't contribute to this project under this name. :(
- certainly_not 13y agoI use this bash function to achieve something similar using the existing (and much larger) database commandlinefu.com: howdoi() { curl "http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/$(echo "$@" | sed 's/ /-/g')/$(echo -n $@ | base64)/plaintext"; }
- Tloewald 13y agoGreat idea and the name is funny, but it seems to me that the obvious name, just sitting there waiting to be used, is help. Another option would simply be to subvert man (since this is far more useful than man) so e.g. man gives you the examples but gives you a keystroke option to switch to the original man page in the case you actually want it.
- brubaker 13y agoI hope this implementation fails simply for the retarded name.
- sgs1370 13y agoWhy don't man pages have more examples, is it because of space, or the work to maintain them (including making sure they still work?) Although man pages is where I go for the syntax and option definitions, stack-overflow has become my go-to place for examples. I think this "bro pages" is an attempt to fill a need but if the tool-owner is willing, a man page approved by the owner seems like it will be more authoritative. Man pages seem like a great place for people who want to contribute to open-source to try and submit patches containing examples (unless examples are prohibited by most patch-approvers). I hate writing documentation, including examples, so I won't be adding in either spot, but lots of people on stack-overflow seem to have a desire and some have a knack for it.
- jclem 13y agoThere's another tool pretty similar to this that I really like. Many of the entries actually have a pretty extensive "EXAMPLES" section (I remember the `tar` one actually being super thorough in its examples). Some of them don't, but they typically have a thorough explanation of what every flag for that specific command actually does (I'd rather...you know..learn how something works rather than just copy and paste a bunch of commands and flags). I can't remember what it's called.
- maguirre 13y agoIn the silly discussion, I do have a couple questions. Can this be used in a machine that's not always connected to the internet? Considering the ranking method is decided via votes, won't (theoretically) results change from one day to the other?
- ComSubVie 13y agoA very nice idea and I hope it will gain a lot more examples (at least I will try to add further examples)! And I love the name and it's play on the manpages. But a lot here seems to recommend changing it - can anybody explain to a non-native-speaker what the problem is with the current name?
- davesque 13y agoThe problem is that "bro" summons up the image of the hyper-masculine culture of college fraternities in the United States which has, to some extent, infiltrated the tech world in recent years. Some unfortunate aspects of this culture include: - Excessive drinking - Objectification of women - Fear/ridicule of homosexuals - Practice of hazing rituals - Cults of personality/Hero worship Basically, role up all the regrettable, animal-like behaviors of immature, dishonerable men. Of course, the average startup is nowhere near as bad as the average college fraternity, but its tragic indeed that you can even mention them in the same sentence. The whole "bro"grammer thing is beyond tiresome.
- jacobtracey 13y agoSo, we apply the 'American Fraternity Guy' definition to a word that has existed for longer than the USA as a country has and is used cross culturally to mean many different things (usually just 'friend' in my experience). HN ought to be closed down if this kind of ridiculous rhetoric continually overtakes actual technical content. If it doesn't happen sooner or later everyone interested in actually discussing technical topics will move elsewhere.
- Crake 13y agoThere isn't one. There's a problem with the people who have a problem with it.
- tobinharris 13y agoLearn by example is powerful. Installed. Great work. I am also concerned about the gender situation. I solved it with these commands: ln -s /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/bro /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/sister ln -s /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/bro /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/lady ln -s /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/bro /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/lass ln -s /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/bro /Users/tobinharris/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/sko
- be5invis 13y agoIt is the `get-help <command> -examples` equalivent in Powershell, right?
- ishener 13y ago“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others, it is the only means.” - Albert Einstein
- uses 13y agoman is short for manual. bro can be short for brochure. Which kind of makes sense anyway.
- mmcclure 13y agoWent to bropages.com later to install this (instead of .org). The irony, it hurts.
- politician 13y agoSo much for just taking one quick look at HN, then getting to work. Next time, I'm going to stick to Quibb.
- mumbi 13y agoGreat idea. Never been a fan of the whole bro thing, but I say keep the name. If the women want a 'sister pages', let them make it.
- vectorjohn 13y agoIf anyone was looking for an example of why the name is a problem, mumbi here is a perfect one. This is why we can't have nice things.
- smsm42 13y agoAlternative version: you can't have a nice things because a random troll can play you like a cheap banjo.
- DonGateley 13y ago> bro alias #An alias lets you create a shortcut name for a command alias sister=bro > sister alias #An alias lets you create a shortcut name for a command alias sister=bro >
- mkr-hn 13y agoIt would need to be a full fork to work. Otherwise it's still deriving its identity from the default.
- xamebax 13y agoI'm not sure if treating men as the default is the best way to go here, dear. I mean, it's the 21st century already.
- tzs 13y ago"Bro" can have many meanings [1] [2]. Most of the complaints seem to be coming from people who are aware of just one of these, which is not the one most people think of when the term is used. [1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bro http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bro [2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/06/21/193881290/jeah-we-mapped-out-the-four-basic-aspects-of-being-a-bro http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/06/21/193881290/jea...
- donotsurveil 13y agoThe name is terrible. Here are a few suggestions of names: - ccex for common case examples - howdoi for how do I - comcasex for common case examples - usex for use examples - usagex for usage examples - howtouse for how to use - ill-namedpoorlythoughtoutcommand for bro - loudandobnoxiousdespicableman for bro
- c7b0rg 13y agoThis looks like a cute productivity hack that I will probably use. So sorry for OP that people getting offended by words and tipping fedoras is more serious than creativity.
- SrslyJosh 13y agoPro (not bro) tip: 1. PAGER=less; export PAGER 2. man somecmd 3. Type "G" and hit ctrl-b once or twice Examples in man pages! Who knew?
- bjourne 13y agoNot sure if you are joking. But G takes you to the end of the man page and ctrl-b one page up. Only rarely will that show you any examples.
- crasshopper 13y agoI think the point is that `man` pages usually don't have enough examples. I've started switching to `info` for commands I don't know the first thing about. But a step further in the direction of examples would be helpful, especially for newbies.
- varg 13y agoAwesome, I always browse the man pages looking for examples ...
- bliti 13y agoThis thread has opened my eyes to the sexist atrocities carried on throughout the tech industry. The first obvious one is my current language of choice, Python. That is the worst and most sexist name for language. Why should female programmers have to put up with it? Python == Snake == Slang for male genitalia. It is so obvious! Ladies, I'm sorry for all those years of oppressive code that I've spent writing. But let's continue. What about Unix. Yeah, Unix. Doesn't it sound like the word Eunuch? Which is a term used for a castrated man that guards a harem (full of sexual slaves). How could I have missed it? Amazing. Ever since the 1970s, we have been making women interact with a system that was named after a sexual slavery term. Just awful. I wish I were done, but no. There are still many terms out there that are just offensive. What about the server Gunicorn? It is a play on the word Unicorn, which we all know is a fictitious (I hope) animal that features an enlarged horn on its forehead. That darn horn just looks like a penis, doesn't it? Well, that's is offensive to women. I'm gonna email the Gunicorn team to give them an earful. What were they thinking? Worst is that this is just a small collection of samples. What does C stand for? Cunt? Wait, what about F? Fellatio? Oh man/woman, we need to really reconsider sexism in this industry. Cause bro, its simply not working out.
- railsdude 13y ago> Python == Snake == Slang for male genitalia You jest, but in 2012 someone from the PSF made a "joke", at PyCon, asking people, men and women: "want to see my one-eyed snake?". Unfortunately, the same Python feminists that are ready to burn anyone who disagree with them regarding the use of a pronoun [1], for instance, were very quiet and dismissive about that other, and bigger, issue. [2] [1] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 [2] https://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/390012555688546304 https://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/390012555688546304
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nicolethenerd 13y agoI'm a woman, and I think it's hilarious and not at all sexist. Had to stop myself from laughing out loud because I'm in a library. Is the association that some people will make with "brogrammer" culture a bit unfortunate? Sure. But there's nothing about this program that's making any assertions about bros, or their gender, or anything else - heck, it's not even really talking about people, it's just a play on the word 'man'. And if we can have a woman named Siri who lives in our phones who answers our questions, why can't we have a bro who lives in our computer and helps us out with the command line?
- fhars 13y agoIt should be renamed "cargo" as it encourages cargo cult programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
- dreamfactory2 13y agoSticking it to the man
- raganwald 13y agoMy experience is this: Some time ago, I wrote a post about CoffeeScript. As you may know, CoffeeScript is a whitespace-specific programming language. I am black, and there is a small cultural wiggle-room when it comes to black people making fun of colour-based cultural issues. So I thought I could get away with calling my post "White Power." The response was immediate and scathing. Regardless of whether I was personally offended by my title, it was put to me that my title was inappropriate to go sailing round the front page of Hacker News, &c. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but you know what? These things are about how people react, not what was on my mind at the time. There is room for debate when people are doing these things specifically to provoke debate, as one finds in art and drama. But in this case, I was not an artist trying to make a point about culture, I was writing a blog post about CoffeeScript. I changed the name, I think I renamed it after a Mondrian composition. A few people continued to rag me about it, but in time people forgot the name but continued to productively discuss CoffeeScript. In any event, I feel for the authors. We all make our little jokes, and sometimes they land with a resounding thud. The problem, of course, is that unless we are artists provoking people into thinking about culture, these discussions are a distraction from the good work we're trying to do. So the right thing to do as a developer is change the name and move on. If it is changed, the good things in this library will live on long after people have forgotten the rhetoric expended on the choice of name. It would be a shame if the library is remembered for its name instead of its functionality.
- rjknight 13y agoTo play devil's advocate for a moment, we should also remember that sometimes (not always, but sometimes) people do have a choice in what they're offended by, and how they react to those feelings of offence. A lot of the people in this thread aren't even saying that they find it offensive personally, but that they feel that they ought to find it offensive on behalf of other people, which is very much a conscious decision on their part. If you react to the mere fact that some people complain about something without considering whether they might be wrong, you'll self-censor unnecessarily. And that makes it more difficult for others to resist self-censorship later. The thing is, I don't think 'bro pages' are offensive. More than that, I don't think that they should be offensive. Are we seriously saying that we should attempt to avoid using any words, even in metaphors or puns, that might ever remind someone of a person stereotypically assumed to be annoying? Really? This feels like linguistic bikeshedding from people who, having realised that words have the power to offend, have set out to find offence where not only was none intended but where it could only be found by actively construing the speech as offensive. It's a massive piece of WWIC[1], driven by an attempt to appear more sophisticated and culturally aware, which massively exaggerates the potential harm caused in order to make a case that someone else (but never the critic) should have behaved differently. Instead of accepting that no harm was meant, and acknowledging their own free choice to decide whether to interpret something as harmful, they're claiming that the words they see are simply inherently wrong and must be changed. Now, I should attach some massive caveats to the above. Some speech is inherently offensive. We know it's offensive because we can all close our eyes and imagine the worst things we could say to someone. There's almost no innocent use of such speech, although context, intent and consent are important. Such speech has no place in civilized discourse and HN is, for the most part, civilized discourse. 'Bro' is not such speech. 'Bro' can be amusing, annoying or neutral. It can make people smile, frown or feel indifferent, as can many other words in the dictionary. Naming things[2] is hard enough without the restriction that the name can never, ever, be interpreted negatively by someone trying very hard to do so. [1] http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html [2] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
- zequel 13y agoI'm not offended, not sure if it's sexist but I think it's immature and unprofessional. Kinda like a fart joke.
- kristopolous 13y agoI wrote an identical thing 10 years ago. went nowhere. boohoo for me.
- Guillaume86 13y agoShould have named it bro ;)
- kristopolous 13y agoI called it wtf - it was keyword driven. Things like wtf deep copy array in php or wtf add disk to a raid array people would add recipes with keyword laden titles and there was votes on them. You could also download the entire db and use it locally for quicker response time. Also, this was because we weren't living in an "internet is everywhere" age back then.
- evilduck 13y agoIt's like /r/ShitRedditSays has invaded HN.
- DanBC 13y agoI hope someone is analysing the voting patterns in threads like these because it's pretty clear that HN has been invaded by MRAs.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vacri 13y agoCrazy that you have to have Ruby installed first.
- gfodor 13y agoWhite Knight News
- tight_scientist 13y agoI think it's a real shame that the whole discussion here seems to be about the name the author chose for this project, rather than the actual project. Surprisingly, the discussion on Reddit seems to be much more constructive and interested in talking about the project itself.
- hinchley 13y agoI know the "man" in "manpages" is short for "manual", but when I first saw this site, I took the "bro" in "bropages" to be short for "little brother". If the "man"-page is the old, official, formal documentation for a command, the "bro"-page was the young, informal, still-evolving version of the documentation. In this sense, the name is rather apt. The negative connotations of the word bro appear to be rather US-centric. I am Australian, and I have several friends from New Zealand who use the word bro as a term of mate-ship and affection (I've even heard one friend call his mum bro). With that said, it's great that people are conscious of the affect of matters like this on the inclusiveness of the community - but in this case, when the word "bro" has such a variety of associations, perhaps we should judge the book by its content, and not its title.
- jrockway 13y agoA ruby project, what a surprise. $ bro rm rm -rf / I approve of this form of documentation.
- ch 13y agoThis looks rather useful, though man pages should also contain examples, but a desperate command to just reach the examples would be nice. I would have called it "how."
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoAfaik, this link wasn't visible well enough. http://bropages.org/browse http://bropages.org/browse it should be made easier to find at top of the page. Btw. Nice derailing with most of comments.
- jtheory 13y agoWhy do so many of the arguments on this page seem to think that "bro" is part of male culture? I'm male. I'm even American. I don't think anyone including my biological brother has ever called me "bro" in my entire life. Maybe because I'm 38 and not 22? When I see something being pitched/marketed/whatever using the word "bro", I have never imagined it could be targeted at me. Just now I figured I'd visit the site before commenting, and I mistyped the domain (the .com is the FB profile for some frat-related group). Oops; so I googled "bro pages". The FIRST HIT is something about the playboy mansion. Nice. I'd be vaguely annoyed if someone standing near me noticed that tab ("bro: just get to the point!") open on my browser, so unless there's a roaring wave of approval and it's suddenly better than regular man pages (which aren't bad; I skim fast) plus StackOverflow, I'm not using it. Eh, with a little luck they'll change it and try again. The idea seems solid.
- siddboots 13y agoHow about "ma'am pages"?
- bobzimuta 13y agoIf we're to be proper, fedora clad neckbeards, it would be "m'lady pages."
- codergirl 13y agoWoman in tech here. I almost skipped reading the post because I instinctively thought "bro pages", like man pages but for bros. There are lots of bad ideas out there, shame this is a great idea with a name that inadvertantly sabotages it.
- AgathaTheWitch 13y agoAbsolutely brilliant. Love the name.
- piyush_soni 13y agoBefore opening this HN article, I had a 'faint' fear that people might be discussing some made up sexist issues here rather than what it is about. Oh, how my fears were fiercely true.
- teddyh 13y agoLet me fix this with a one-line shell function: eg(){ man "$@" 2>/dev/null|sed -ne '/^EXAMPLE/{:a;p;n;/^[^ ]/q;ba}'|${MANPAGER:-pager -s};} Now there’s an “eg” command to display just the EXAMPLES (or EXAMPLE) section of a Unix manual page. For example: $ eg cat EXAMPLES cat f - g Output f's contents, then standard input, then g's contents. cat Copy standard input to standard output. If the command gives no output, the manual has no EXAMPLES section. Consider writing some examples and submitting a patch to the manual. There, I fixed it. Now nobody needs this program (or should I say “brogram”) anymore. (Thanks to pbhjpbhj for the name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7122063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7122063)
- mayneack 13y ago3 entries for alias -- submit your own example with "bro add alias" # make 'sis' equivalent to 'bro' alias sis=bro bro thanks to upvote (1) bro ...no to downvote (0) .....................................................................................................................
- Karunamon 13y agoFor real? Someone does a play on words with man pages and we end up with a 546 comment thread about SJW bullshit? Unbelievable. Someone does a cool thing and the discussion is about the name they chose for it. Not what it does, not what problem it solves, but because someone, somewhere, might have an issue with the name. Concentration on the minutae of mostly irrelevant things instead of stuff that actually matters, like function and effect. Basically everything a developer hates. What the fuck.
- aragot 13y ago546 comments, including: - 530 talking exclusively about the name, - 14 mentionning the name as an issue and - 2 commenting on the real, useful, technical stuff. Thank you HN
- schnevets 13y agoI think the name just needs an acronym! B.R.O. - Brief, Reviewed Orders B.R.O. - Big Repository of Operations B.R.O. - B.R.O. Responds Often B.R.O. - Bitter Ruby Organizers The possibilities are endless!
- victorhooi 13y agoAre you kidding me? Hundreds of idiotic comments on this page from Social Justice Warriors with too much time and nothing better to do. People, it's the word Bro... get over it. It took me a second to get the joke (it's from man pages), I thought it was semi funny but whatever, it seems useful actually. Why can't we keep the contents in topic? The authors put in effort to make this - how about we commend them for that, instead of tearing them down, when we've contributed nothing to this project.
- shurcooL 13y agoThis is neat; I want[1] something similar for Go types as well. For example, say I'm looking at godoc for http://godoc.org/go/build#Package http://godoc.org/go/build#Package and I see all these descriptive comments for the fields: type Package struct { Dir string // directory containing package sources Name string // package name Doc string // documentation synopsis ImportPath string // import path of package ("" if unknown) Root string // root of Go tree where this package lives SrcRoot string // package source root directory ("" if unknown) PkgRoot string // package install root directory ("" if unknown) BinDir string // command install directory ("" if unknown) Goroot bool // package found in Go root PkgObj string // installed .a file AllTags []string // tags that can influence file selection in this directory ConflictDir string // this directory shadows Dir in $GOPATH // Source files GoFiles []string // .go source files (excluding CgoFiles, TestGoFiles, XTestGoFiles) I'd love to see a random sample data of that type, e.g.: (*build.Package)(&build.Package{ Dir: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand/src/github.com/shurcooL/go/vcs"), Name: (string)("vcs"), Doc: (string)("Package for getting status of a repo under vcs."), ImportPath: (string)("github.com/shurcooL/go/vcs"), Root: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand"), SrcRoot: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand/src"), PkgRoot: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand/pkg"), BinDir: (string)("/Users/Dmitri/Dropbox/Work/2013/GoLand/bin"), Goroot: (bool)(false), PkgObj: (string)(""), AllTags: ([]string)([]string{}), ConflictDir: (string)(""), GoFiles: ([]string)([]string{ (string)("git.go"), (string)("hg.go"), (string)("vcs.go"), }), (A couple of them, putting the most commonly occurring samples on top, etc.) Perhaps Sourcegraph will offer something like this in the future. [1] Well, I'm slowly working on achieving this myself in my spare time.
- HowardJ 13y agoThis whole thread is silly. The "Bro" has nothing to do with brogrammer or that misogynist culture. It's a pun on "man" pages. And most people in tech who use the term bro are not referring to the brogrammer culture. They're using the bro slang popularized by MMORPGs/MOBAs/4chan/internet memes, since like World of Warcraft 2004.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- amjd 13y agoI don't see any gender implications here. When I first read the word bro pages, I thought it was simply a play of words on man pages, since man pages are kind of serious and verbose, bro pages will be a bit informal and have only examples. Maybe boy pages would've been better. Though I like the sound of tin pages as well, which someone here suggested...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- krstck 13y agoToken woman in tech here, with the disclaimer that I do not speak for "women" or anyone else but myself. I am sensitive to the issue of exclusionary culture within tech. I think there are times when this is a necessary discussion to have. I want to see more women get involved in programming, and I am happy to point out instances of men perpetuating a sexist culture. With that said, I don't see it here. I really don't. And I understand the concept of lots of little things adding up over time, where one joke would not be offensive, but a constant barrage would be. I think of myself as someone who isn't bothered at all by swearing, but I have a housemate who literally swears in every other sentence and it is the most grating thing to me. It's not once instance, it's the accumulation over time. But I don't think this is similar. "Bro" being offensive seems very highly specific to particular subcultures that I guess I'm not a part of. I guess there are people for whom that word has some highly negative connotation, maybe the people who are called "bros" derogatorily, but I don't understand why this pun is offensive to women. Gender isn't some super shameful characteristic that I flinch at any reminder of its existence. If I used this tool, I guarantee you that I would not be subtlely reminded that I am an "other", that I am not a "bro"; I use git all day every day and I honestly forget that it has any other meaning. I hate to say this, because women feeling excluded from tech is a big, real problem, but this conversation trivializes it. People who need to hear that this is a problem are going to see this discussion and think that women are being ridiculous. Women are not underrepresented in tech because of this. But thanks for contributing to the stereotype that women whine and complain about trivial stuff, bros.
- Myrmornis 13y agoI think that a command giving terse examples of unix command usage has the potential to be really useful, and I was excited when I saw there were 614 comments. I'm very disappointed to see that the comments are full of do-gooders criticizing the author's choice of name for the command. She or he is free to call it what he/she likes. Maybe those do-gooders should look up `bro alias` and discuss the project itself instead of trying to sanitize the world to better fit their personal sensibilities.
- steveplace 13y agoremember when we didn't have to check our privilege before reading HN? that was nice.
- spoiler 13y agoI seriously can't fathom why so many people have a problem with the name (because it may or may not affect a third party, however has not directly affected the person writing the post. Wat). Y U mad, bro?! [1] It's a cool thing, I love the whimsical name (I find it witty and clever)! [1] I apologise, for that; it was just too tempting!
- spoiler 13y agoI seriously can't fathom why so many people have a problem with the name (because it may or may not affect a third party, however has not directly affected the person writing the post. Wat). Y U mad, bro?! [1] It's a cool thing, I love the whimsical name (I find it witty and clever)! [1] I apologise for that; it was just too tempting!
- choicesmade 13y agoFunny timing, I published a similar projects just a few weeks ago! https://github.com/rprieto/tldr https://github.com/rprieto/tldr It doesn't have all the "bro" features, but has a few extra ones too: - less offensive name :) - syntax highlighting of input parameters - pages are stored on Github (pull request friendly) - but no way to upload/vote on suggestions for now Happy to hear any suggestions!
- hibbelig 13y agoSis pages: like bro pages, but with better examples.
- ryan-allen 13y agoActually there are really good points in this thread. I never thought of manpages as sexist but certainly typing man this and man that all the time could offend some people. We certainly should do something about this.
- hf 13y agoI humbly submit an implementation of `eg`. It solves the technical problem discussed here for a selection of programms (notably git!): alias eg='man --pager='\''less -p "^[A-Z]* ?EXAMPLES"'\''' This obviously depends on the quality of the man-pages. Witness: `eg git pull` (with a recent enough Bash, `eg git-pull` otherwise), `eg awk`, `eg cat` or even `eg man`. Ironically, the curl man-page doesn't have a separate Examples section; the authors prefer to intersperse those throughout the text. The name was coined here by imdsm[0] -- I had been using `examples` previously. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121505