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

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 1:38 AM Stefan Strigler <stefan.strigler@REDACTED>
wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 6:01 PM Jesper Louis Andersen <
> jesper.louis.andersen@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> There is also "Maine Coon", which is a cat breed.
>>
>
> And there is also me who thinks you CAN NOT be serious. I mean seriously
> WTF?
>

FWIW, you should read my statement as a defense of Valery, not as an
endorsement of the name choice. As in: unless you happen to sit with the
deeper understanding of American slang, you are unlikely to grasp this.

I don't think it is fair to expect people to know the intricacies of
another culture or language to its fullest extent, so I'm fully expecting
mistakes to be made in that regard.

However, once you know a name has certain connotations, the right course of
action is to make an evaluation based on the new information and then
eventually change the name.

Etymology can also play a role, and when you port a word from one culture
to another, it might gain or lose connotation. This can make it especially
hard to navigate the reef. As an example, the word "robot", which is
usually seen as fairly innocent, stems from the Czech "robotnik" which
means "forced worker". If you continue the path, you end up with "slave"
and then you have the origin for the "master/slave" connotation often used
in engineering (originally for train locomotives). There has been a push
recently to change "master/slave" into e.g., "leader/follower" or
"primary/secondary". But curiously, rather little time has been spent on
"robot", even though the origin is the same. Treacherous waters indeed.
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