[strken]

Killing child processes could certainly have painful historical connotations for anyone who's miscarried, had a forced abortion, or is distressed by the historical existence of those events. I'm sure if it becomes politically advantageous to remove the kill command, a community organiser or developer advocate somewhere will immediately start lobbying for it.

[awb]

Ok, fair point about miscarriages / abortions.

> I'm sure if it becomes politically advantageous to remove the kill command, a community organiser or developer advocate somewhere will immediately start lobbying for it.

Politically advantageous? I’m not sure why social change is assumed to have ulterior motives. If one of my employees said a violent personification of a programming process was distracting or disturbing to them and made their job harder, why not change it? It’s not like these are technical terms. These are words that relate to human interaction that we’ve embedded into a non-human field.

There are tons of words throughout history that were accepted by previous generations that aren’t accepted by subsequent ones and vice versa. Language and social norms are always changing.

If you can’t speak the truth freely, that’s a huge problem. If you can’t program with others using your preferred personified analogy for a variable name when another variable name will communicate the intent just as well, that doesn’t strike me as quite the same existential threat to society and public discourse.

[strken]

I don't believe that most of the cancelled terms were distracting or disturbing anyone who wasn't a political activist to any significant degree prior to being cancelled. Staking them out as unacceptable terms has brought into existence a battlefield where there didn't need to be one, and caused people to be offended by terms that hadn't offended them before. When I look for reasons why this might have been done, I find a lot of people making careers out of their advocacy, and getting a lot of dopamine hits from social media.

It's my impression that there are a lot of people looking for things to cancel, justified by their political beliefs, but motivated by social approval and career-building.

If this is the case, it's obvious why we shouldn't change our language to suit those demands: the demands are motivated by a positive feedback loop where cancelling is rewarded, and rewards enable cancellation, and so whether a term is a real problem is irrelevant so long as outrage about it can generate enough income or likes.

[awb]

That’s a pretty pessimistic view.

As the programming field becomes more diverse, isn’t it reasonable that some might have a legitimate emotional reaction to the word “slave” especially in the context of a “master/slave” relationship?

Or is it more realistic to assume that it’s people on power trips manufacturing outrage for social or physical currency? And that no African American would ever have had a problem with that word pair until a social justice warrior came along and told them to be outraged?

The latter is pretty insensitive, but not an uncommon view.

> we shouldn't change our language to suit those demands

Programmers used an analogy that attempted to change the meaning of the word pair “master/slave”. People are advocating not to change the meaning of our language but to respect the original meaning that is still taught in every school. “Master/slave” has an important historical meaning and isn’t something we should casually co-opt.

If someone wrote a script to “genocide” a DB instead of “wiping” it, I’d hope that we could see that co-opting a word that already has important historical meaning doesn’t help anyone, but surely hurts some.