It’s a shame that an innocent French word for a French tool has to be renamed because of how it sounds to English speakers. It kinda reminds me of how kids tease someone with the surname Wang because of how it sounds in English.
But, the tool that originated in France is now a standard tool in a world where the lingua franca (pun intended) is English, and there’s no avoiding that in that environment it sounds like cock. There’s no choice here that isn’t somehow shitty, so it seems like they’re making the best decision.
On the other hand I am extremely tired of the US' continuous disregard of the existence of other cultures and languages. English might be the lingua franca but the US one is not the "cultura franca" of the whole world. I live in a place/culture where hearing Coq makes me think of the french word for male chicken and only marginally of an English swear word, and I am growing more and more exhausted with this kind of juvenile, sterile thinking.
I had the same reaction, coming from the perspective of an adult doing paying work. If your engineers can't use a language called Coq without creating a hostile environment, you have a much bigger problem with how they behave around people named Wang, Dong, Mount, or Kuntz. You urgently need to fix that problem.
But, on reading the discussion page, I realized I forgot about kids and students, especially women, and in that context, even though changing the name is obviously not the best or most important way to solve the problem, it could be a great mitigation and is worth doing.
> in a world where the lingua franca (pun intended) is English
That would be for computing in general. When it comes to proving software, France's academia seems to be one of the few that takes "making working software" as a serious development for the future (maybe because of airplanes and nuclear power plants). They're actually in the forefront here, if not leading.
The correct response to "Coq sounds funny in English" should be:
I sometimes joke that "Coq" was French revenge for the Anglosphere making "bit" a common word in computer science, which sounds like the French equivalent of "cock".
If you think that's interesting you should see an even worse case that happened recently. During a Champions League football match a Romanian reserve referee was arguing with some folks from one of the teams playing. He wanted the most vocal to get a yellow card. There were multiple folks there, all dressed the same, similar builds.
So, being slightly naive and maybe stupid, he told the Romanian main referee to book "the Black one", in Romanian. Black in Romanian is "negru". And it's not offensive (maybe a bit too colloquial for the setting), we have a ton of offensive words he could have used. Ironically, they wouldn't have understood any of the truly offensive words, I'm quite sure.
Because a ton of the folks around being English speakers you can figure out how this ended.
From a certain perspective you could say it's cultural imperialism.
Even innocent English words and abbreviations are getting cancled. kill process is no longer OK. man pages are under fire. There's no way coq is escaping the word cancellation brigade.
The same thing happened in reverse with the Toyota MR2, which in France was just called the Toyota MR, because "MR2" sounds like a swear word (merde) in French.
I don't think they are making a decision, rather being pushed to make a certain decision, that might not necessarily match their view.
I aknowledge English as the lingua franca of our digital world, but that doesn't mean that we should be attached to every aspect of English speakers cultural environments, basically because we have our own environments too, and are just as valid as theirs.
That's pretty much my take on it too. It's a bit unfair to the maintainers that their innocent name is sort of being co-opted by English, and for that matter it kind of sucks that English is the standard language for most scientific writing, but sadly that's just the way it is.
A shame, but I just can’t teach it in my programming languages class. I can’t stand up there in front of 200 students saying coq coq coq for an hour. I just can’t.
- We have something with a localized name (uncommon for a software tool) that bother English speakers
- The English speaker changed the original poultry meaning to the modern slang by themselves
- We rename it to something neutral and in the alternative names you have ... English propositions, and arguing about it in english
It's like a double win for the English world, almost like a embrace, extend and extinguish strategy.
I hope the tool ended up with a non-english alternative.
As I am in "the either everything is fine or nothing is fine" team, maybe I am a little biased on the subject.
Yes, finally! I'm no puritan, but this name is really embarrassing to use and every time you mention it to someone for the first time you have to go "no, no, no! like 'Rooster' in French!". Long overdue!
It would be a shame to not use a French name though. I don't know about Chapon (it's a bit on the nose to have the new name be "Coq, but emasculated"). I vote for "Canard", which would also be sort-of funny in English.
I have no opinion on to change the Coq name or not, but I have to ask: Do you have similar issues when it comes to Git as well and how do you deal with that?
Here's the logo, for those interested. Honestly it's a bad logo in general, but when you combine the name of the language, the color of the logo, and general shape, it's downright terrible (not even in a harassment sense, in a literal "why should I care about this product" sense).
The fact that this is an issue tells me how english-centric is the software community! culturally and linguistically speaking.
Why do some folks have to change it's project name regardless of it's meaning in another language? Coq's name wasn't meant to be offensive.
What would happen if the new name is considered an offensive or uncomfortable word in any other language? would that be a good enough reason to reconsider it? Or we only care about english speaking minds?
If coq's team is fine with it, I'm fine with it (maybe they want to have more users and thats a legit reason to change it).
But this sounds like some sort of peer presure to change it.
I recently saw a tweet of a Ph.D candidate, whose professor asked her 'How good are you with Coq?', and then the prof finally realized what he had said.
I think its time to change the name, it might make people uncomfortable.
Honestly, you get used to the name and just kind of abstract over it -- because it's your only option if your work is in the area. It can still be awkward to explain to people what you're working on though, so I welcome the change.
I'm so glad this is happening. I've tried to occasionally propose we use a theorem-prover at work for stuff that "isn't allowed to make mistakes", and I'm always hesitant to recommend Coq because the name will, at best, get some chuckling and jokes, and worst make people feel a bit uncomfortable.
This isn't a big deal. There's a long history of product names being screened for this kind of unintended confusion - at times this leads to commercial products having different names in different countries, which isn't really an option for open-source software.
That page is a goldmine of involuntary comedy. At the end of the day, the more languages you care about, the more likely you are to find some animal-related term that has become sexual slang somewhere at some point.
I understand their predicament and agree it needs a new name though (it’s actually surprising how long they’ve gone before accepting that it’s a problem, in such an anglo-dominated field as computing). I just don’t think they’ll find a solution if they stay “around a farm”... I mean, looking at other names they have, gallina in Italian is a hen, but also a very common negative slang for “stupid woman” - any Italian woman using that language would feel horribly. The whole farm-related imagery is ripe for this sort of thing.
thanks, a quick glance brought "coquito" to my attention, and ponder why "cogito" is not in the suggestion list? a nod to French philosopher René Descartes
dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum ("I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am")
I've been following this discussion closely because I work in adjacent areas and have dipped into Coq and Agda. Now that I see it on hackernews and all sorts of comments speculating on how this is cancel culture and English-centric chauvinism I'm really disappointed. Sometimes you lack the social context to evaluate the merits of a discussion so you default to your image of the most plausible motivation and it says a lot in this case. A popular idea here is the "gellman amnesia effect", yes? Well I'm definitely not going to forget this in the broader context every time a post comes around baiting culture war rhetoric.
Unfortunately some women actually in the Coq community discussing this on Twitter noticed they were getting all of a sudden a lot more engagement with concern trolls around the time this submission gained traction. "intellectual curiosity" indeed. I hope its worth it, this place existing. I think I can find a replacement though so I'm logging off indefinitely.
Reminds me of the similar problem with the machine learning conference NIPS which was renamed NeurIPS (not much of an improvement if you ask me). There were instances of women at that conference also being forced into uncomfortable situations relating to the name. People are dumb.
I was just thinking of a few other names that I find amusing but I can definitely imagine people abusing:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
- Aircraft Incident Data Store (AIDS. This was renamed)
This should be a case where absence of personal experience should not invalidate other people's experiences. I've never faced any weird reactions to the name (other than a sign language interpreter's confusion), but y'know what? I believe that other people have. It's not a big jump. And it's also not a big jump to rename the project.
"Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations ..."
These re-namings always follow the same pattern. Some professionally oppressed people contact a project, provide mostly secret evidence to members of the project's progressive faction.
After the re-naming they are never heard of again.
Coq isn't pronounced like "cock" at all by the French. As a first crude approximation, it is more like "coke".
In the Oxford dictionary, "cock" means "a male bird, esp. a male domestic fowl". There's cockroach, cockpit, cockney ...
So U.S. cultural imperialism wins again.
I'm saying this as a person who had problems with the NNTP "suck" program, so I do understand aversions to names, if they are legitimate.
> These re-namings always follow the same pattern. Some professionally oppressed people contact a project, provide mostly secret evidence to members of the project's progressive faction.
Hello, I'm the woman who chimed in with the story of the Uber driver harassing me. I'm not just a Coq expert (check my publications), but also a contributor to the proof assistant (check my Github). Every year during non-pandemic times I go to France for a week for the Coq Users & Developers Workshop, and I am quite close with the team.
I also hear "Coq" before "cock" when people say either of those words, naturally, since I spend so much time working on Coq. Unfortunately, this means that in public I frequently forget that almost everyone who has never heard of it before hears "cock," and this is what most often gets me into bad situations like in the Uber.
The problem isn't that we are community outsiders; it's that you can't imagine us being community insiders.
The Coq development team acknowledges the recent discussions (started on the Coq-Club mailing list) around Coq's logo and name.
We wish to thank everyone that participated in these discussions. Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations, reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning / using Coq because of its name, were all very important so that the community could fully recognize the impact of the current name and its slang meaning in English, especially with respect to gender-diversity in the Coq community.
I strongly agree it should be renamed if only for the reason that the name usually completely derails any news discussion thread it features in with people discussing why it's called that and making jokes. This happens when talking to people about it as well. It's tiring and distracting and is never going to go away with the current name.
I don't see this as some big PC encroachment. This is Branding 101. One of the first things you should do when you come up with a cool name for your brand is make sure it doesn't mean or sound like anything vulgar in another language. You'd hate for your product to take off and get popular and then realize later its name means "asshole" in Turkish or something. This one seems like a no-brainer to me.
This battle was lost decades ago. If you read computer science journal articles, what language are they typically written in? What language are your favorite programming keywords like "function", "for", "if", "else", etc.?
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|5 years ago|reply
But, the tool that originated in France is now a standard tool in a world where the lingua franca (pun intended) is English, and there’s no avoiding that in that environment it sounds like cock. There’s no choice here that isn’t somehow shitty, so it seems like they’re making the best decision.
[+] [-] thefz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|5 years ago|reply
But, on reading the discussion page, I realized I forgot about kids and students, especially women, and in that context, even though changing the name is obviously not the best or most important way to solve the problem, it could be a great mitigation and is worth doing.
[+] [-] craigsmansion|5 years ago|reply
That would be for computing in general. When it comes to proving software, France's academia seems to be one of the few that takes "making working software" as a serious development for the future (maybe because of airplanes and nuclear power plants). They're actually in the forefront here, if not leading.
The correct response to "Coq sounds funny in English" should be:
"Maybe just learn French?".
[+] [-] SilasX|5 years ago|reply
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bite
Even without knowing French, you can kind of make out this part:
« Bite » est une expression d'argot désignant vulgairement le pénis.
[+] [-] oblio|5 years ago|reply
So, being slightly naive and maybe stupid, he told the Romanian main referee to book "the Black one", in Romanian. Black in Romanian is "negru". And it's not offensive (maybe a bit too colloquial for the setting), we have a ton of offensive words he could have used. Ironically, they wouldn't have understood any of the truly offensive words, I'm quite sure.
Because a ton of the folks around being English speakers you can figure out how this ended.
From a certain perspective you could say it's cultural imperialism.
[+] [-] jonsterling|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbaz33|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umvi|5 years ago|reply
Cock means "adult male bird" in English as well. See: cockfighting[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockfight
[+] [-] m12k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatcode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihojman|5 years ago|reply
I aknowledge English as the lingua franca of our digital world, but that doesn't mean that we should be attached to every aspect of English speakers cultural environments, basically because we have our own environments too, and are just as valid as theirs.
[+] [-] tombert|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapnie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ModernMech|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastball|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cedricgle|5 years ago|reply
I hope the tool ended up with a non-english alternative. As I am in "the either everything is fine or nothing is fine" team, maybe I am a little biased on the subject.
[+] [-] OskarS|5 years ago|reply
It would be a shame to not use a French name though. I don't know about Chapon (it's a bit on the nose to have the new name be "Coq, but emasculated"). I vote for "Canard", which would also be sort-of funny in English.
[+] [-] capableweb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rscho|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq
[+] [-] ihojman|5 years ago|reply
Why do some folks have to change it's project name regardless of it's meaning in another language? Coq's name wasn't meant to be offensive.
What would happen if the new name is considered an offensive or uncomfortable word in any other language? would that be a good enough reason to reconsider it? Or we only care about english speaking minds?
If coq's team is fine with it, I'm fine with it (maybe they want to have more users and thats a legit reason to change it).
But this sounds like some sort of peer presure to change it.
[+] [-] mfrw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mckirk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FartyMcFarter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hadrien01|5 years ago|reply
I particularly like Chapon, if the name was to change (from the announcement: this is not yet a commitment toward a renaming)
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
I understand their predicament and agree it needs a new name though (it’s actually surprising how long they’ve gone before accepting that it’s a problem, in such an anglo-dominated field as computing). I just don’t think they’ll find a solution if they stay “around a farm”... I mean, looking at other names they have, gallina in Italian is a hen, but also a very common negative slang for “stupid woman” - any Italian woman using that language would feel horribly. The whole farm-related imagery is ripe for this sort of thing.
[+] [-] guram11|5 years ago|reply
dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum ("I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am")
[+] [-] pampa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitdizzy|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately some women actually in the Coq community discussing this on Twitter noticed they were getting all of a sudden a lot more engagement with concern trolls around the time this submission gained traction. "intellectual curiosity" indeed. I hope its worth it, this place existing. I think I can find a replacement though so I'm logging off indefinitely.
[+] [-] gryn|5 years ago|reply
This is a sad day for the revenge of french on english.
Is Lean going to be renamed too next ? immature people might mistake me for a proud drug user.
[+] [-] mumblemumble|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefft255|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rscho|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frakt0x90|5 years ago|reply
I was just thinking of a few other names that I find amusing but I can definitely imagine people abusing:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
- Aircraft Incident Data Store (AIDS. This was renamed)
[+] [-] clarus|5 years ago|reply
(this is mailing list)
Here are some other links related to the discussion:
* wiki, where anyone can add proposals: https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names
* chat: https://coq.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/237655-Miscellaneou...
* forum: https://coq.discourse.group/t/renaming-coq/1264
[+] [-] hardwaregeek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glaringxc|5 years ago|reply
These re-namings always follow the same pattern. Some professionally oppressed people contact a project, provide mostly secret evidence to members of the project's progressive faction.
After the re-naming they are never heard of again.
Coq isn't pronounced like "cock" at all by the French. As a first crude approximation, it is more like "coke".
In the Oxford dictionary, "cock" means "a male bird, esp. a male domestic fowl". There's cockroach, cockpit, cockney ...
So U.S. cultural imperialism wins again.
I'm saying this as a person who had problems with the NNTP "suck" program, so I do understand aversions to names, if they are legitimate.
[+] [-] tlringer|4 years ago|reply
Hello, I'm the woman who chimed in with the story of the Uber driver harassing me. I'm not just a Coq expert (check my publications), but also a contributor to the proof assistant (check my Github). Every year during non-pandemic times I go to France for a week for the Coq Users & Developers Workshop, and I am quite close with the team.
I also hear "Coq" before "cock" when people say either of those words, naturally, since I spend so much time working on Coq. Unfortunately, this means that in public I frequently forget that almost everyone who has never heard of it before hears "cock," and this is what most often gets me into bad situations like in the Uber.
The problem isn't that we are community outsiders; it's that you can't imagine us being community insiders.
[+] [-] tom_mellior|5 years ago|reply
Yes it is: https://forvo.com/word/coq/#fr
> As a first crude approximation, it is more like "coke".
No it isn't: https://forvo.com/word/coke/#en
[+] [-] syspec|5 years ago|reply
The Coq development team acknowledges the recent discussions (started on the Coq-Club mailing list) around Coq's logo and name.
We wish to thank everyone that participated in these discussions. Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations, reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning / using Coq because of its name, were all very important so that the community could fully recognize the impact of the current name and its slang meaning in English, especially with respect to gender-diversity in the Coq community.
[+] [-] seanwilson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thu2111|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnwatson|5 years ago|reply
In naming things to make English speakers comfortable, we're implicitly identifying that other languages and cultures are less important.
[+] [-] jrockway|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] formerly_proven|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] m000|5 years ago|reply