[erlang-questions] erlang-questions Digest, Vol 360, Issue 5

[Onorio Catenacci]

A few thoughts:

1.) As a native speaker of American English, trust me the word "coon" is
extremely offensive.  I'm not trying to be hyperbolic but it's my
impression that to African-Americans this word is almost as offensive as
the N word is. I'm not a SJW and I'm not politically correct. I simply
don't have any good reason to likely offend people when a less offensive
term (like "Racoon") is easily available to use.  If you don't speak
American English natively, trust me this is not a case of someone being
hypersensitive.  It's a very offensive word.

2.) It looks like Valery simply decide to build Rebar3/Hex/Mix etc. with
Python.  That's perfectly fine.  I'm not seeing anything much on there
other than "we decided to rebuild rebar3 with python" and "we're going to
build packages to work with our new build system" but it doesn't look as if
they have yet.

3.) I also agree with Fred and others who say that all this discussion on
the subtleties of political correctness and freedom of expression will get
lost outside of this mailing list.  All this would do is give a black eye
to the Erlang community and convince people who don't know any better than
some segment of developers who use Erlang are racists.  Fair or not that's
what will happen. Of course who ever said life is fair?

I wish I had a better grasp of the native language of some folks on this
list so I could express how offensive this particular word is to people who
speak American English.  Maybe if I said to Valery I were going to build a
library named " КГБ" that might give some idea of how loaded with negative
meaning the word "Coon" is in English. The fact that lots of Russian folks
might find that particular phrase offensive--well they need to stop being
so sensitive right?

If you want to continue with this library, please simply change the name to
"Racoon." This is not about offending or not offending anyone.  Its about
giving people the wrong impression by picking a name with a negative
meaning in American English. Or if you insist on using "Coon" then use the
word in whatever your native language is for "Racoon".

I'll put it this way: I wouldn't name a library "Bitch".  Yes, it refers to
a female dog.  But it's more commonly used as an offensive way to describe
a female that one doesn't like.

I also wouldn't name a library "Ass". That word can refer to a donkey but
it's so overwhelmingly identified with a pejorative slang term that native
speakers wouldn't think "donkey"--they'd think the other thing.

-- 
Onorio Catenacci

http://onor.io
http://www.google.com/+OnorioCatenacci
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