[sleiben]

The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho.

Even 15 years ago, when I started my professional journey (in Germany) there were a lot of people who were gay, trans and so on in the dev community … and nobody cared about it. We were all passioned about technologies and respected each other based on commitment/engagement/skill level. At the end most of the true full blood developers were always «special» and knew since their childhood that they were different from other children. I think that’s the reason why the embarrassment level was pretty low and people just wore the stuff they wanted, behaved like they wanted eg.

But of course that’s only my personal experience. I’m sure there are a lot of other stories out there to share.

[kentrado]

As a black person, the switch from master to main, is the most condescendingly racist thing that has been widely adopted in tech. It says "black people are too stupid to understand context. We (small group of white people) must protect them against words."

Another thing it does, is that it promotes the identification of blacks as slaves when all races have been enslaved (and continue to this day).

[jalapenos]

Based on how uppity about it around the time the whites I talked to about it were, yes it was 100% this.

The high horse riding was surreal. They all took long savouring draws of their own farts after each 'master' branch they renamed to 'main'.

When I mentioned that none of the people they did this in the name of were helped, they met it with abject hostility. Narcissism is a hell of a condition.

[sleiben]

100% with you here! Great arguments

edit: It also reminds me of men playing feminist and stepping (aggressively) up to protect women’s rights. I heard from my female colleagues that they hate this since it implies that women are like children and aren’t able or mature enough to speak up for themselves. So the «strong men» need now to protect them…

[SSLy]

I don't live in USA, but this very week one of such staunch feminists was ousted as a groomer and violent partner. https://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/gargamel-jakub-chuptys...

[gadders]

Many such cases.

[PartiallyTyped]

The “white saviour” complex is well documented. Well-meaning but racist in their ignorance white people try to save people based on racist stereotypes and caricatures of imagined problems.

[philistine]

Hey, maybe the white dude feels icky about the master/slave thing. Maybe it's not about the opinions of black people but words we want in common usage in our societies.

[TheHappyOddish]

Is the intent to completely remove the terms? That's a new angle I hadn't heard. I guess it makes said guilty feeling persons life easier, as they can't hear about the currently happening slavery in the world and can continue on their merry way.

[philistine]

The point is to correlate the word slavery with the concept of human slavery only. Disallowing a word to be used outside that usage is better for everyone.

[about3fitty]

I would like to ask: do you have a position on the following?

- an allowlist/blocklist to replace whitelist/blacklist

-primary/replica to replace master/slave

Also, how old are you? I’m not young but not old and I don’t associate racial overtones to the latter terms

[tapland]

Is replica used that way? That can't be

[worik]

I've started using "mistress"

Meh

[woodpanel]

> and nobody cared about it

you see, this is the gift of American progressive cultural imperialism.

Suddenly, the only historiography that can exist in the world is that of American trustafarians who try to minimize their shame of being born wealthy heirs of the slave-owner class by spreading the shame on white immigrants that arrived way after slavery got disbanded.

And once you set the precedence that you can at will shame innocent people - the majority of white Americans - into obedience even though it’s technically impossible that their ancestors had anything to do with slavery… well then why stop at Americans at all?

Now its every European country and culture that has to subvert itself to the viewpoint of Ivy league grads.

Brownfacing, Blackfacing, minstrelshows, Kuklux you name it - it doesn’t matter what Poles could possibly have to do with it, or Germans or Swedes - you are all guilty by being born white.

God bless America.

[dang]

Please don't add nationalistic flamewar hell on top of ideological flamewar hell. It's highly destructive of what this site is supposed to be for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[developer93]

I'd say at least some Europeans have their own guilt to deal with, if we're saying the sins of the parents should be visited on the children... Not like the US has a monopoly on terrible history

[woodpanel]

> if we're saying the sins of the parents should be visited on the children

I’d say this is the binary option we routinely fail to make the right choice.

> renaming master branches/HDDs to main because of rAciSm

Sticking to OP‘s topic its just ridiculous to have such a discussion in Europe because we are supposedly to feel guilty about what other people did to African Americans.

Lest for the majority of US slaves well into the 1700s were European catholics, or that much of European borders and coasts were routinely raided in the hunt for white slaves (Cornwall, Ireland, Russia…)

[developer93]

As a Brit at least, the empire was doing very well out of the slave trade at some point even if there were no slaves in UK (which iirc there were some depending how the law on bringing bringing in slaves stood at the point), so I don't think we can disclaim responsibility like that. Whether we should feel personally guilty for something that happened before anyone now living was born is a different issue, but I think we should acknowledge it happened

[_a_a_a_]

As a brit I didn't know cornwall + ireland were raided for slaves into the 1700s (earlier, with viking Circa 1000 yes, but not after). Could you provide some solid links please? TIA

[aragilar]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade

[woodpanel]

This. Thanks.

Also for the other regions that were routinely raided in the hunt for white slaves:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empir...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean%E2%80%93Nogai_slave_...

[askvictor]

I work with SPI devices a bit, and _some_ places have shifted from MISO/MOSI (Master in Slave out etc) to CIPO/COPI. Or PICO/POCI (Pico? Like the really cheap and popular RPi device?). MISO/MOSI is at least consistent, unambiguous, and is _literally a master/slave situation_. Unless the end game is to remove the words master and slave from the dictionary in case someone gets offended, this is stupid.

[blueflow]

Thats also my observation.

Whats new is that people now base their identity around it and expect some kind of validation to happen. Do a mental scenario where people did that not with gender identity, but with their heritage or national identity.

[sschueller]

I can understand the master/slave thing as it does directly come from "slavery" so although I think it's stupid to change git I can see it being an issue. Not being from the US I never realized why the large bedroom in a house was called the master bedroom.

Changing blacklist and whitelist to allowlist and denylist is however stupid.

[dmarcos]

Notice that “master” in the context of git has nothing to do with slavery. Master means the “reference” like “master” copy for CDs / Records that duplicates are made from.

Etymologicaly master comes from magister that also means expert / teacher. This is more apparent in some Latin languages like Spanish (I’m Spanish) where we have words like Maestro meaning teacher.

In Spanish Master copy translates to “Copia Maestra”. Nothing to do with slavery.

Most progressives in the US don’t know anything about this and / or conveniently ignore it.

[rewmie]

> The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho.

If I recall correctly, the point of reflecting upon the usage of specific terms was not that every single person thought it was B.S. but that a minority might feel negatively impacted by them, and it took no trouble at all to accommodate them by switching to less charged terms.

Basically it's the same argument behind not swearing at the workspace.

Were you negatively impacted by replacing references to "master/slave" or "blacklist" with terms like "primary/secondary" or "allowlist"? I hear a lot of people whining about these but I'm yet to hear any coherent argument against it.

It's also telling that this dead horse is being flogged in a discussion on the US Federal Government looking into recurring accusations of racial bigotry.

[thunky]

But that's not even what "master" means in git. There is no "slave" branch.

[rewmie]

> But that's not even what "master" means in git. There is no "slave" branch.

I think you're trying to cherry-picking debatable examples as strawmen. The central argument was not that some inclusive terms may or may not extend to all applications. The central argument being made in this thread by anti-inclusiveness proponents is that each and every single proposal to use terms that are not racist or bigoted should be rejected, regardless of their suitability.

In addition, I don't see anyone even try to argue that "master" branch is suited of even makes sense, while alternative terms such as "mainline", "development", "production", or even "release" are extensively used.

[thunky]

I'm not cherry picking, your comment is a direct reply to:

> The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho.

[rewmie]

> I'm not cherry picking (...)

Sorry, but it's obvious that you are. This discussion is not about Git but about Tesla's history of harassment, racism, and overall bigotry, and the thread you're commenting on is clearly about the usage of inclusive language instead of legacy non-inclusive terms. I feel you're playing dumb and disingenuous to pretend it's suddenly about Git, which is really not cool or contributing positively to the discussion.

[TheHappyOddish]

> Sorry, but it's obvious that you are. This discussion is not about Git but about Tesla...

HN reguarly deviates off into tangentially related comment threads. _This_ discussion is about git master/main, although the parent one isn't.

> legacy non-inclusive terms

Love a good game of "spot the American". Thankfully, you're not authoritive on the english language and don't get to pick what is "legacy".

[roenxi]

But it is also a technical improvement. main is easier to type.

It takes a lot of effort to overcome the inertia of a default, so even if the reasoning is a bit suspect the outcome is going to be a win eventually.

[olalonde]

Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia.

Consider the QWERTY keyboard, which is far from the most efficient design. JavaScript is notorious for its quirks. Unix commands often lack intuitiveness, suffering from poor naming conventions. Linux is coded in a language that has memory safety issues. Even the English language itself, is riddled with inconsistencies and arbitrary exceptions. The list goes on.

To surmount the inertia for any of the mentioned examples, the replacement solution has better be significantly superior. A marginal improvement simply won't suffice, given the large costs of change.

To many people, the switch from "master" to "main" had benefits that were, at best, debatable, while introducing substantial costs such as fragmentation, outdated tutorials and scripts, and confusion for beginners, among others. That's what got people worked up.

[rewmie]

> Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia.

What colossal cost do you see in granting users the choice of, say, picking their default branch name instead of being forced to use "master"?

What cost do you see in referring to "blacklists" as "allowlist" instead?

Have you ever noticed that critical projects like Kubernetes managed to adopt clear and unambiguous concepts such as "control plane node" and "worker node" without making dubious remarks regarding "inertia"?

Any argument regarding "inertia" frankly sounds like a lame excuse to stick with bigoted and racially-charged terms without any valid reason other than a refusal to extend the most basic of common courtesies.

[olalonde]

The costs were moderate, not colossal. But they were still bigger than the benefits, which were tiny to non-existant. Because 99.99% of people do not actually see a "master branch" as a racially-charged or bigoted term.

In the case of Kubernetes, I suppose those terms were chosen from the beginning so there was no cost of switching. And hence why no one complained about it.

Which incidentally supports my claim: that people were upset about the cost of changing rather than because of their secret admiration for slavery.

[rewmie]

> The costs were moderate, not colossal.

Care to point out any concrete example? Just pick the absolute best example you can imagine. So far none was provided. There's all this talk about "cost" but apparently it's so costly that even providing a concrete example is prohibitively expensive.

> In the case of Kubernetes, I suppose those terms were chosen from the beginning so there was no cost of switching. And hence why no one complained about it.

What's there to complain? Absolutely nothing at all.

[olalonde]

But I did provide some examples in my original comment: "fragmentation, outdated tutorials and scripts, and confusion for beginners".

> What's there to complain? Absolutely nothing at all.

Well yes, that's my point. We agree on that. In the case of git, I am sure if "main" had always been the convention there would have been nothing to complain about as well. In fact, I am sure the same people who complained about the change from "master" to "main" would have complained about a change from "main" to "master".

[iakov]

This is such a silly argument. Let’s call it “m” then - it’s even easier to type, so should be an even bigger win, right? Thousands of scripts and workflows be damned.

[roenxi]

Less silly than you might think. An important part of life is letting people you don't like make the world better. The people behind this change are the up-in-others-business personalities. They're always going to be destructive, but we should appreciate when they do a little good nevertheless.

[TheHappyOddish]

> make the world better

I really try hard not to mock people on HN, but you need to take a look in the mirror. Your sheltered world view of what "makes the world better" isn't reflective of everyone elses, nor objectively true. I'm glad you think it's good, but you must understand that those who don't agree aren't generally 'bigoted racists' or even people who "don't like" those making the changes.

[roenxi]

Literally everyone who renamed their master branch to main thought it was good, that is why they did it. There isn't some international police force conspiring to strong-arm unwilling coders into renaming their default git branch.

[krona]

Except its a very common adjective, so any time you refer to it you have to say 'main branch' otherwise you've introduced unnecessary ambiguity. Whereas 'master' refers to one thing and one thing only in most contexts (unless you're selling bedrooms).

[thefounder]

>> Whereas 'master' refers to one thing and one thing only in most contexts.

What contexts? Should we also ban "master" key because it implies it enslaves the other keys?

[SSLy]

I think krona is not arguing against using `master` as default branch name.

[tjpnz]

Replacing one well known default with another non-retroactively increases cognitive load. At that point it being easier to type is meaningless.

[rewmie]

> Replacing one well known default with another non-retroactively increases cognitive load.

It's quite clear that managing cognitive loads is the least of all concerns considered by proponents of sticking with non-inclusive terms.

For example, the terms "blacklist"/"whitelist" do not impose a lower cognitive load than "denylist"/"allowlist", but somehow this argument is used in favour of sticking with the legacy/non-descriptive terms.

Also, there is no objective meaning to "slave". In the times of old, people talked about "slave drives" and I bet that most of the proponents of sticking with racist/bigoted language cannot even describe what it's supposed to be.

[Zetobal]

Coming from an electronics background I hate it.

[PartiallyTyped]

It’s the enshittification of everything and the pervasiveness of “pop culture”.

Every HR person needs to touch something to feel useful and “changing something”.

[thelastparadise]

Well good riddance them in this great tech recession.

[gumballindie]

Yeah I dont think germany is a good example of mutual respect. Far from it actually. Racism and discrimination are rampant in that country, including in tech. Any german moralising americans on racism should first look at their own 10x issues.

[blueflow]

Germany is not the one with the "black person shot by police" protests setting stuff ablaze.

[gumballindie]

Because it’s not in the german media. Censorship ensures the image is clean but in reality germany is at an extreme that makes the us shine. Perhaps not shootings but other types of discrimination.

[thefounder]

>> Perhaps not shootings but other types of discrimination.

Like what?