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As a black developer... this all just makes me a little sad. Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this attempt to remove the
by madsmith 6y ago
As a black developer... this all just makes me a little sad.
Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this attempt to remove these phrases for less well understood phrases just seems like an attempt to whitewash history for little to no gain.
I'm a firm believer that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them.
- userbinator 6y agoPerhaps you mean "attempt to blackwash history"...
- tehlike 6y agoAnd it's all very us centric too. In my native language, we have something called "black notebook" which is essentially a blacklist. It has nothing to do with skin color, never been. It's more reference to bright and dark - it's a list of people you wouldn't do business with. It's very natural for people to use words from of their sensors. We call greenfield)brownfield in a similar manner.
- eesmith 6y agoGitHub is a US company. HN is run by a US company.
- tehlike 6y agoSo? Blacklist or master words dont have its roots in the us, and they don't have their roots in the racist history either.
- eesmith 6y agoBecause you wrote "it's all very us centric too" - and I struggle to find out how that's a relevant comment given that "GitHub, Inc. is an American multinational", so obviously embedded in the US context, and American interpretation of the words.
- tehlike 6y agoBut github caters to a global market. That's why replacing master->main is just doing busy work that doesn't do anything to address the problem?
- eesmith 6y agoThat global market includes the US, which is a substantial part of GitHub's revenue. This thread started as madsmith's valid comment that "that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them" - how do we determine what meanings are associated with a given term? All indications are that it has a US origin, which provides the appropriate interpretation. What is "the problem" and what should GitHub do to address the problem? If the problem US-centric, and you think the US-only issues can be ignored because GitHub caters to a global market, then isn't your logic that GitHub should do nothing?