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GitHub plans to replace racially insensitive terms like ‘master’ and ‘whitelist’
- Bostonian 6y agoThe dictionary says that a definition of master when used as an adjective is "main; principal." 'the apartment's master bathroom has a free-standing oval bathtub'" This has nothing to do with slavery.
- sabertoothed 6y agoA dictionary first and foremost tells you the use/meaning today. You need to look into the etymology to understand if it has something to do with slavery.
- edjrage 6y agoWhat's the point, though? I doubt you have a deep knowledge of the etymology of every single word you use, even for the ones you use all the time. I bet you would feel forced to use a very different and extremely narrow set of words if you did. You might even have chosen another username if you were "sensitive" to how "saber" alludes to an instrument of historical oppression and suffering. And yet not many people do or seem to care. Why? You might say it's because our culture is still not enlightened, but it really is just because it doesn't matter what the usage used to be as long as it's used with a different, more-or-less harmless meaning today. Not only that, but what about words that have had countless interpretations since forever (black/white)? Why pick the one that happens to be racist? And I may be making a wild conjecture here, but it's not like talking about a "master branch" will make you more likely to become pro-slavery. I mean, what would "master branch" even mean out of the context of version control? Words are just labels to meaning. It makes no sense to care about the label. People have declared love with N-words and advocated for genocide with flowery language. Banishing words is a prime example of bikeshedding.
- stOneskull 6y ago> I mean, what would "master branch" even mean out of the context of version control? stop being mean. you shouldn't impose your control. whip me for telling you not to. and scold them for whipping me. decentralize the git commit hierarchy! no order!
- wayneftw 6y agoSo I guess describing people as a flower or snowflake in a derogatory manner means that we will have to remove these words soon?
- iso1210 6y agoThe bedroom where the Master slept Master of course not being specific to slavery - it was in wide use before. Mastering a subject means to be better than those who aren't masters. The term comes from Latin magister, which means things like 'head' or 'teacher'. It evolved to maestro in Italian, and predated the atlantic slave trade by over a millenia.
- superasn 6y agoCS is filled with such terms like zombies, orphans, reaping dead children, etc but nobody finds them offensive as we know it has nothing to do with their literal meaning.
- sabertoothed 6y agoWe should avoid offensive language if there is a simple alternative without any loss in clarity / semantics. EDIT: Misread and deleted parts.
- viraptor 6y agoReaping, not raping.
- tehwebguy 6y agoSeems easy enough to imagine who would be offended by the use of terms “orphans” and “dead children,” and why they would prefer not to bring it up constantly.
- luckylion 6y agoThe issue is that you can have that with nearly every term that has some meaning. Leader/follower? But I've once met a terrible Leader and they had many followers that made my life hell. If the argument is "but that's only true for very few people": what percentage of the population (or the subset of the population that is programming) does need to be affected before it needs to be changed? Orphans aren't that common either, neither is losing a child.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- s9w 6y agoThey would find it offensive - just look at the santa hat debacle of vscode. But they don't know the terms you listed. It's not like these people know anything about or even have an interest in software dev. They're a purely destructive force, hopping from victim to victim and spreading wherever they find weakness.
- ricangius 6y agoTo all commenters: As you wouldn't want anyone to produce software before studying software engineering and the application domain beforehand, please refrain from stating personal views, unsubstantiated by language and policy research, as valid professional recommendations.
- rvz 6y agoI'm still waiting for the same spineless sunflowers who suggested this change to GitHub and git-scm to have the guts to tell Mr. Torvalds to replace these "offensive" terms in the Linux Kernel. Have fun with coming up with a logical reason, rather than being the tiny percentage of 'being offended' on behalf of others.
- sagichmal 6y agoHi, I support this change and I don't consider myself a spineless sunflower, nor am I offended on behalf of anyone else.
- StavrosK 6y agoWhat is it that offends you about the terms, and why? Honest question, as I've never spoken to anyone who wasn't offended by proxy.
- sagichmal 6y ago> What is it that offends you about the terms, and why? Sorry for being unclear. I'm not offended, either. But (see my reply to sibling comment) I find the arguments that the term can be seen as offensive, and that it perpetuates a (small! subtle! but real!) form of systemic racism, essentially plausible, and I'm sympathetic to them.
- tehwebguy 6y agoExactly! People said this terminology hurts to hear and use, explained why. It doesn’t hurt me to use more appropriate terms so it feels like an easy choice. I’m not surprised GitHub came to the same conclusion.
- wayneftw 6y agoI haven’t seen one explanation that makes any sense. Care to link to one in any of these threads here, on Twitter or reddit that made sense to you?
- pydry 6y agoThis appears to be a deliberate distraction from Nat Friedman's decision to continue the contract with ICE. https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20906213/github-ice-microsoft-software-email-contract-immigration-nonprofit-donation https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20906213/github-ice-micro... Unlike that, this change doesn't cost anything.
- kissgyorgy 6y agoI can understand removing master/slave, but by the logic of blacklist/whitelist, the color names "black" and "white" should also be removed.
- forgingahead 6y agoMass hysteria - everyone needs to take a 7 day holiday from the news media and the internet.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoSoftware Justice Warriors More seriously, I’m not convinced any of this is going to help. Perhaps we can have sanity prejudice through.
- xellisx 6y agoDoes it hurt anything, besides the feelings of people hell ben on using names for things that really don't reflect core concepts of how things work or what they are used for?
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoI think I side with Slavoj Žižek here. When I become dictator and send you to Gulag you can have two servings per day of rotten fish-head soup, because I like you!. And I promise not to call you names. -------------- It's a massive distraction. GitHub, and / or whatever other organisation, deplatforming words will have approximately zero effect. I'm willing to conjecture that while we are busy patting ourselves on the back for reducing the use of word combinations like master / slave another death in custody will occur. And in that way it's a distraction while the harm continues. It's a distraction while the powerful continue to not immediately retrain the police en masse to not deal with everything by a progression of escalating violence.
- langitbiru 6y agoGit does not have the "slave" term, only "master" term. But the "master" term is being removed because it is derived from master-slave connotation from Bitkeeper allegedly. https://discourse.gnome.org/t/renaming-master-branch-to-mainline/841/15 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/renaming-master-branch-to-main... Master-slaves have been replaced in many projects, such as Drupal (primary/replicas), Django (leader/followers), OpenSSH (parent/children). I wonder what would happen to robot term? Robot comes from Czech language, which is robota. It means forced labour. https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/14/origin-of-slave/ https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/14/origin-of-slave/
- kingkongjaffa 6y agoThis is the one I don't understand. Changing blacklist/whitelist is fine, we can make this better. Changing master in instances where no pairing exists with the word slave doesn't make any sense to me.
- xellisx 6y agoThe word doesn't make any sense in the context of something that is constantly changing. And Gitnis graph based and the is no real concept of a trunk, like in SVN. So we start calling the dog a dog, instead of a rock.
- merricksb 6y agoDiscussed many times in the past week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23531032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23531032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23527093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23527093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23517843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23517843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583005
- rdgthree 6y agoThis strikes me as a bit silly, because "master"/"slave" are simply words that describe a relationship. One that unfortunately still exists in many parts of the world. We're certainly not going to stop using them to describe the original thing. These aren't derogatory terms, they're just terms. Terms that describe bad things, but terms. Surely people can see the difference between this and something like the "Washington Redskins" name, which is (arguably, but imo) an actual derogatory term. I don't really have any concerns about whitelist/blacklist (I'm aware of the history) because alternatives are more explicit. Allowlist/Denylist seem strange to hear at first, but they're intuitive, so I'm fine with it. With master/slave, in Djangos case[0], they replaced it with "leader" and "follower", which obviously have different meanings. Master and slave have a very explicit connotation, which is that one controls the other, and the other has to do everything the other says. Leader/follower does not fit the bill to describe that relationship. We're explicitly and objectively losing precision because we've decided that non-derogatory non-outdated accurate terms in the English language make some people uncomfortable. And again, to really drive this point home, these are just words. They are not derogatory terms. They're used in accordance with their dictionary definition. This is like saying we should stop using "kill" to describe the termination of a program because people have been killed and that makes some people sad when they think about it. [0]https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692 https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692
- sebazzz 6y agoI always learned that in language context matters. In the current context master has nothing to do with slavery. Perhaps once when bitkeeper had master/slave you could see it different. Apparently these people focus only on the word without any consideration. That said, I do understand it in the master/slave context.
- drorh 6y agoDo you also understand it in the owner/slave context? Want to get rid of 'owner'? What other words are you willing do expunge? Will you be able to say anything at the end?
- Toine 6y ago"If I don't see it it doesn't exist"
- greatgib 6y agoThis movement is so stupid. It's like the novlang in 1984. Master meaning is very large: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master Yes, some times it was used in the master/salve context but it is far from its most common meanings. It's not even its meaning in the case of a git branch. With all of that, I think that the world is on the straight line of the future described in the Idiocracy movie!
- thinkingemote 6y agoIt allows developers working for multi national corporations who exploit people around the globe to feel better and safer and purify their workplace of certain negative things, toxic people and retrograde attitudes. If it means that a developer has to change their language to something better to be able to continue to extract wealth from the poor, so be it. These kind of actions in a non profit or activist space would go unnoticed Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoI like how @antirez put a case against such renames in writing http://antirez.com/news/122 http://antirez.com/news/122 OTOH, what i am worried about is a change for the sake of the change. It gives opportunities to dishonest people with hidden agendas.
- zahreeley 6y agoIt’s time to redefine races. Do not change anything else. No humans are of basic white/black colors.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sidazhou 6y agomaster->slave can be replaced with: employer->employee... omg what have I done with my life (O_o)