| This past summer I helped teach a bunch of students to code, students who were from under-represented populations here in the U.S. They were horrified to learn where the 'master' term came from. Switching from master to main is a good change. The 'master-slave' terminology has been used in tech for a while (for example, IDE [0]). Yes, it's not intended to be a direct reference to slavery, but that's where the term originated and it's clearly used to mean "one thing is in charge, the other thing follows orders". Yes, there's no explicit 'slave' term in git, even though BitKeeper did (apparently - I've never used BitKeeper). It's not effortless, but it's not hard to change from master to main ( [1] ). Plus, it's a great excuse to learn (or sharpen) your grep/awk/sed/etc skills :) ---------------------------------------------- [0]: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm#pt4 [1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBra... |
Tell it to your students next time and let's all make a fuss about the use of the word.