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.
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 [2] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html