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Personally, I think the alternatives for whitelist/blacklist and blackbox are just better in actually transporting more of the intended meaning.
by ketzu 6y ago
Personally, I think the alternatives for whitelist/blacklist and blackbox are just better in actually transporting more of the intended meaning.
- alpaca128 6y agoThey also don't roll off the tongue as well, which is, whether we like it or not, one of the main deciding factors for how language evolves. Imho attempts to replace established terms could be much more successful in wider adoption if they took this into account. For example I don't know why most try to push "denylist" instead of the more obvious "blocklist". Slang exists for a reason, and going the opposite way just makes everything harder.
- PeterisP 6y agoI work a bit on translation of terminology w.r.t new terms, and my pet theory is that the key factor for predicting whether a proposed translation will catch on and get used is the syllable count; proposed terms that are short to use get used, but proposed longish terms get abandoned whenever there is a shorter alternative - perhaps they get used in official documentation, but in practice everyone tends to use the shorter alternative even if it's worse in all other aspects. From that perspective; allowlist and denylist are three syllables each; blacklist, blocklist and whitelist are two - so my experience suggests that in the end the latter will be used instead of the former whenever possible.