[ajyotirmay]

I still wonder, how blacklist/whitelist or master/slave has helped or promoted slavery and racism.

And how many devs who are from black communities offended by the use of these terms, at least before it was made to be an issue in mainstream.

Because right now I feel like this is a "woke feminist" issue.

And I'm not a white person. I've never thought otherwise of these words, but maybe that can be because of the mixed society I grew up in.

[creakingstairs]

The biggest annoyance for me is that the word/woke policing throws out the most important thing: context.

We don’t punish people for crimes until we’ve had a look at the context and establish their specific intention (Strict liability withstanding) so why are we not doing the same with words and sentences?

Master/slave debacle is a prime example. Yes it can be used offensively. But for gods sake, look at the context! Annoys me that with all the injustice still prevalent in the world, they choose to fight this instead.

/rant

[chc]

That seems like an odd example. The "specific intention" of the word "slave" in computing is unquestionably to draw an analogy to slavery, so if somebody objects to the word on the grounds that it references an actual atrocity, they're factually correct.

I think what you're trying to say is that people don't mean to be offensive when they reference slavery this way. And you're right about that. Similarly, if I ask someone how their mom is right after she died, I'm probably not trying to be hurtful. But not intending an outcome doesn't actually prevent you from getting that outcome. If somebody tells you their mom is dead, and you didn't mean to be hurtful, you won't keep asking after her, because now you're aware of the effect it has.

[cuteboy19]

Why is an analogy to slavery a bad thing? Such that even references to the concept need to banned

The Partition of India was a horrific tragedy and killed 2 million people. Does this mean we should do away with partition_sort ?

[tsol]

I mean it isn't killing people, but it is admittedly strange. How about if instead you use Dominatrix and Sub? Or Officer and Prisoner?

Would those not be inappropriate because it's just borrowing terminology?

There are only a few of these progressive changes I find really valid, but this is one I can understand. It's not that it's killing people, it's just if we can change it then why not. It is kind of weird to use, given the history of slavery in the majority of the world. Can't we just not have references to slavery in the BIOS of my computer?

[eclat]

It’s such a non issue but these are the same people that wanted to change the name of Rubocop because it makes reference to policing. Or motherboard, whiteboard or blackboard because they’re patriarchical white supremacist heteronormative neo colonial etc etc pomo fashionable nonsense. There’s really not an iota wrong with making reference to these terms. It’s really an insult to everyone’s intelligence.

[notahacker]

Partition_sort isn't an analogy to the Partition of India (which isn't the traditionally understood meaning of the word 'partition').

In terms of analogies, we're much closer to if we'd decided to call a "delete all" function the "genocide" function. If computer programmers had widely used that terminology for the last three decades it might sound a bit less weird to us and the cohort of people shouting "that's such an inappropriate analogy" might be just a small group of liberals, but I'm not sure their argument about it being a poor word choice would be entirely baseless.

[throwaway290]

On this note, fun fact: 'slave' used to be the same word as 'Slav', as in literally a person of Slavic origin. The new meaning was acquired subsequently because Slavs were often enslaved in those times. So if etymologically traced further back the word itselft is pretty benign.

However, since Slav and slave evolved into distinct words and slavery is a larger phenomenon than the Partition, I'd say your point stands.

[cuteboy19]

>Partition_sort isn't an analogy to the Partition of India

And "slave" isn't an analogy to transatlantic slavery.

And anyways, who decides which words are associated with bannable tragedies?

[notahacker]

Master/slave replication is unambiguously an analogy to the practice of slavery in general (not one accurate enough to be useful, I agree). 'Partition' is a generic term for the subdivision of something, with the subdivision of India not even being a particularly prominent example.

Who decides if particular words are potentially inappropriate? People decide, including people working for corporations that make linting tools or industry bodies like the MPAA. Ironically the latter is an actual monopoly that literally does attempt to prevent people from watching films based on its word lists rather than simply suggesting alternative words, but the longstanding practice of people being fussy about certain words is apparently only terrifying or Orwellian when the potentially offended party is minorities.

[eclat]

Abort

[alpaca128]

Exactly, that's the big problem with so many of these ideas - they ignore common sense, making them look like tone-deaf measures created in bad faith. Which they probably are.

[Sirenos]

I feel you. This is my biggest critique of the so-called "woke" language. Perhaps their intentions are good, but I fail to see how hiding behind inclusive language does anything to change the reality of the lives of people they claim to be helping in the first place.

Calling a "landlord" a proprietor (example from the article) does nothing to change the actual dynamic between landlord and tenant. You have only changed the symbols you use without affecting any meaningful change in the world. Maybe a devil's advocate would say, "Symbols evoke feelings evoke action and thus we are affecting people's actions". That's the strongest counter-argument I can think of, and it's not very convincing either. Not sure how a landlord would suddenly change how they act because they are now proprietors.

[DavidSharff]

Yep, I had struggled down these lines too but the always lucid John McWhorter cleared things up for me, and as a linguist it's right up his alley.

"On metaphor, master is a useful example. The basic concept of the master as a leader or person of authority has extended into a great many metaphorical usages. One of them was its use as a title on plantations worked by slaves...That makes sensible the elimination of certain other uses of the word, which parallel and summon the slavery one...in the 1970s, such schools had just begun a call to stop having male teachers called "master" and female teachers called "teacher," in favor of having all instructors called simply "teacher"...This meant that young subordinates had been calling white men in positions of authority "master," after all—including, by the 1970s, more than a few black students. And today's call to stop referring to technology parts as "master" versus "slave" attachments follows in the same vein, as it directly channels what was so offensive about the slavery usage...However, other extensions of the word master do not meaningfully resemble the plantation one, and only a kind of obsession could explain spraying for them now. Are we to consider it racist to refer simply to mastering a skill? To master tape as opposed to dupes...The plantation meaning of master was one tributary of a delta of extensions of the word; it should go, but we need not fill in the entire delta."

And for emphasis I'm pulling this one out of the main block:

** "To be human is to make distinctions." **

https://reason.com/2020/08/12/is-your-master-bedroom-racist/

[raxxorraxor]

Probably severe nepotism with industry consulting or someone has some idealistic child in colleague and their guilt about neglected parenting made them force the issue as it has been adopted in some parts of the industry. At least official, never seen anyone use different terms by now and I don't even know the substitute. It is always something like this. But yeah, they certainly are white as the snow, so much is sure.