6 ms·

If the name change builds a larger, diverse, empathetic community. What have you or I lost?

by PretzelFisch 6y ago

sam_lowry_ 6y ago
IMO, it does exactly the opposite.
- steviedotboston 6y ago
  how so?
s_dev 6y ago
Enduring a breaking change for something that will have absolutely 0 impact on the diversity, size or empathy of the software dev community.
GhostVII 6y ago
We haven't lost anything, but we've gained the expectation that we should be accommodating a tiny minority of people being offended for no reason. Sure it's not much work to switch "master" to "main" (although in aggregate it's probably a tonne of person hours), but what happens when the next trend is to be offended at "blacklist", or "sanity check", or any of the other thousands of words that someone is inevitably going to be offended by. And once the expectation is that you change your language based on the irrationally offended minority, if you refuse to do so because it is a lot of work and makes no sense you become deamonized as some kind of sexist/racist/*ist. I've seen lots of people claim that if you aren't a part of the minority in question you have no right to say what is or isn't offensive. I strongly disagree, some people are offended for stupid reasons, and we shouldn't feel obligated to accommodate them. Now if a significant portion are offended then there is probably some legitimate reason behind it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  > blacklist > sanity check Sorry to tell you, but the PC twinkies are going after those, too: https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the-new-debate-over-security-terminology/ https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the... https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e38899baf5cc https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e388... There are significant costs, both in terms of money and productivity, to switching up so much terminology.
- dspillett 6y ago
  > "blacklist" That has already happened in some places, though blacklist/whitelist are still the most common naming convention for that sort of thing. Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change. I don't have any examples I remember of what people might use instead of whitelist though, allowlist doesn't particularly trip of the tongue IMO. Grandfathering is another common word that I've seen argued against because of its history.
  - lnenad 6y ago
    > Blocklist IMHO it's definitely not. What I do with my blacklist might have nothing to do with blocking anything.
    - nicbou 6y ago
      It doesn't have anything with the color black either. What about "yeslist" and "nolist"? "Includelist" and "excludelist"?
  - jameshilliard 6y ago
    > Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change. You should try to avoid using "Blocklist" in most code IMO, it's ambiguous in a number of contexts as the word block itself is ambiguous and can mean very multiple different things such as blockchain blocks or data/filesystem blocks which would be something very different from the intended definition of a disallow rule.
    - dspillett 6y ago
      I would assume in most cases context would differentiate the meanings adequately unambiguously, especially in userland rather than when coding. But you have a point, block is unhelpfully overloaded on the English language.
      - kondu 6y ago
        You mean just like how the context will disambiguate the meaning of "master"?
- aaomidi 6y ago
  You're pushing all the "angry minority" stereotype in your language in your comment. Like, if I as a brown person am uncomfortable something it's me being an irrationally offended minority. If it's a white person it's just Mike having a bad day. I'm glad you're not my coworker.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
    I believe it's called white fragility nowadays bt insane Americans. Also, someone who is from Eastern Europe and white, I'm grossly offended by people using my skin color everywhere, I have nothing to do with your history. Do you even realize tech community is bigger than California?
  - GhostVII 6y ago
    When I say "irrationally offended minority", I mean "minority" as in a small number of people, not "minority" as in racial minority, although I see why they isn't clear given that I use the word in two different ways in my comment. Most of the people I've seen get offended for trivial reasons are actually not a racial minority at all. As I said, if a significant number of people are offended (or if a small number are offended for a good reason), we should probably change our language. But if it is a small number of people getting offended at a word used in a context where it has never been offensive, I don't think we should accomodate them.
josefx 6y ago
A lot of work fixing code that depended on the old behavior, having to guess if a repo uses the old or new style and probably implementing workarounds for both cases. At the foggy promise of recruiting people that cannot be in the same room as anyone holding a masters degree without suffering from mass hysteria.
IshKebab 6y ago
I now have to go to extra effort to get my default branch to be called `master`. Plus I can no longer assume that the default branch is `master`. I have to check for every project whether they are using `main` or `master`. Maybe not a lot more effort, but it definitely is more effort, and for basically no gain. Let's not kid ourselves that black people being targeted by the police care about Git branch names. Hell apparently nobody even cares that Git is called Git, which is definitely a ruder word than "master".
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  You couldn't assume that before. Some black people don't care about this kind of thing. Some do. Git is a generic insult and doesn't have historical baggage. Nobody identifies as a git or the descendant of gits.
  - KMag 6y ago
    > Nobody identifies as a git or the descendant of gits. I see you've never been to Finland.[0] (Perhaps Linus comes from a long proud line of gits ;) ) [0] I briefly considered saying Switzerland, after a Stan Freberg skit where he speaks in an outrageous accent and claims to be from Switzerland "that way, nobody gets offended". Crockford's page with various types of JavaScript inheritance (including Swiss inheritance) unfortunately now has a broken link to the Fredberg skit.
vrotaru 6y ago
And if it doesn't?
Okawari 6y ago
I'm not entirely convinced convinced it will make for a larger nor a more empathetic community. I think these kinds of changes only makes it harder to enter the community, by adding more landmines to discourse and saying that there is a right and wrong way to talk regardless of intent and context that you need to know regardless of if you come from a background where these words are as heavily loaded as other places. It also creates a community which seemingly supports and defends personal attacks against people whenever the mob finds something new to hate on. For example in the case of Rubocop, when all of the sudden cop was a loaded word. The developer seemingly got harassed when he didn't want to change the name. I think we are losing more than we are gaining by going through with this. Not because of master or main but because we are seemingly not assuming best intentions when communicating anymore.

If the name change builds a larger, diverse, empathetic community. What have you or I lost?

sam_lowry_ 6y ago

IMO, it does exactly the opposite.

steviedotboston 6y ago
how so?

s_dev 6y ago

Enduring a breaking change for something that will have absolutely 0 impact on the diversity, size or empathy of the software dev community.

GhostVII 6y ago

We haven't lost anything, but we've gained the expectation that we should be accommodating a tiny minority of people being offended for no reason. Sure it's not much work to switch "master" to "main" (although in aggregate it's probably a tonne of person hours), but what happens when the next trend is to be offended at "blacklist", or "sanity check", or any of the other thousands of words that someone is inevitably going to be offended by. And once the expectation is that you change your language based on the irrationally offended minority, if you refuse to do so because it is a lot of work and makes no sense you become deamonized as some kind of sexist/racist/*ist. I've seen lots of people claim that if you aren't a part of the minority in question you have no right to say what is or isn't offensive. I strongly disagree, some people are offended for stupid reasons, and we shouldn't feel obligated to accommodate them. Now if a significant portion are offended then there is probably some legitimate reason behind it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

da_big_ghey 6y ago
> blacklist > sanity check Sorry to tell you, but the PC twinkies are going after those, too: https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the-new-debate-over-security-terminology/ https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the... https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e38899baf5cc https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e388... There are significant costs, both in terms of money and productivity, to switching up so much terminology.
dspillett 6y ago
> "blacklist" That has already happened in some places, though blacklist/whitelist are still the most common naming convention for that sort of thing. Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change. I don't have any examples I remember of what people might use instead of whitelist though, allowlist doesn't particularly trip of the tongue IMO. Grandfathering is another common word that I've seen argued against because of its history.
- lnenad 6y ago
  > Blocklist IMHO it's definitely not. What I do with my blacklist might have nothing to do with blocking anything.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    It doesn't have anything with the color black either. What about "yeslist" and "nolist"? "Includelist" and "excludelist"?
- jameshilliard 6y ago
  > Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change. You should try to avoid using "Blocklist" in most code IMO, it's ambiguous in a number of contexts as the word block itself is ambiguous and can mean very multiple different things such as blockchain blocks or data/filesystem blocks which would be something very different from the intended definition of a disallow rule.
  - dspillett 6y ago
    I would assume in most cases context would differentiate the meanings adequately unambiguously, especially in userland rather than when coding. But you have a point, block is unhelpfully overloaded on the English language.
    - kondu 6y ago
      You mean just like how the context will disambiguate the meaning of "master"?
aaomidi 6y ago
You're pushing all the "angry minority" stereotype in your language in your comment. Like, if I as a brown person am uncomfortable something it's me being an irrationally offended minority. If it's a white person it's just Mike having a bad day. I'm glad you're not my coworker.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  I believe it's called white fragility nowadays bt insane Americans. Also, someone who is from Eastern Europe and white, I'm grossly offended by people using my skin color everywhere, I have nothing to do with your history. Do you even realize tech community is bigger than California?
- GhostVII 6y ago
  When I say "irrationally offended minority", I mean "minority" as in a small number of people, not "minority" as in racial minority, although I see why they isn't clear given that I use the word in two different ways in my comment. Most of the people I've seen get offended for trivial reasons are actually not a racial minority at all. As I said, if a significant number of people are offended (or if a small number are offended for a good reason), we should probably change our language. But if it is a small number of people getting offended at a word used in a context where it has never been offensive, I don't think we should accomodate them.

josefx 6y ago

A lot of work fixing code that depended on the old behavior, having to guess if a repo uses the old or new style and probably implementing workarounds for both cases. At the foggy promise of recruiting people that cannot be in the same room as anyone holding a masters degree without suffering from mass hysteria.

IshKebab 6y ago

I now have to go to extra effort to get my default branch to be called `master`. Plus I can no longer assume that the default branch is `master`. I have to check for every project whether they are using `main` or `master`. Maybe not a lot more effort, but it definitely is more effort, and for basically no gain. Let's not kid ourselves that black people being targeted by the police care about Git branch names. Hell apparently nobody even cares that Git is called Git, which is definitely a ruder word than "master".

pseudalopex 6y ago
You couldn't assume that before. Some black people don't care about this kind of thing. Some do. Git is a generic insult and doesn't have historical baggage. Nobody identifies as a git or the descendant of gits.
- KMag 6y ago
  > Nobody identifies as a git or the descendant of gits. I see you've never been to Finland.[0] (Perhaps Linus comes from a long proud line of gits ;) ) [0] I briefly considered saying Switzerland, after a Stan Freberg skit where he speaks in an outrageous accent and claims to be from Switzerland "that way, nobody gets offended". Crockford's page with various types of JavaScript inheritance (including Swiss inheritance) unfortunately now has a broken link to the Fredberg skit.

vrotaru 6y ago

And if it doesn't?

Okawari 6y ago

I'm not entirely convinced convinced it will make for a larger nor a more empathetic community. I think these kinds of changes only makes it harder to enter the community, by adding more landmines to discourse and saying that there is a right and wrong way to talk regardless of intent and context that you need to know regardless of if you come from a background where these words are as heavily loaded as other places. It also creates a community which seemingly supports and defends personal attacks against people whenever the mob finds something new to hate on. For example in the case of Rubocop, when all of the sudden cop was a loaded word. The developer seemingly got harassed when he didn't want to change the name. I think we are losing more than we are gaining by going through with this. Not because of master or main but because we are seemingly not assuming best intentions when communicating anymore.