[zzt123]

Seems so in my reading. I assume I must be incorrect though, since that interpretation seems absurd. Yet, not sure how else to interpret it… but I guess this isn’t much different from the master/slave stuff in code, or the removal of the master branch default in git.

[bschne]

With the GIT thing my usual stance is that there's no need to make this a hill to die on. Some people feel better about it, it's next to zero effort, so it's no big deal wether I personally think it's absolutely necessary or not. I don't think it's a high priority or high leverage thing to do against racism or for inclusion, but I don't mind when GitHub goes "you know what, main is nicer for some people, let's switch".

But the ant colony thing in the SA piece sounds a bit like saying software engineering is a "problematic" field that should be critiqued because it often uses a VCS that at some point in the past opted for a very common set of terms that some may now consider offensive.

I could try to rack my brain for all the more or less charitable interpretations of what she is actually trying to get at with that sentence, but viewing it in the context of the whole piece, I think there's not much of a there, there.

[tomp]

The problem with git master->main is, that if you don’t say “no”, there’s always gonna be the next thing. Like “ant colony”. Ironically Scott Aarson has himself written about this, after having realised he was, like you, wrong for not saying “no”. (Too late.)

You have to say “no”.

[gspr]

I don't buy that logic. I have absolutely no problem with the word "master" for e.g. a main branch, or for something that controls something else for that matter, but why wouldn't it be OK to let someone do all the work of changing a fine word into an equally fine one? How does that force you to do non-neutral, negative, changes in the future?

[tomp]

In your mind, it’s “fine work” but in their minds, it’s winning a political battle, and they’re just empowered for the next battle.

Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed.

If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying

[gspr]

> In your mind, it’s “fine work” but in their minds, it’s winning a political battle, and they’re just empowered for the next battle.

Why should I spend energy to try to gauge their motivations? And why should I care if I don't like the outcome of that estimation? I feel your criticism is refusing to admit a (low-priority, highly cosmetic) bugfix into an open source project because you don't like the political views of the committer.

To me, it's a pure calculation:

* To me, the words "master" and "main" equally well describe the most-important branch of my git repository.

* To some people, "master" is offensive. I don't understand this at all, but to these people, "main" is better.

* Someone else is offering to do the work.

So letting them is a net change for some people, and neutral for me. So why not?

> Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed.

Also by ignoring non-negative contributions from such people?

> If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying

That's the pointing: I'm arguing it has non-negative technical merits. So why care?

I'd be all on your side if "main" wasn't actually an equally good word! In fact, I think I'm driving people a little bit nuts by opposing things that have small negative impact all the time. I try not to compromise in that department. But I'm simply arguing that changing "master" to "main" here has no negative impact.

[stickfigure]

It's often not such a trivial change. Depending on the profile of your project, it may affect a lot of people and a lot of tooling downstream. That person volunteering to "do the work" isn't really doing all the work.

[janto]

"no need to make this a hill to die on" is what you say to someone to take away their ability to say "no". Don't make it your usual stance.

[anonymoushn]

Having different names for main branches in different repositories is "next to zero effort" like git submodules are "next to zero effort"

[Siira]

Next to zero efforts for you. I have lost hours debugging issues caused by it, and I am sure I will lose some more in the coming years.

[barfingclouds]

Acronyms are fun

[ogogmad]

Can we not say cool-sounding words anymore like "colony", "supremacy" and "master"?

I'll admit that "master vs slave" might perhaps be in bad taste (but not "master" on its own). But cancelling "blacklist", "colony" and "supremacy" is pretty incredible.

[8note]

I'm very favourable to getting rid of blacklist. It's random whether it's an allow list or a deny list, and there are domain specific words you can use instead to make it really clear what the list does

[Invictus0]

In what context does blacklist indicate an allow list? I've never heard of that. And is your issue with the word on the basis of race or on ambiguity?

[ogogmad]

Please explain to me what you find wrong with blacklist. I'm dying to know.

[HumanReadable]

it's less clear to non-native English speakers what the hell a blacklist is than what a deny-list is.

EDIT: the replies I received to this comment are pretty shocking to me. I'm not arguing for the removal of anything, I am only listing one issue with blacklist that deny-list doesn't have. Anything you're reading into my comment beyond that is your tribal identity projecting its insecurity.

[IlliOnato]

I'm a non-native English speaker, and I must say that you are wrong.

Even forgetting that many languages have exactly the same construction ("black list") with the same meaning, the thing you do as a non-native speaker with an unfamiliar word is to look it up in a dictionary, or guess its meaning from the context, not try and run some inverse etimology on it.

I mean, for years I understood what "paste" meant (as in "copy and paste") and used that word without having any idea about "paste" being some sort of glue. I still have no idea where the word "parkway" comes from, but understand the word and use it. (If I were to guess from its parts I would arrive to something like a "garden path":))

[HumanReadable]

I didn't claim we should remove the world blacklist. The comment I was responding asked for things I find wrong with blacklist, I replied with one.

[ogogmad]

1. By this logic, we should abandon most words in the English language, because non-native speakers might otherwise need to learn them. Somehow though, you've applied this logic only to the word "blacklist". And why should a language with its own literature and history abandon its own vocabulary?

2. The usual reason given for not saying "blacklist" is because of supposed racism. Your argument is a new one, and seems to have been produced post-facto. Your comment is sophistry.

[edit] Removed some scathing remarks.

[rbanffy]

Even if the readability argument was created after the fact, it still stands. It’s immediately clear what an “allow-list” means.

[HumanReadable]

The comment asked for things wrong with the word blacklist. I replied with a reason.

I'm not arguing for the removal of the word, I don't know why you think I am.

[major--neither]

> [edit] Removed some scathing remarks.

you mean you white-washed some remarks?

aha!

;)

[esarbe]

Not sure I buy that argument. In German they have the "Schwarze Liste" which essentially means.

German is pretty close to English though, so I guess your argument could still hold for other non-related languages.

[maximus-decimus]

whitelist = good allowed things

blacklist = bad, forbidden things

=>

white = good

black = bad

Associating something being black with it being bad/lesser/evil is problematic if you're trying to get rid of racism toward black people.

[ogogmad]

White is good because it's the colour of natural light. Black is bad because it's the colour of darkness, which is dangerous because you can't see. Children are afraid of the dark.

The fact that people's skin colour is sometimes described as white or black is a coincidence that doesn't relate to the origin of the word blacklist.

If people are offended by coincidences like this, it means that we won't be able to speak Spanish, Russian or Chinese. The Russian word for black (as in a black person) is negr; but note that this is not considered offensive in Russian.

[rbanffy]

> White is good because it's the colour of natural light.

In a post about a world flag someone mentioned that, for the Chinese, white is associated with death.

[tomp]

white lies

whitewashing

white collar crime (why not “black suit crime”?)

You’re hallucinating an issue that doesn’t actually exist.

[refurb]

Blacksmith

Black and Tan

Plenty of “black” compound words that are neutral to positive.

It’s not about the words, it’s about power. They want to force you to do what they say.. Even for something trivial like this, if they can force you to do use their language, they make a small win.

A few hundred wins later and they dictate what is acceptable language.

[Ma8ee]

Your examples are actually supporting the argument. White lies are innocent, not so bad lies, much better than black lies. White washing is making something look better than it actually is, that is: make it look white = make it look better. And the only one that doesn't automatically use "white" as good is "white collar", but that is because here the distinction is between "white collar" and "blue collar".

[dcanelhas]

As in "Master of science"?

[ogogmad]

I said "master", when it's not in opposition to "slave", should not be deemed offensive. Your example helps make my point.

To clarify my view on master/slave terminology, I do understand how an overt analogy to slavery could be offensive. But the word "master" doesn't usually imply that there's a slave.

[zepto]

What does it mean to ‘master’ a subject?

[dcanelhas]

I was specifically referring to the academic Master's degree. What you're talking about is a more philosophical question :)

[paganel]

Which is absurd because the Romans had used this term first [1] (I mean, compared to the Europeans that set up colonies in the 1500s-1700s), with pretty tame connotations, for crying out loud, there's an entire German city which got its name from it, Köln.

> however, the term came to denote the highest status of a Roman city.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_(Roman)

[marcan_42]

The master/slave stuff is just terrible terminology. Seriously, it means about a dozen different things depending on context. Sometimes the "slave" is a clone of the master, sometimes it's an alternative of the master, sometimes it merely has the role of a responder in a protocol, and rarely is it actually under the full control of the master (funny enough, the technology closest to "total and absolute control" I can think of - JTAG - calls that the "target", not the "slave"... :-) ). That particular set of terms has been so thoroughly abused and overused so as to lose all nuanced meaning, and we'd do much better to drop it just out of sheer uselessness and switch to more accurate, varied terms that properly fit the context (like primary/secondary, primary/replica, initiator/responder, host/device, leader/follower, etc.).

This isn't out of wokeness; quoting the previous version of the I²C specification:

"Some devices are masters – they generate bus clock and initiate communication on the bus, other devices are slaves and respond to the commands on the bus."

... if you're going to have to define what your terms mean in other terms because your original terms are unclear, why not just use the other terms directly? Initiator/responder would've been perfectly appropriate here (that terminology is used by IPSec, FWIW). Initiator/target would've also worked (iSCSI calls them that).

Interestingly, just a couple months ago the spec was updated to replace the terms with "controller/target" instead, which is actually worse; "controller" is already a widely used term to mean the hardware that implements I²C inside any given chip, and which can work in either "controller" or "target" mode, which is very confusing.

So yeah, I'm all for replacing master/slave since it's terribly ambiguous, just please pick something that doesn't make things worse.

As for git master vs main, that has less of a technical argument to it... but it doesn't hurt anyone, it's easy to change the default branch name, "main" is just as descriptive as "master", and "main" is shorter anyway, so "main" it is. There's absolutely no reason to die on that hill even if you reject the (tenuous) argument of a master -> master/slave -> slavery association (in my mind "master" here is in the sense of "master record" or "master bus" and there is no "slave" counterpart, so I never had a problem with this one, but I still find "main" perfectly fine and it saves typing).

This thing about ant colonies... yeah, that's pretty different and clearly utterly illogical.

[SV_BubbleTime]

You are making the mistake that anyone you are arguing against wants you to make.

It’s not about this or that word. It’s about controlling language and letting you discuss it seriously is still them winning.

If it “doesn’t work”, they’ll find a new word that is racist or sexist or whatever, and they’ll want you to discuss that one too.

The only way to win (for everyone) is to not play the game. Mock, belittle, double down before you take it seriously.

[mongol]

Master in git I assumed is the same as tape master, master copy etc. I never heard about slave in git context. Which makes it even more absurd.

[akvadrako]

Master in git comes from BitKeeper, where it was used in master/slave context.

[marcan_42]

That connection has been contested, but even if that is the case, nobody using git would think of that, since slaves aren't a thing in git itself.

[dang]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778461.

[kevin_thibedeau]

No way to blame the patriarchy on that one though. Maybe worker exploitation is a possible angle.