[erlang-questions] Coon - new tool for building Erlang packages, dependency management and deploying Erlang services

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 02/12/2018 07:10 PM, Tom Santero wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 1:02 PM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED 
> <mailto:essen@REDACTED>> wrote:
> 
>     On 02/12/2018 05:13 PM, Fred Hebert wrote:> Loic can correct me if
>     he's wrong, but his /Cowboy/ web server took its
> 
>         initial name because /cowboys kill apaches/ if I recall old
>         conference conversations. I think it's of poor taste, but so far
>         Loic has not had any fall out or enough offended people to make
>         any change, and he did build a successful business out of it. He
>         made the call and ran with it.
> 
> 
>     Oversimplified of course but true. Context is important though, my
>     knowledge of cowboys mostly comes from Lucky Luke and a few farwest
>     movies, so the inspiration is fictional.
> 
>     Nobody has had any problem with it.
> 
> 
> Actually, plenty of us have had a problem with it for a long time Loic. 
> Those of us who knew the origin. The term cowboy absent your naming 
> context is of course innocuous, which might explain why it's coasted 
> under the radar for so long without having been called out; in context, 
> it is disappointing.

If ignorance is disappointing then so be it. But in that case you must 
be horrified at a lot of western related entertainment products. 
Watching kids play "cowboys and indians" must be truly heartbreaking too.

I grew up with Lucky Luke, Tintin, Asterix and other fictions. Cowboy 
comes from there. Sure some of the stories raise some eyebrows today 
(Tintin in the Congo is particularly infamous, and it's especially 
telling that it hadn't been translated to English for so long despite 
being translated everywhere else), but that doesn't make the people who 
enjoy them whatever *ist some want them to be.

Ignorance of US history is to be expected of non-US people. The same 
applies everywhere. You can't really expect a single developer to know 
all the intricacies of all existing *and future* cultures and languages. 
Culture changes fast enough that you might see otherwise normal words 
become slur within your lifetime.

According to some people, and I'm no expert, Thanksgiving originates 
with the genocide of native Americans. Should Thanksgiving be dropped 
because of its origins? Clearly some people are offended by it, 
otherwise I wouldn't have heard of this from faraway lands. Still I 
don't think the people celebrating Thanksgiving today are celebrating 
genocide. In the same vein, me naming a project after fictional stories 
does not make me side with anyone in historical events.

Finally, the origin of a name is one thing, its use another. Sure that's 
how the idea came to me, remembering fictional stories and naming the 
project after them. But that's not how it's been used since. The process 
for coming up with the name is irrelevant, just as the history behind a 
practice is irrelevant to how it's practiced today. What matters is how 
things are today, and today the western theme is just that, a theme.

And just to complete the story behind the Cowboy name: I initially 
thought of using the name of a tribe but because there was already a 
number of them in use in software projects, including the Apache and 
Cherokee HTTP servers, and I was not familiar with the others, I decided 
against it. So we came real close of having the name being the same as a 
native American tribe. Maybe later.

Cheers,

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
https://ninenines.eu