I just received a registration confirmation from codingame with the subject line: “Start to pimp your coding skills!”. I find this incredibly juvenile and off-putting. If you as a company want to help people get better at their craft, and grow our industry, it would suit you to aim your communications at the community at large, rather than just brogrammers.
Every time I think this industry is making some tiny steps in the right direction, something like this happens.
Can you post the full email that you’ve received? I got this one:
Hi CvxFous,
You have registered to Smash the Code.
Use this link to access the contest or update your registration form: https://www.codingame.com/contests/smash-the-code.
Still, I don’t know why you are so offended about, pimp is probably a reference to Pimp my ride, and in this case is a synonym of “sharpen”.
All in all, I’m having a hard time finding why you find this offensive or juvenile, it’s a way of saying things, and it’s neither vulgar nor inappropriate.
Could you explain a bit more your position?
Someone from Codingame got back to me, saying they would change the language, so maybe that’s already happened. I’m impressed, and pleased that they listened to my concerns.
I know where the term comes from, and it’s great that you don’t find it offensive, or juvenile, but I do, and just because it has a colloquial meaning other than the original one, doesn’t mean it no longer has the unpleasant connotations.
I think it has no place on a platform for growing professional skills.
Professional industry skills bullshits set aside, I have to admit that there is some room left for improvements regarding genders representation. Batman, Indiana Jones, Kirk, even Bender and not a single female in all the puzzles. Codingame staff really need to take some vacation watching The 100 on torrent TV. Maybe it’s time to revamp the infamous Power of Thor puzzle itself!
Yeah, I didn’t notice the lack of female until now, could be a way to include Towerfall characters into the puzzles, since it has blue and violet female archer, and pink male archerTotally not promoting my favorite game
The 100 is awesome, and I think part of it is because female are in charge in a world where men are trying to take control, love it.
Eh… they could at least cheap out, and in the Marvel ones throw in Lady Deadpool and Gwenpool.
Though, I’m not bothered by the lack of female characters… as well, I’m kind of the puppet master on several male ones. Men who are not able to do anything but be compelled to my bidding MWAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! AAAAAAAAAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! DANCE FOR ME MY PLEASURE PUPPETS! DANCE FOR ME!
I will note, that having your pleasure puppet dance party… er… subservative slaves… er… internet bots without any real gender (only imaginary which isn’t real) attached to them… being a sausage fest… it just makes you seem odd. You know, the kind of odd where you end up editing a sentence to try to save grace so it doesn’t make things worse–and create a self contradictory mess that barely parses as communication.
Eh, I’m going to say that the immaturity was an attempt to have the language sound less formal and ultimately more colloquial. Which didn’t end up going through properly.
It kind of comes across as like this famous meme Gif indicates: http://33.media.tumblr.com/106e7e5598f02c6017fb6e146dea465f/tumblr_inline_no8x9v1TTK1ttefo7_500.gif
In Codingame’s success… most materials on learning other languages seem to insist on being a super formal DesuDesuDesuDesuDesu robot, desu desu. Desu used as one of the better known desu examples of desu overly desu formal desu language desu tutorials desu making people sound like tools desu desu desu desu desu. (My mocking of it, is meant to make it come across as really tool-ish, as I’ve found people who think they are familiar with Japanese stuff are often really stupid. So for people to not misunderstand this statement, requires me to be super blatant about it all)
Besides the gamification, one way of not having to be too much 
is to have a small community which, in the end, always translates into a lack of diversity. I’m pretty sure that staying small is not that CG is aiming at and being is probably the best way to behave in a more crowded community. No surprise that the japanese have become good at that.
… well, the article is in French… I’m also guessing it is written by a total weeb (which uh… generally means they don’t actually know anything about Japan–they just think they do)
And the thing is: the Japanese are not really THAT good at it. It is part of why “the overly formal” is kind of a stock character. Imagine a society that has Constable Benton Fraser being a common character archtype that shows up to annoy people in your material and work.
Being too nice annoys people about as much as not being nice enough… which when you are translating between materials–can be REALLY hard to get good at handling decently. Long standing companies still have issues figuring out how to accurately localize materials.
So… Codingame having issues figuring out how to not sound like a really awkward dork in every language other than there own… isn’t that big of thing to worry much about–as it will happen.
Hell… the concept of “Wooleyisms” only really showed up in the 1990s as a rather new idea for dealing with many common localisation pitfalls.
