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by sfink
1416 days ago
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Purely from a clarity standpoint, I'm in favor of killing off whitelist/blacklist. They just introduce an extra step in figuring out what something is—whitelist usually means stuff to allow, blacklist is stuff to deny, but I at least have to dig that up from memory since white/black don't mean that at all. Exclude, allow, deny, ignore, block, etc. are all more obvious, and in many cases more descriptive. In most cases, simply replacing "blacklist" with "blocklist" helps. Though I have more trouble with "whitelist", since it doesn't directly suggest anything to me; I have to contrast it with a blacklist, and then remember what blacklist means (for authors or actors or whatever), and then map it back to what's actually going on. (For whatever reason, I have less trouble with using "whitelist/whitelisted" as a verb.) Please please use a term that describes what you're actually doing with the list. Don't get me started on "false positive/false negative"... |
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Isn't that true for most words/phrases? No words inherently mean anything. We assign meaning to them. I suppose that if enough people settle on a replacement for 'whitelist' and 'blacklist' those words will be limited to history, but right now it will mean being forced to remember multiple phrases for the same thing since others will certainly still use the current terms.
In the context of your own use/code it doesn't matter much, but every mail provider (just one example) will be dealing with blacklists that describe themselves as such and incoming requests from people looking to be whitelisted which means they'll still have to take whatever steps are needed to recall what those words mean, and must still be trained on the meaning of those words, all while still having to remember not to use those words in their own writing/code/documentation and having to remember what new words they should replace them with/translate them as.
Maybe there is too much jargon in tech in general, and I certainty don't object to efforts to reduce it, but I don't see it as saving anybody much time/effort in the near term.