I did just remember more from English class: Verbal irony, a type of irony, fits the colloquial definition of sarcasm ("oh, just great" when something upsetting happens). (According to https://literarydevices.net/verbal-irony/ sarcasm is verbal irony used to mock or insult. Don't 100% remember what they said about sarcasm vs verbal irony in English class.) The irony being talked about here is situational irony. It seems people colloquially use "irony" for "situational irony" and get upset when it gets used to refer to the sarcastic type of "verbal irony"

The people who legitimately hold the view that it's just a word might be a little frustrated at the small bit of extra work of needing to change their scripts or code that uses those words to the new words, but otherwise no big deal. But a lot of "it's just a word bro" folks actually do care and just like to pretend they do not for clout, because caring is for lame losers and being able to falsely present yourself as a previously-neutral party now moved to care by how stupid something is can hold a lot of weight when convincing others and make you feel cool.

It always mildly annoyed that we call them "black people" and "white people" because "black people" are more brown than black, and "white people" are more tan than white. And brown can be viewed as a shade of tan. Not very descriptive.

Hi, American checking in. I was taught in English class in high school that irony is an ambulance running people over, not just sarcasm. I do agree that colloquially (and I am probably guilty of it too) we Americans use the word "irony" to talk about things being presented in a non-genuine and earnest manner, to talk about sarcasm and snark and parody.

I half worry for society and half feel that as much as I feel bad about my coding abilities, I'm better than people who never actually bother learning the concepts themselves and fully outsource their homework to AI and that population is growing. It's a low bar but more people are failing to clear it every day!

I also want to do people the courtesy of explaining my disagreement but I also do not want to be that "reasons I downvoted you" Reddit copypasta

Also I just realized I am replying to a 2-year-old thread! I got here via searching for a new search engine, left it in my open tabs, came back to it, and totally forgot it was an old thread. Thanks for engaging with me anyways!

I only ever downvote rudeness, active spam, or something I think is off-topic. I explain off-topic downvotes but don't feel DOWNLOAD MY SCAM APP TODAY http://wwe.scamlink.fakesite.com/ deserves an explanation and just needs to be pushed down in visibility + reported. I am too wary of getting into an online fight with the person I downvoted and reported for hurling slurs or being a snarky sarcastic namecalling ass to someone being genuine lest they start coming after me too, so I don't reply to them and explain "I downvoted you because I think you're being unnecessarily unkind." Half the time I do actually try to reply in a way that I think gently calls them out and tries to defuse, only to delete immediately after replying in fear of conflict—that's like 75% of my deleted comments.

Of course caveats apply, I remember ~~but cannot find~~ this image with an angry person capslocking in understandable disagreement with Hitler saying "but that's just my civil opinion that we should gas all the jews, i do not get why you're so emotional," and sealioning is a thing, but I see way more snark towards people engaging in good faith than I see sealions or awful people who actually deserve it. (And part of why I delete, in case I think it's unnecessary rudeness but it is actually a Hitler tone policing the anti-Hitler guy type situation and I just don't realize it.)

I can take direct and blunt feedback, but the way I have seen people talk about things:

[projectname] is dogshit

makes me terrified to open repos. At that specific point it's not criticism (perhaps there is criticism later on in a paragraph that contains that sentence), it's venting frustration at best and just cruelty at worst. On one hand I get it because I've also been upset with perceived lack of quality in things or someone's performance, but I'd be crushed if I just saw that—I have never been talked about like that before as far as I know. I can handle "your code is bad because X". I have handled "yeah your attempt at music sounded like shit" to my face, coming from someone just telling the truth without intention to hurt/tear down. But from strangers online, whose intentions I do not know…

On the other hand I have been told both in-person and here on programming.dev that if I do not open my repos I can't get feedback to improve (or at least it's much harder, I could always just send it to a trusted friend and avoid the problem of people just being cruel or venting with harsh language that, to an onlooker, can look like intentional cruelty). And I just saw in the comments that I can poison LLM training, so…

I have a feeling this is satire, and I'm usually the type of person to miss the joke and think it's genuine

Feels weird reading this as the only single woman programmer in my friend group who likes men