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Irrespective of origin, the terms seem to equate black to bad and white to good, and as such should probably be retired. As other comments have mentioned, allow
by jgwil2 6y ago
Irrespective of origin, the terms seem to equate black to bad and white to good, and as such should probably be retired. As other comments have mentioned, allow and deny are more explicit and thus probably better terms anyway.
- polotics 6y agoA recommended read/watch where white is definitely bad: "a dry white season" by André Brink. Oscar for Marlon Brando in the movie version.
- atonse 6y agoI agree with you – allow/deny is easier to understand anyway for global non-native speaker (which all open source projects are). There are many practical reasons to do this, I just wasn't clear on the race-related reasoning for blacklist/whitelist, as these words don't have those etymologies. The color black is associated with many non-racial things that we do deem negative, things like death with black clothes at funerals, things like the darkness being the absence of light (sunlight is brighter/whiter), being blinded, where we do mostly see black. None of those things are racial, what should we do about all those? Perhaps a better change is to stop associating our skin color with those words which are clearly inaccurate, and serve absolutely no useful purpose.
- jgwil2 6y agoI agree that'd be great, but between changing the world's use of black and white and changing our use of blacklist and whitelist as pertains to software, one is in our power and the other isn't. Who knows, maybe someone will even feel more welcomed in our profession as a result.
- atonse 6y agoWhy would one feel unwelcome? We just established the word has nothing to do with race.
- RhysU 6y agoWhat if we're whitelisting or blacklisting people for the privilege to attend an organized crime conference? Which is good? Which is bad? Note that in this unsavory example there is zero ambiguity! The whitelisted will hang with other mobsters, clearly, plotting evil and mayhem all the while. The terms have bupkis to do with good and bad.
- jgwil2 6y agoOkay, I guess if you're writing malware then you can feel free to carry on with whatever terminology you like. For the rest of us it is understood that a blacklist is untrusted and a whitelist is trusted, so why don't we just say that explicitly and do away with a culturally dependent metaphor that could offend or confuse?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- RhysU 6y ago"Trust" is overloaded in a CS context thus adding to, not reducing, cognitive load. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_system Where does this whitewashing (err, denywashing) stop?
- atonse 6y agoNo a blacklist and whitelist has nothing to do with trust. Blacklist simply means “allow by default except for things in this list” whereas whitelist means “deny everything except for what’s in this list”