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I feel the same way, and it’s depressing that people have to risk their reputation over this. If this was about people waving confederate flags or holding Nazi
by waon 6y ago
I feel the same way, and it’s depressing that people have to risk their reputation over this. If this was about people waving confederate flags or holding Nazi banners, we should do our best to keep those people out because these are symbols of ill intent used to send a clear message of hate towards minorities. But I have never seen people use the noun “master” as a symbol to spread hate. Moreover, I don’t think many people have even thought of slavery when referring to “master” in CS context before it was brought up in this manner.
But all this aside, this would’ve been a no-brainer if renaming the default branch didn’t have other real-world consequences. If it has a possible chance of making people happy, we should by all means do so. However, the proposed change is inevitably going to break many scripts out there that manipulate git repositories and forces additional work for countless people all over the industry. At this point, I think it’s reasonable to rethink whether this is actually going to improve the lives of anyone at all before proceeding.
- azinman2 6y ago"Moreover, I don’t think many people have even thought of slavery when referring to “master” in CS context before it was brought up in this manner." That's probably true, and it's probably people who didn't have grandparents that were slaves. It's closer in mind to some more than others. And if we want to have CS be more open to the black community, then being sensitive to how words can turn people off is important.
- waon 6y agoBanning the use of a common noun is distractive and inflammatory while doing nothing at all to address the real issues. What are we going to do when the whole software industry is done wasting countless man-hours of work renaming git branches? Ban the use of the word "order" because that too might remind someone of slavery? This is just an endless rabbit hole that leads us nowhere. Why not we just address racial inequality directly?
- pezo1919 6y agoLol.