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Merge tag 'inclusive-terminology' into Linux kernel
- slezyr 6y agoprimary/secondary is even an alternative to master/slave? To me it means that they're on the same level and can do the same thing, while master means that it operates over slave devices.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agomaybe controlling/controlled
- DonHopkins 6y agoOr top/bottom. But that gets more nuanced, because you also have "power bottoms" and "service tops". https://www.reddit.com/r/gaybros/comments/68rrmi/whats_the_inverse_of_a_power_bottom/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaybros/comments/68rrmi/whats_the_i...
- isoprophlex 6y agoThere's also leader/follower if you are looking to replace master/slave.
- slezyr 6y agoNot really, to me "leader" sounds like it do some of the same work as "follower", which often is not.
- akvadrako 6y agoThere is often no following involved. It's often about one process being in charge and other's doing what they are told. I suppose manager and worker would make sense.
- DonHopkins 6y agoTeacher / Student is better for database replication, since a "School" of databases can have multiple teachers and students, and it refers to the flow of information.
- microcolonel 6y agoHow dare you prefer plain language! Somebody somewhere thinks USB devices are people so it's time to shut up and listen. It's so sad to see the most dishonest, bad-faith arguments and ideas take over society. Hopefully the people enabling this will be held to account, in due time.
- karpour 6y agoYou do realize that for USB it is called host/client? I saw a huge reddit thread with people whining about some social media platform changing their internal coding conventions. People who will never even see or notice those changes. There are a lot of things to be upset about, but this is not one of them. If you disagree with the kernel naming guidelines you are free to create your own fork. Good luck.
- randompwd 6y ago> If you disagree with the kernel naming guidelines you are free to create your own fork. Good luck. You do realise that cuts both ways. Why did some people raise this issue in the first place - according to your logic, they should have just forked it. Silly arguments like this don't contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way.
- karpour 6y agoOf course I realize that, if you think I didn't you're missing my point. The naming conventions changed, and the kernel will run just as well either way. I personally don't care what a blacklist/blocklist is called, as long as things are clear and consistent. In some cases we will likely end up with even clearer terms. What disappoints me more is how much of an outcry there is over a simple naming convention change. Can you explain to me why you seem to have such a strong opinion on this issue?
- DonHopkins 6y agoForks don't cut both ways, knives do! How about renaming forks to sporks, to be more inclusive of spoons?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dx87 6y agoI think that if people really want to change the terminology, master/minion would be a good alternative.
- slezyr 6y agoActually, I almost like it. I would gladly use overlord/minion as a replacement.
- fabian2k 6y agoprimary/replica is the terminology I've seen for the database case, which does describe the situation better than master/slave in my opinion. Master/Slave is kind of overloaded terminology, and the replacements in other areas will certainly be different.
- nemetroid 6y agoATA master/slave is an example where both devices have the same capabilities.
- benaadams 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#Master_and_slave_clarification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#Master_and_slave_... > Although they were in common use, the terms "master" and "slave" do not appear anymore in current versions of the ATA specifications, or any current documentation. Since ATA-2 the two devices are referred to as "Device 0" and "Device 1", respectively. This is more appropriate since the two devices have always operated, since the earliest ATA specification, as equal peers on the cable, with neither having control or priority over the other. > It is a common myth that the controller on the master drive assumes control over the slave drive, or that the master drive may claim priority of communication over the other device on the same ATA interface. In fact, the drivers in the host operating system perform the necessary arbitration and serialization, and each drive's onboard controller operates independently of the other. > While it may have remained in colloquial use, the PC industry has not used ATA master/slave terminology in many years.
- sebazzz 6y agoThe I2C protocol is not however - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C2%B2C#Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C2%B2C#Design. The slave listens to the master and responds when asked to.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoHow about parent and child?
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoAre you looking to offend orphans?
- DonHopkins 6y agoThe problem with "parent/child" relationships for trees is that humans always have two biological parents, not one like tree data structures.
- acdha 6y agoThis is a good example of why master/slave is not an accurate term: most technical uses reflect performing the same kind of work rather than one only telling the other what to do and when the master fails a slave is elected to replace it. Your master database doesn’t torture the slave node when it errors, either. Using more accurate terms such as those on the kernel’s list immediately tells you the nature of the relationship AND doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. That seems worth it alone, and it’s really unclear what good reason could explain why a few people would spend far more time complaining about work which someone else will do than it will take to complete that work.
- collyw 6y agoCan anyone find me someone who actually gets offended by this? (And doesn't write a column for the Guardian or make money out of claiming offence everywhere).
- neckardt 6y agoWhite male here: I always found the terminology of master/slave uncomfortable. I never really encountered the word slave outside of american history classes, so in my head it does remind me of slavery in the US. I would frequently avoid using the word "slave" in technical discussions. I'm happy with this change.
- FeepingCreature 6y agomaster in the git sense is not master/slave.
- acdha 6y agoIt’s not clear that this is true: if were around when Git started, it was influenced heavily by BitKeeper and that did use master/slave: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
- _-david-_ 6y agoThere are no slave branches in Git though.
- acdha 6y agoYes, but the point is that the history isn’t as clear cut as it might seem. I generally prefer other branch names anyway which tell how you use them - e.g. does “master” mean development actually happens there, where code is integrated for testing, the ready-to-release code (which is what the image/audio usage of master would imply), etc. Using terms like “develop”, “integration”, “release”, etc. make your project conventions more apparent.
- beervirus 6y agoBlack people: can we stop the police from killing us please? White people: we will change the terminology in the Linux kernel, you are welcome.
- microcolonel 6y agoProblem is, the black people who call this out are "not the right black people" and the white people who call it out often lose their jobs. Do society a favour and get this cancer out of your HR departments, and start saying no while you still can; because if you wait long enough, all of the activism will be fake, because it's cheaper and you're not allowed to notice the difference.
- f6v 6y agoWhy though? It makes people doing it feel better and requires little effort. Anything else other than virtue signaling is hard and expensive.
- torgian 6y agoIt's virtue signaling. It does nothing, and 99% of the people aren't going to see these terms and racially charged.
- dannypgh 6y agoI appreciate knowing my colleagues have virtues. How is that doing nothing?
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoDo you think moral posturing as a means to gaining political and/or social capital when nothing is at stake is of any real value? Because that’s what virtue signalling is, and that’s what most people fighting the good fight in these comments are doing.
- kache_ 6y agoThis same conversation came up at my job. I personally don't think that the effort put in is worth the advantages that it affords, or if there are any real advantages at all. However, I largely kept my mouth shut because I was afraid of the social repercussions. I wonder how much of this is occurring in tech companies because of the same phenomenon - people are just probably don't want to risk their jobs over something so unimportant. As always, paycheck comes in, jira ticket gets dragged from left to right. Whatever.
- nojito 6y ago>if there are any real advantages at all. If it brings just one more person into OS isn't it worth it?
- umvi 6y agoOnly if it doesn't drive >0 people away from the OS
- FeepingCreature 6y agoIf it just puts off one person isn't it not worth it?
- smachiz 6y agoYou seem unconcerned about the people who might feel marginalized and harmed by the rampant use of offensive language, and really concerned about people who could simply substitute another word with no impact. It's a really, really false equivalence. If you're offended by being asked to behave civilly you really have a bigger problem to deal with.
- zug_zug 6y agoI don't feel you're arguing in good faith. We should define "offensive language." How will we measure it fairly? Will we poll the english-speaking and set a thresh-hold? Because I sure hope we don't find out "aborting" a process is offensive language to religious coders with a polical agenda.
- huffmsa 6y agoAnd will accountants stop using "in the black / in the red"? Master/slave, maybe. But doing so as a reaction to BLM complete ignores the rest of the various people's who've been enslaved at some point in history.
- twic 6y agoBarely connected, but i only recently learned that there were raids by Ottoman slavers on Iceland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Abductions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Abductions https://jddavies.com/2017/02/20/the-barbary-corsair-raid-on-iceland-1627/ https://jddavies.com/2017/02/20/the-barbary-corsair-raid-on-...
- slezyr 6y agoSo... As a Slav, can I use the master/[slav]e?
- huffmsa 6y agoTsar / slav
- LordHumungous 6y agoYeaaaah, if you could rename your ethnic group to something more inclusive, that would be greaaat. Thanks.
- pgtan 6y agoI really like the gender duality of the russian and the other slavic languages: п_зда/п_здец, х_й/х_йня, etc. And so there is a masculine pendant of к_рва in them, AFAIK.
- f6v 6y agoWhile everyone should say: Can we end the extreme wealth disparity where millions of people are couple pay checks from being homeless. It's ironic, since decades of fighting communists in the USA rendered any class-based rhetoric a taboo.
- collyw 6y agoAs someone from a "very white" country wealth disparity seems to exist regardless of race.
- f6v 6y agoYes, so here's a crazy idea: maybe, just maybe, there're systematic problems in the society, other than monuments and words.
- bsaul 6y agohere's an even crazier idea : maybe inequality is part of natural behavior of every single organisation, from animals to vegetables, to cells. I'm not saying it's a good thing, just that abolishing inequalities is a phenomenaly ambitious goal which hasn't even been proved feasible.
- f6v 6y agoWe can practice reductio ad absurdum all we want. However, it seems that inequality is taken to the extreme in some parts of the world.
- qznc 6y agoThe distinction is just wording: > If we find that much of the overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal justice system is because black people are often poor and poor people often get sucked into the system, should we describe this as “the problem isn’t racism in the criminal justice system, it’s poverty” or as “the problem is racism in the criminal justice system, as manifested through poverty”? – Scott Alexander https://web.archive.org/web/20200523051001/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/03/framing-for-light-instead-of-heat/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200523051001/https://slatestar...
- m0xte 6y agoAh book burning making a come back in 2020.
- Icyphox 6y agoThis is beyond dumb. Americans always assume the world revolves around them and their politics.
- rgoulter 6y agoI find that an important point. I think a bunch of people want to be helpful and do anything that they believe would be more inclusive for others. What irks me is it comes across more as an expression that their worldview is the one that matters, others aren't to be tolerated.
- Hamuko 6y agoNot sure why that's surprising. Americans have always wanted to invade the entire globe, whether it be through culture or via Hellfire.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- skocznymroczny 6y agoIt's time to rename the "man" command to "person"
- meitham 6y ago“man” in unix is short for “manual” and has no relationship to gender! This is like car vs carpet argument.
- skocznymroczny 6y ago"master" in Git doesn't have a relationship to slavery and yet it's being changed in repositories around the world.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> "master" in Git doesn't have a relationship to slavery That’s...unclear, at best. Heck, the person who claims responsibility for the Git usage isn’t even sure, having both suggested a “master recording” sense and that derivation from use of “master/slave” in bitkeeper is a possible origin. https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441?s=19 https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441?s=19 https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272817929046962176?s=19 https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272817929046962176?s=19 They've also endorsed the change to “main” as more clear.
- luckylion 6y agoThat's true, but some people also get upset every other year about the fact that history and mankind exclude women.
- palimpsests 6y ago"mankind" has always struck me as unnecessarily exclusive. Why not "people", "humankind", etc? Such a simple substitution that honors the fact that all people are not men.
- kingnight 6y agoReally surprised to see a comment pool that is completely negative. Wouldn’t primary/replica and allowlist/denylist be more explicit anyway? Society doesn’t have to just do one thing. And because whatever momentum is causing this to happen now, doesn’t negate other reasons why it should happen regardless, and shouldn’t be a reason for it not to either.
- huffmsa 6y agoBecause the origins.of the term isn't racially based. You're seeing race and color where there isn't any. > The state papers of Charles II say "If any innocent soul be found in this black list, let him not be offended at me, but consider whether some mistaken principle or interest may not have misled him to vote". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting
- acdha 6y agoYes, it’s an old usage just as niggardly or denigrate predate a word they’re often assumed to be derived from. The point is that people have to think about that in a context where they otherwise wouldn’t, and it costs so very little to avoid that. Many projects have replaced these terms with more accurate ones in the past and it’s a very minor shift. It took very little time to do and years later, only aggrieved right-wing activists are still talking about it. Everyone else is just using software without the distraction of wondering about the origins of the terms they’re using.
- Dylan16807 6y agoNo, it's not like niggardly. Blacklist is a common word and 'black' does not resemble any offensive words.
- acdha 6y agoWe’re talking about black being used in a negative connotation, with no connection to color. I mentioned it only as another example where the origin of the term is harmless but there is still a good reason why you might want to avoid using a particular word.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y agoGreat, can someone explain Americans their society is not the world, these projects are international and everyone's tired of American politics leaking in anyway. When will it end?
- bsaul 6y agobut it IS a master/slave relationship. Giving something the correct name doesn't mean you're actually promoting it ! I don't understand how linus tolerate crippling code for the sake of politically correct. It doesn't look like him
- greesil 6y agoLet's not get started about white vs colored noise in digital signal processing. Why is white noise white?
- fennecfoxen 6y agoSame reason that white light is white: its has a mix of all the light frequencies in about the same proportion, rather than being weighted to one particular color.
- greesil 6y agoAnd yet the sun's spectrum follows the black body radiation curve.
- frazbin 6y agoI dunno, maybe let's get started. I would guess it is called white noise by analogy to analog TV static, which even though it has black pixels in it at any time, appears white to the eye. But interesting question.
- terrytate9080 6y agoIf this is what the Linux kernel developers have to do to inflate their ego and self worth who are we to stop them!
- DonHopkins 6y agoBut I like the ironic sound of "Robot Overlords"! Robot: 1920s: from Czech, from robota ‘forced labour’. The term was coined in K. Čapek's play R.U.R. ‘Rossum's Universal Robots’ (1920).
- m0llusk 6y agoIf there are truly superior alternatives then it would make sense to put the focus on those and their positive features. In contrast it seems possible that most alternatives simply cloak the same issues in a context that is ultimately the same. Take service and client for example. Is the client truly free or do they become bound by their interface access pass and consistent usage. Is there any real escape from patterns of dependence? Could much of this simply be wasting energy on unresolved mommy issues?
- loceng 6y agoI'd argue it's more post traumatic stress derived hypersensitivity (leading to irrational reasoning, the whole "blind rage" spectrum of emotion disrupting logic development) than say mommy/daddy issues.
- dboreham 6y agoInteresting because we made this change in the Netscape Directory Server in 1996. Ever since I've been a little surprised to see the usage appear here and there. It felt like a memo had failed to get delivered.
- dbbljack 6y agoI wonder how male/female connectors made it this far into the inclusive-language wave, haven't seen a single mention of them.
- dariosalvi78 6y agoJust wait a bit
- torgian 6y agoWhat is the point of this? What, is using a "yellow" color for "warning" going to be removed next? What about "red" for stop or "remove"? I can go on , but basically this is getting ridiculous.
- fafk 6y agoBikeshedding. ️
- nsilvestri 6y agoI used to disagree with this before realizing that I cared more about them being changed than I cared about the words in the first place. I don't care what the words are. This is a smaller change than learning a new JS framework, and I already care very little about that.
- air7 6y agoHow about we just call them "the M word" and "the S word" as we're already accustomed to that. /s I find this type of virtue signaling very annoying and a slippery slope on the free speech/rage culture front.
- qznc 6y ago"S word" is great for lots of puns... > All they that take the S word shall perish with the S word. –Jesus > Never give a S word to a man who can't dance –Confucius > There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the S word. –Ulysses S. Grant > The pen is mighter than the S word > I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the S word. I will tell the truth wherever I please. –Mary Harris Jones > There's a huge difference between stage fighting and real S word fighting. –Kit Harington > So we're living by that S word, and we're going to cut every now and then from it's backlash. –Vince McMahon > There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a S word. –Mark Waid
- frazbin 6y agoTo people upset about master/slave in CS terminology I say: fair enough. We can find metaphors for our tools without punching down. To people upset about CHANGING the terminology: I would ask.. Y so mad?
- _-david-_ 6y agoMy issue is we don't know where this will end. What happens when tomorrow somebody complains about male and female connectors not being inclusive. Should we change the names? What about killing a process? Some people have family members who were killed. Lets change that too. What happens if a person was assaulted by someone with your same name. Should you change your name to appease that person? "I say: fair enough."
- dwalts 6y agoDo you actually lose sleep worrying about this sort of thing? Do you seriously think humans are so stupid that they cannot draw any lines?
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoThere's even hermaphrodite/hermaphroditic connectors. And gender changers.
- nonce42 6y agoWhen the terrorist group ISIS rose to prominence in 2014, many product names and even company names were changed to avoid connection with ISIS. For instance, in the computer world, Cornell's Isis distributed computing library was renamed Vsync. These changes seemed to be uncontroversial; I didn't find any HN discussion of the Vsync name change. This shows that there is precedence for widespread name changes if a name becomes offensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_changes_due_to_the_Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_changes_due_to_the_Islami...
- luckylion 6y agoHowever, master/slave aren't the names of companies, they're names of concepts. There is no Slavery, Inc selling digital picture frames and refusing to change their name because they like being associated with Slavery. This is more like "killing a process" ("but people get killed"), "deleting a file" ("minorities are getting erased", "you aren't even removing anything, you're just changing some bytes, so it isn't even accurate"), "touching a file" etc. It matters what you read into it, but that's mostly you, not the word. Is MariaDB sexist because it's a software that is expected to silently and flawlessly do things for you for free so of course it was given a female name, or is it a programmer's dedication to his daughter?
- DarthGhandi 6y agoThat's an unimpressive list of name changes. A University login system, a chocolate maker, a PE firm, few small businesses, a software release name, the fictional organisation from a cartoon. I'd be more interested in who didn't change their names despite the connotation. There's a town in Australia called Isis, who didn't change, nor did their local football team called the Isis devils. Going through Wikipedia there's also Oxford University's magazine http://isismagazine.org.uk/ http://isismagazine.org.uk/ A peer reviewed journal: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/isis/current https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/isis/current A British prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Prison_Isis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Prison_Isis USGS planetary software used by NASA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Software_for_Imagers_and_Spectrometers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Software_for_Imager... A Dutch aerospace company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovative_Solutions_In_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovative_Solutions_In_Space
- bavell 6y agoWhile I'm sympathetic to the idea of being respectful of everyone, I question whether these changes make any meaningful difference at all. Was anyone offended by these terms and called for change? Or was this a preemptive move by those thinking something along the lines of, "Gosh, what if someone else sees this? They might get the wrong idea! Better remove it." I suppose black box testing is on the chopping block next? Or Master's degree/thesis?
- acdha 6y agoFor me, there are two priorities: get rid of any use of “slave”, and any use in a negative context. Blackbox testing doesn’t have negative connotations and it’s not contrasted with a better white counterpart, unlike blacklist/whitelist. Similarly, the degree below masters isn’t named black and a karate black belt is respected.
- bavell 6y agoHow do you feel about the term, "Blackbody"? E.g. Blackbody radiation. Master's degree implies a superiority to the lower degrees, clearly establishing a dominance hierarchy. Is that much different from the master/slave terminology? Or is it just the use of the word "Master" combined with the word "Slave" which is the problem?
- acdha 6y agoMaster as in “master’s degree” is from a Latin word meaning teacher, and it’s the same root for mastery. I think most of the concern about tech usage comes from introducing the term “slave”, either directly in a pair or, as with Git, deriving from that usage. It’s that specific pairing along with the technical inaccuracy which makes master/slave considerably more likely to offend, in my opinion. If someone came to me and said, however, that they didn’t like the term and wanted to change it I wouldn’t object because it costs me so very little to be respectful of the fact that not everyone comes from the same place. Blackbody radiation, black hole, etc. similarly doesn’t have the same pairing as you get with white/black-list - it’s a physical phenomena, not a problem. The concern isn’t using the word black but using it in a context which reminds the reader of racist use of the same words in other contexts.
- akoumjian 6y agoThe comments here on HN seem really knee-jerk. Some people like to claim no one is made to feel erased or reminded of their otherness when they hear this terminology. Some people seem to think we can't walk and chew gum at the same time. What I see are people criticizing these changes because of a fear that perhaps, on some level, they have participated in a language and a culture that continues to demean or ostracize others. It is not a good feeling to realize this. Please ask yourselves why you are so attached to using terms like master/slave. If it had been different from the start, would you even care?
- umvi 6y agoIs there a line you personally won't let political correctness police cross? If someone wants you to stop using innocuous words for arbitrary reasons, will you ever stand your ground or will you always yield? master/slave, maybe there's a case to be made there. But "master" in general has other meanings besides "owner". And black/whitelist have been around for centuries and have nothing to do with skin color. I, for one, am sick of being bullied by politically correct language police forcibly imposing their ideals on society via shaming and mob justice.
- jl6 6y agohttps://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/black https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/black Check out the large number of senses in which the word ‘black’ represents something negative. Vice versa for ‘white’, ‘light’, ‘dark’, and more. This issue runs very, very deep in the English language. I guess this was behind the late-20th-century culture of deprecating the word black and replacing it with words like “colored”. As if that era had conceded that ‘black’ was an intrinsically judgemental word and should no longer be used to refer to people. But there was no getting away from the fact that the African skin tone really was black, and so denying use of the word black began to feel more offensive, as if it were something shameful to which attention should not be called. “Don’t worry, son, you’re not really black, you’re colored.” Pretty rough, right? And so we seem to have flipped in the other direction, and the word ‘black’ is increasingly worn proudly. So if ‘black’ is now to have a positive sense, it is all those negative senses which must come under scrutiny. I don’t know what the answer is, but I wonder how we manage to use the word ‘black’ for hair color without negative connotations.
- qznc 6y agoAre you sure about the hair color? My feeling is that movie villains tend to have black hair while the good guys are more often not black. It isn't a strong association though. Superman has black hair while Cersei is blond. Black has a natural association with night, darkness, and shadows. While white is associated with day and sun light. This is deeper than the English language.
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoPerhaps we need to redo the physical world, as it seems to be promoting racism. /s
- umvi 6y agoThis has nothing to do with black people though. "The land was filled with light" "The land was covered in darkness" One of those phrases has a positive connotation, the other a negative. Saying that this is an "issue" with the english language because coincidentally some humans have dark skin is absurd.
- frazbin 6y agoSo I swear I'm on your team but i just realized that Robot=robota=slave
- monokh 6y agoTwitter is already way ahead of curve[1] > Dummy value => Placeholder value, sample value Any clues on who this terminology is excluding exactly? [1] https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733305190342656/photo/1 https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733305190342656/ph...
- celeritascelery 6y agoI think twitter is a good example of why people are reacting so negatively to this. The changes that twitter has made are just plain PC insanity. Everyone is so afraid of backlash for being the voice of reason that it never seems to stop. You end up spending so much time tying to find and police imagined offenses that you don't get real work done.
- qqii 6y agoI've got no problem with removing master/slave, especially in cases where you could use more descriptive terms. On the other hand I'm just not a fan of the proposals for blacklist/whitelist. I've nothing against changing them, but denylist/allowlist or blocklist/passlist just doesn't "sound right". Blocklist sounds fine, but whitelist and passlist just sound... awkward?
- vegetablepotpie 6y agoWhen my team got a black developer I realized that it’s slightly awkward to say the word ‘master branch’. I understand that git was made by a Finish developer, but in the historical context of the US any allusion to slavery can be problematic because it implies disregard for some people. Imposter syndrome is a big issue with developers, I certainly don’t want to add to that with any extra hints of ‘you don’t belong here.’ I would much rather use the word ‘primary’ for the central branch. I can certainly change that. But our repos are maintained by a dedicated configuration management department in consultation with a quality department. Any change requires meetings and lots of questions by lots of people. When we have 50 other priorities with dollar values attached to them, this type of thing is ranked very low. Plus we would be the only team to do that, we’d stick out like a sore thumb and future merges to primary would require special instruction for our support departments. I welcome an industry wide shift away from these terms. Although I have no evidence to point to, I feel like this would increase retention. If one day management mandates that we need to rename ‘master’ to ‘primary’ it will make the shift easier because all the meetings where we get asked ‘why’ won’t happen, my team won’t stick out and be different. The change will happen across the board. Most importantly there would be less reason for people to feel like they shouldn’t be there.
- umvi 6y agoIs it also "slightly awkward" when your black colleague asks what your preferred credit card or padlock brand is?
- bavell 6y agoDo people with Master's degrees make you feel awkward? Why or why not? Do you think we should call it something else? It seems a bit racist to me to consider use of the term "Master" in a very technical and unrelated context to refer specifically to U.S. slavery.
- gruez 6y agoThe "master" in git refers to "master" copy, not the master/slave relationship. There aren't any "slave" branches in git.
- chrisbennet 6y agoMy philosophy is to change my behavior to avoid hurting other people. This isn't being weak, this is just good manners (being kind). I'm less inclined to change my behavior for people who just want to be offended or who take it upon themselves to be outraged for someone else (who isn't themselves outraged). I was concerned about hurting people so I talked to my only black friend (also a developer) and he said: "I think people are going overboard with political correctness. Maybe when we switch to the metric system we can change terminology" What's A Good Substitute for Master/Slave? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23811866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23811866
- ulisesrmzroche 6y agoTo everybody questioning if this matter, you should definitely read philosophy. Of course language matters. Especially in the context of the times. Wittgenstein says that: "in order to communicate with a tribe, listen to how they communicate with a language.In many cases slang, banter, and jokes are not poorly constructed forms of secondary communication but a coded means of crafting pointed exchanges within a community." Yall are so resistant to change you don't even care how bad it makes you look.
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- class4behavior 6y agoLanguage matters but you should also understand the language you're using or censoring. To assert white-/blacklist or master/slave have anything to do with discrimination or were in anyway offensive is just beyond stupid. If not for this measure, there would be no connection between those contexts; just as there is no relationship between black humor and black people, or between slavery and masters/slaves in BDSM. Heck, I can still consider removing master/slave acceptable—it is just as more of less a casually chosen terminology anyway—but the rest only creates more problems and solves none.
- gnicholas 6y agoDoes anyone know the etymology of "blacklist" or "whitelist"? To me, this would be a relevant factor in deciding whether the terms should be deprecated.
- eat_veggies 6y agoThe etymology doesn't matter so much as long as the harm done now is real. I wrote this comment in a similar thread before, but I'll paste it here: Historically, white/blacklist did not have racial origins, but history is always happening. The original intent of a word can be erased by its proximity to new taboos and new circumstances, and in this case, white/black have been racialized. See also: the disappearance of the words "niggardly" and "feck" from common English usage, or how some Thais are uneasy using the word "fuk" (gourd, pumpkin) [0] [0] https://sci-hub.tw/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808190.013.10 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808190.013.10
- gnicholas 6y agoHey old friend — good to see you here. I can understand that some people object to the terms regardless of etymology, but certainly the case for deprecation would be stronger if the etymology driven by or related to race. Do you have any citations to the actual etymology? I wasn't able to find anything definitive.
- luckylion 6y ago> The etymology doesn't matter so much as long as the harm done now is real. You declare that using blacklist/whitelist does harm, yet you provide no evidence. If it does, shouldn't the black belt being the highest grade (and the white belt the lowest) in Karate etc be a positive thing? Shouldn't the white flag being the sign of defeat, while pirates have cool flags that are mostly black really make the difference? I'm sorry, but no, of course not. I see some (albeit very little, it feels more like avoidance coping, which is more harmful than dealing with your feelings) merit in "I don't want to hear the word slave, it triggers thoughts of the slavery somebody having a similar skin color as me had to go through", but blacklist/whitelist? Black hat? Black Death? Black Hole? No. It has nothing to do with Africans, and going out of your way to create a connection where none exists for the sake of being offended feels like a mental health issue that needs to be addressed, not encouragement.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoI am wondering if mastering, “a jack of all trades, a master of none” and a master copy are going to be changed, too
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 6y agoOr master bedroom, masterclass, masterpiece, mastercard, master's degree etc. Where do you draw the line if the syllables alone are allegedly problematic?
- dragonwriter 6y agoUses of “master” that don't derive from specifically the use in terms of master/slave relations (and it entered English with multiple different sense ab initio), and perhaps even those with such an origin where the current use isn't even closely metaphoric and reliant on evoking that relationship are less likely to be seen as problematic.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoI am pretty certain “Master” in Git is not derived from master/slave duality.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> I am pretty certain “Master” in Git is not derived from master/slave duality. It apparently comes from copying bitkeeper, which uses master/slave, so it is, indirectly, derived from master/slave. It's easy enough to interpret (and retain) in the artistic sense of a master copy (which usage is not derived from master/slave), so even with it's etymology it is far from the most problematic use of “master”, but the git usage is not historically unconnected to master/slave.
- bronzeage 6y agoThis is reaching stupidity levels I never thought possible. This is coming from a code base where you can find the word fuck hundreds of times, as well as other curses. This is coming while Linus has probably directly personally attacked people with profanities on their commits in front of whole mailing lists. This is the moral equivalent of just cleaning the mirrors alone in a dirty public restroom. Probably only done to be able to admire yourself, it doesn't clean any of the real shit.
- tokamak-teapot 6y agoOffence, like most things in life, isn’t black and white - if you’ll excuse the awful pun. Words like you’re referring to are offensive to a number of people, and their reasoning is something I don’t quite understand, so I won’t offer an explanation, because I’m not qualified. Terms like those being discouraged in the linked post are offensive to people for an entirely different reason. Again I don’t find them offensive myself, but I respect those who do and see absolutely no problem with steering clear of them to be kind. Kindness wins here over claims of nannying. I agree that a minor change of nomenclature isn’t going to solve anything on its own, but it’s symbolic, an act of solidarity, a piece of a puzzle, perhaps some or all of these and more. Let’s just get behind it instead of being negative about it.
- scruple 6y agoWhere are the aggrieved and why don't they ever show and speak for themselves in these threads? I've seen exactly one comment in many thousands from a person who stated outright that they were a female minority and... She ranted that these language changes are coddling... I've spoken to a few minority, female, and homosexual friends (in tech) and colleagues and they share the same sentiment (I understand how ironic it is that I, too, show up with nothing but anecdotes). How does this reconcile with the 100s/1000s of comments that amount to, "but some people find this stuff offensive!"
- rflec028 6y agoImmediately linking any resemblance of racial identity politics to meaningful programming terms, and then demanding that the vernacular of an entire discipline be ideologically reshaped, means that you are the one who is on the 'wrong side of history'. If these changes are truly merited, they will occur naturally over time.
- camdenlock 6y agoThis is dangerous because it’s a wholesale enforced linguistic shift pushed by a group which claims that the goal is to protect other people who are being “harmed”. No solid evidence is given, no input is received from the hypothetical “harmed” group. All that happens is a blank check is handed to the people claiming that they’re totally a force for good. When has this ever ended well?
- reanimus 6y agoThis is one of those changes that does little to actually improve things yet somehow manages to piss a lot of people off, despite the fact that other areas of tech have long been moving away from the "master/slave" terminology (see RDBMSes). At the end of the day I think there are other (more important) cultural issues with open source development but you can't pat yourself on the back and call them fixed with a git commit lol
- throwaway547369 6y ago(throwaway for obvious reasons) Imagine if major parts of systems architecture casually referenced the holocaust, gassing civilians, or other recent historical acts of violent oppression. Wouldn't you advocate for the same thing?
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoAre they though?
- dariosalvi78 6y agoWhich of course doesn't change a bit, not politically, not historically, nothing. Those words will most likely survive in the jargon, because a) it's hard to change an established terminology overnight and b) they belong to a complete different semantic area than the politics we are discussing about.
- antiRadical 6y agohttps://github.com/words-matter/blacklist-whitelist-are-not-racist-words https://github.com/words-matter/blacklist-whitelist-are-not-...
- antiRadical 6y agoThis really wasn't necessary. Blacklist and whitelist have never been racist words... https://github.com/words-matter/blacklist-whitelist-are-not-racist-words https://github.com/words-matter/blacklist-whitelist-are-not-...
- Ghjklov 6y agoI would love to see an experiment done with a Linux fork with the inclusive terminology changes. Then hopefully, all the black coders that been prevented from contributing to the kernel can start working on that one, and naturally it will eventually surpass the original, non-inclusive kernel. All the bigoted people can continue working on what they've worked on for years and PoC can have their kernel. Everyone wins.
- csense 6y agoIf someone's offended by this, they are looking for a reason to be offended. If someone's looking for a reason to be offended, they will find one, no matter what you do. George Orwell warned us about this kind of thing. Edit: If you downvote this post, perhaps you could leave a comment explaining why?
- tmaly 6y agoWhat is going to happen to all the printed books and technical docs? This seems like it might cause a lot of issues going forward.
- BlackAndWhite1 6y agoNext to be renamed: * Black and White chess (whites go first - OMG ) * old Black and White movies * repainting zebra * barcodes * piano keys * book pages with black text * yin-yang sign Etc
- CawCawCaw 6y agoIs this moral licensing?
- Byamarro 6y agoAre chess now racist as well, because they're black and white? Yin and Yang? BDSM Slave-Master relationships? This is getting out of the hand.
- stunt 6y agoVoices against this idea are pretty loud. But nobody is giving a real argument. I don't see anything other than "oh it doesn't solve world Racism or Sexism problems" or, "I never thought about slavery when I use my git branch". I think they just miss the point. I don't see any reason to not fix this. There are studies that claim language does transmit values and cultural norms. So it isn't only about someone being hurt or reminded of something when (s)he sees a word. These issue is so big that no single action or change is going to fix it. It requires commitment and lots of small and big changes. And yes a lot of companies aren't going to do anything more than tiny changes while portending that they support the cause. It doesn't mean that others should stop.