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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

> I use this pattern so much I actually wrote a little metaprogramming language that is capable of generating a lot of the boilerplate for you. Link in my bio, if anyone's interested in looking at it.

Your language [0] is an interesting idea. I've done a lot of similar stuff (not at work, I'm very rarely asked to write C code professionally, but I like mucking around with it in my personal time). My own approach to C metaprogramming involves obtuse preprocessor hacks (e.g [1]) and shell scripts that use grep/awk/sed to find macro invocations and spit out new header files as a result. Maybe your way is better.

A word of warning though – do you realise your name for your language is an anti-gay slur in several dialects of English? You might end up unintentionally upsetting some people with it.

[0] https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

[1] https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,...

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>> My own approach to C metaprogramming involves obtuse preprocessor hacks

I considered doing this, albeit briefly, but decided against it for two reasons:

1) I hate the preprocessor. 2) I found a few projects that did that already.

Ultimately, writing a bespoke C parser and scripting language that sits on top of it was kind of an experimental accident. I just started doing it, and it's ended up working out so well that I've kept pushing on it to see where the natural conclusion is.

>> do you realise your name for your language is an anti-gay slur in several dialects of English?

I actually didn't realize that, thanks for pointing that out. I'll be changing the name.

> A word of warning though – do you realise your name for your language is an anti-gay slur in several dialects of English?

I'd say 'poof' is worse. Jesse's a real name in some parts of the world.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Poof

I don’t understand your comment. I’m wondering if maybe you misunderstood me as talking about Jesse’s name as opposed to his language’s name.

>anti-gay slur in several dialects of English

So is puff. Am I to give up actual puff the magic dragon and sugar puffs? Being English I like the occasional puff on a fag aswell, there's a double entendre for every one there.

And then there's the pouffe that I rest my legs on...

> So is puff. Am I to give up actual puff the magic dragon and sugar puffs? Being English I like the occasional puff on a fag aswell, there's a double entendre for every one there.

I never told him he had to change it. I was simply checking if he was aware it was an anti-gay slur (in some countries), in case he wasn't – and indeed he said he wasn't. Now he is aware that it is, it is his decision how to respond. He's said he's going to change the name. If he'd decided the opposite, to keep the name – it wouldn't be my place to criticise his decision. If someone else felt it was theirs, that would be between him and them, not me.

And, personally, I've never heard ''puff'' been used as an anti-gay slur, but I've heard ''poof'' been used that way many times. But sure, when you tell me it has been, I believe you.

If someone insisted that ''Puff the Magic Dragon's'' name be changed because ''puff'' is a slur, I'd think that was silly. But there's a big difference between a 50 year old song, which exists in many people's childhood memories (it does in mine), and a pre-alpha open source project which very few have heard of, where if there'd ever be a good time to change its name, it would be now.

It's almost exclusively pronounced puff where I am.

The problem is that the author doesn't really know the cultural nuances, simply saying it's a possible issue isn't helpful because they don't know the relative usages of certain words. I wouldn't be particularly worried about using poof because there already homophones that are innocent so it isn't like fuck. Plus at this point Im not even sure if it's derogatory or just slang for gay.

But anyway, I'm firmly in the intent camp when it comes to words. If the word as used is obviously not meant to offend, offense shouldn't be taken. The world's got enough problems without extracting insults from open source projects.

Fwiw puff the magic dragon to me is synonymous with smoking weed.

> It's almost exclusively pronounced puff where I am.

At high school in Sydney, Australia in the 1990s, I remember hearing poof as an anti-gay slur a lot - to the point that if I hear the word, that's the first thing that pops into my head. And poof is a clipping of poofter, which I heard a lot too, and the two words get mentally merged together. Whereas puff, to me that's a completely separate and unrelated word, which is pronounced differently, I never thought of connecting the two. From what you are saying, in some dialects in England, the two words are pronounced the same – didn't know that before

> Plus at this point Im not even sure if it's derogatory or just slang for gay.

It is derogatory, but it also has "re-claiming" uses. Few will be offended by a gay person using it, but someone who isn't gay calling gay people that is going to offend a lot of people. Similar to the situation with Black people calling themselves the n-word versus non-Black people doing it

In Australia, poof and poofter are associated with the so-called poofter-bashing, an epidemic of violent assaults and murders of gay men in the 1970s thru 1990s, in which the police were complicit. I think that history makes poof/poofter more offensive in Australian English than they are in British English

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/world/australia/australia...

> Fwiw puff the magic dragon to me is synonymous with smoking weed.

When I was a little kid, my mother used to play "Puff the Magic Dragon" (the Peter, Paul and Mary song) all the time. That's what it makes me think of, my early childhood. I know some people linked it to weed, but that's never been a prominent link in my head-and it is a link which the band themselves have always vehemently denied. Anyway, who really wants to mentally associate weed with their parents’ taste in music?

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