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>These changes make sense even outside of any sort of political charge. They only make sense if you disregard any costs associated with the change. In addition

>These changes make sense even outside of any sort of political charge. They only make sense if you disregard any costs associated with the change. In addition to logistical costs, it's culturally costly to make many people change, and even more costly that people who fail to adapt are demonized. Generations of text was written to use blacklist/whitelist, and people who read them would naturally be more comfortable with those usage, and you're asking them to bend over. >If you were trying to learn the English language, I'd imagine a self describing term is much easier to understand. The controversies of blacklist/whitelist are very America-centric and your argument is exemplary of that. Terms like blacklist/white list have already permeated many languages by this time. People who have seen blacklist/whitelist in their own language would have no problem adapting to the English version of it.

carbadtraingood 4y ago
Can you help me understand the costs? Because as far as I can tell it is: 1) "We should consider using Allowlist" "ok, but let's be careful with externally facing APIs, in exactly the same way we change all our externally facing APIs?" "Sure!" 2) "I was editing this file, find/replaced a couple cases of whitelist while I was in there" "LGTM" 3) "Oh, hey, noticed we had nearly finished opportunistically replacing whitelist. Does anyone mind if I just finish up?" "Sure, timebox it?" Like, it's extremely low cost? What costs are you imagining?
- mariusor 4y ago
  I'd like to add a point that I haven't seen discussed regarding the cost of change. In many languages a lot of computer related terms have no native correspondent, therefore they use the ones borrowed from English. If the English IT community decides en-masse to change those terms, the best result is that these people will have to catch up - with some unknown delay - or that they'll not bother, and there will be a disconnect in the terms. Which one is more likely and what the overall effects will be, I have no idea. But it will be a point of friction.

carbadtraingood 4y ago

Can you help me understand the costs? Because as far as I can tell it is: 1) "We should consider using Allowlist" "ok, but let's be careful with externally facing APIs, in exactly the same way we change all our externally facing APIs?" "Sure!" 2) "I was editing this file, find/replaced a couple cases of whitelist while I was in there" "LGTM" 3) "Oh, hey, noticed we had nearly finished opportunistically replacing whitelist. Does anyone mind if I just finish up?" "Sure, timebox it?" Like, it's extremely low cost? What costs are you imagining?

mariusor 4y ago
I'd like to add a point that I haven't seen discussed regarding the cost of change. In many languages a lot of computer related terms have no native correspondent, therefore they use the ones borrowed from English. If the English IT community decides en-masse to change those terms, the best result is that these people will have to catch up - with some unknown delay - or that they'll not bother, and there will be a disconnect in the terms. Which one is more likely and what the overall effects will be, I have no idea. But it will be a point of friction.