Most servers started to close the finger port for incoming connections in the late ’90s because the protocol was a great way of enumerating the valid accounts on the system. If your mail provider enables it then you can find all of the addresses that will work and that makes sending spam to that provider a lot easier.

I first saw finger in 2000 and even then it only worked on the local network and was blocked at the firewall for the machines that hosted a web server / email.

I have writing PIM in my “TODO one day”, and it would be nice feature to add.

The problem with the internet is how many people are now reachable. Is it hypersensitivity if you cause many thousands of people distress, even if the denominator is much much larger?

It’s hypersensitivity to be caused distress by the word finger. I’m sorry, but it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

If people get offended by something, I most certainly don’t care.

I will first say that I love your thoughtfulness and your willingness to reconsider in the middle of a discussion. That’s what this should all be about. Kudos.

That being said, my inner Izzit jumped at this:

I’m not sure what the size of that group is (maybe it’s small!), but it’s also unquestionably disproportionately women.

Is it though? Can ‘men’ (whatever that means) not get fingered?

It does not invalidate your point that we need to be thoughtful and conscious in our language, but even when arguing for thoughtfulness, we can still be blind to our own bias (or ‘blind to our own view of reality shaped by our own lived experiences’).

All that to say - let’s have these discussions, but go out of our way to have them with people actually affected, whose version of reality looks nothing like ours - with humility.

Side story - probably unrelated: I feel violated when anyone on my team uses the word “bang”. I honestly feel enraged and it takes everything in my power to not throw my computer across the room anytime I’m invited to “bang this out with someone,” or when a team member relates how they solved a problem by staying up late and “banging it out.”

I have not said anything to these people. I probably never will. For reasons that you may or may not be able to imagine, based on your own lived experiences.

I honestly have no idea if they are aware of what it sounds like. I know for a fact they are not thinking of me (intending to get a reaction out of me, or how it would make me - or anyone else - feel).

If anything I guess I just take issue with calling it hypersensitivity as opposed to discussing how much we should be sensitive.

Yes, this is the conversation I think we need to have: what is a desirable level of sensitivity, and when does it tip over to being excessive? The answer will be different for different people in different communities, but it should be an ongoing conversation that changes with the times, and doesn’t assume that because something has always been accepted that it should continue to be acceptable (and perhaps allows for language to move the other direction as well, e.g. if slurs like “queer” are reclaimed as words one can take pride in).

Elsewhere in this thread, @david_chisnall lists other utilities that also lend themselves to double entendres:

In contrast, finger always led to people making fingering jokes (mind you, with touch, unzip, mount, fsck, and so on, the UNIX command line doesn’t really provide a shortage of input for a dirty mind).

I’ve seen t-shirts etc. that use these utility names to refer to sexual acts, but I will admit that for whatever reason these others did not set off alarm bells for me in quite the same way as finger. If I were god emperor of command line utilities, I might rename finger and leave the rest alone. Are there people who find one of these other utility names more troubling, and find finger to be acceptable?

How do we decide when a name needs to be changed, or when the change is worth the effort / inconvenience? Is there a meaningful difference between many people experiencing mild discomfort and a few people experiencing extreme distress? How many people have to experience an issue, and how severe must that issue be, before we seriously discuss changing a name? How much should we care about how the worst people in a community behave vs. more common behavior? There will always be someone who finds something objectionable about anything, so we cannot take action on every objection, but it also doesn’t seem like we should ignore all objections.

How do we weigh the current community vs. an aspirational community we hope to have? I think one important piece of context is that programming has been something of a boy’s club for decades, and if the profession wants to be more inclusive and welcoming, it perhaps should err on the side of being more sensitive. The absence of objections could be a sort of survivorship bias.

I also think it’s worth taking a stand in favor of caring about people’s feelings, instead of making it cool to be cruel. Many people have an attitude of “fsck your feelings” until it’s their feelings that are hurt, and then they demand blood. We shouldn’t be ruled by people who refuse to consider any feelings they don’t share, any more than we should be ruled by puritans who object to everything.

Given a chain that long, I suspect I could link any word in any alphabet to a term that some people would find offensive.

I don’t know the details of this specific case, but if someone is taking offense at the result of a chain that long, it’s reasonable to infer that they’re choosing to take offense.

It’s very common IME for American neo-puritans to assume that their own parochial, contingent cultural anxieties do and should apply unconditionally to the rest of the world. A form of cultural imperialism, I would say.

I’m very much on board with attempting to empathize with people with lived experiences different from the majority demographic in a community, but does that mean that a single person from a morally-privileged group gets an unconditional veto over anything they object to?

many of these are based on intentional mis-readings

I think I’m missing a reference here, because I am not aware of a situation where someone intentionally misread something and then felt excluded on that basis, let alone many of them. But I’m specifically referring to situations where someone wants to participate and feels uncomfortable doing so because of the language being used by others. Bad faith misreadings are entirely different.

Making that call is hard and will depend on how many spoons you have

Is that an auto-correct error? If not, can you tell me what “how many spoons” means in this context or point me to an explanation? I’m a native US English speaker, and that is new to me.

I recognize that I’m engaging in wishful thinking. It doesn’t seem like a bad wish, though, to want to be smart enough to identify exclusionary things before they make someone feel excluded.

I’m sorry to have made you google that but simultaneously glad that it wasn’t already in your vocabulary. I learned it from my supervisor at my first job in high school. When he was informed by more senior management that it wasn’t acceptable, he replaced it with the term “afro engineering”. IIRC he was given his walking papers shortly thereafter for a completely unrelated reason. The state of that part of the world at the time was that as long as you weren’t literally using the n-word, you weren’t being racist.

The term “jerry-rigged” (or “jerry-built”) is the only other such form I know of, which I used to think was connected to the slang (slur?) term for Germans, but apparently it predates Germans being referred to as “Jerry” (circa WW1).