9 ms·

The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho. Even 15 years ago, when I started my professional journey (in Germany) there were a lot of

The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho. Even 15 years ago, when I started my professional journey (in Germany) there were a lot of people who were gay, trans and so on in the dev community … and nobody cared about it. We were all passioned about technologies and respected each other based on commitment/engagement/skill level. At the end most of the true full blood developers were always «special» and knew since their childhood that they were different from other children. I think that’s the reason why the embarrassment level was pretty low and people just wore the stuff they wanted, behaved like they wanted eg. But of course that’s only my personal experience. I’m sure there are a lot of other stories out there to share.

roenxi 3y ago
But it is also a technical improvement. main is easier to type. It takes a lot of effort to overcome the inertia of a default, so even if the reasoning is a bit suspect the outcome is going to be a win eventually.
- iakov 3y ago
  This is such a silly argument. Let’s call it “m” then - it’s even easier to type, so should be an even bigger win, right? Thousands of scripts and workflows be damned.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Less silly than you might think. An important part of life is letting people you don't like make the world better. The people behind this change are the up-in-others-business personalities. They're always going to be destructive, but we should appreciate when they do a little good nevertheless.
    - TheHappyOddish 3y ago
      > make the world better I really try hard not to mock people on HN, but you need to take a look in the mirror. Your sheltered world view of what "makes the world better" isn't reflective of everyone elses, nor objectively true. I'm glad you think it's good, but you must understand that those who don't agree aren't generally 'bigoted racists' or even people who "don't like" those making the changes.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        Literally everyone who renamed their master branch to main thought it was good, that is why they did it. There isn't some international police force conspiring to strong-arm unwilling coders into renaming their default git branch.
- krona 3y ago
  Except its a very common adjective, so any time you refer to it you have to say 'main branch' otherwise you've introduced unnecessary ambiguity. Whereas 'master' refers to one thing and one thing only in most contexts (unless you're selling bedrooms).
  - thefounder 3y ago
    >> Whereas 'master' refers to one thing and one thing only in most contexts. What contexts? Should we also ban "master" key because it implies it enslaves the other keys?
    - SSLy 3y ago
      I think krona is not arguing against using `master` as default branch name.
- olalonde 3y ago
  Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia. Consider the QWERTY keyboard, which is far from the most efficient design. JavaScript is notorious for its quirks. Unix commands often lack intuitiveness, suffering from poor naming conventions. Linux is coded in a language that has memory safety issues. Even the English language itself, is riddled with inconsistencies and arbitrary exceptions. The list goes on. To surmount the inertia for any of the mentioned examples, the replacement solution has better be significantly superior. A marginal improvement simply won't suffice, given the large costs of change. To many people, the switch from "master" to "main" had benefits that were, at best, debatable, while introducing substantial costs such as fragmentation, outdated tutorials and scripts, and confusion for beginners, among others. That's what got people worked up.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia. What colossal cost do you see in granting users the choice of, say, picking their default branch name instead of being forced to use "master"? What cost do you see in referring to "blacklists" as "allowlist" instead? Have you ever noticed that critical projects like Kubernetes managed to adopt clear and unambiguous concepts such as "control plane node" and "worker node" without making dubious remarks regarding "inertia"? Any argument regarding "inertia" frankly sounds like a lame excuse to stick with bigoted and racially-charged terms without any valid reason other than a refusal to extend the most basic of common courtesies.
    - olalonde 3y ago
      The costs were moderate, not colossal. But they were still bigger than the benefits, which were tiny to non-existant. Because 99.99% of people do not actually see a "master branch" as a racially-charged or bigoted term. In the case of Kubernetes, I suppose those terms were chosen from the beginning so there was no cost of switching. And hence why no one complained about it. Which incidentally supports my claim: that people were upset about the cost of changing rather than because of their secret admiration for slavery.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  Coming from an electronics background I hate it.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  Replacing one well known default with another non-retroactively increases cognitive load. At that point it being easier to type is meaningless.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > Replacing one well known default with another non-retroactively increases cognitive load. It's quite clear that managing cognitive loads is the least of all concerns considered by proponents of sticking with non-inclusive terms. For example, the terms "blacklist"/"whitelist" do not impose a lower cognitive load than "denylist"/"allowlist", but somehow this argument is used in favour of sticking with the legacy/non-descriptive terms. Also, there is no objective meaning to "slave". In the times of old, people talked about "slave drives" and I bet that most of the proponents of sticking with racist/bigoted language cannot even describe what it's supposed to be.
gumballindie 3y ago
Yeah I dont think germany is a good example of mutual respect. Far from it actually. Racism and discrimination are rampant in that country, including in tech. Any german moralising americans on racism should first look at their own 10x issues.
- blueflow 3y ago
  Germany is not the one with the "black person shot by police" protests setting stuff ablaze.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Because it’s not in the german media. Censorship ensures the image is clean but in reality germany is at an extreme that makes the us shine. Perhaps not shootings but other types of discrimination.
    - thefounder 3y ago
      >> Perhaps not shootings but other types of discrimination. Like what?
kentrado 3y ago
As a black person, the switch from master to main, is the most condescendingly racist thing that has been widely adopted in tech. It says "black people are too stupid to understand context. We (small group of white people) must protect them against words." Another thing it does, is that it promotes the identification of blacks as slaves when all races have been enslaved (and continue to this day).
- sleiben 3y ago
  100% with you here! Great arguments edit: It also reminds me of men playing feminist and stepping (aggressively) up to protect women’s rights. I heard from my female colleagues that they hate this since it implies that women are like children and aren’t able or mature enough to speak up for themselves. So the «strong men» need now to protect them…
  - SSLy 3y ago
    I don't live in USA, but this very week one of such staunch feminists was ousted as a groomer and violent partner. https://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/gargamel-jakub-chuptys-przemoc-byla-dziewczyna https://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/gargamel-jakub-chuptys...
    - gadders 3y ago
      Many such cases.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  The “white saviour” complex is well documented. Well-meaning but racist in their ignorance white people try to save people based on racist stereotypes and caricatures of imagined problems.
- about3fitty 3y ago
  I would like to ask: do you have a position on the following? - an allowlist/blocklist to replace whitelist/blacklist -primary/replica to replace master/slave Also, how old are you? I’m not young but not old and I don’t associate racial overtones to the latter terms
blueflow 3y ago
Thats also my observation. Whats new is that people now base their identity around it and expect some kind of validation to happen. Do a mental scenario where people did that not with gender identity, but with their heritage or national identity.
sschueller 3y ago
I can understand the master/slave thing as it does directly come from "slavery" so although I think it's stupid to change git I can see it being an issue. Not being from the US I never realized why the large bedroom in a house was called the master bedroom. Changing blacklist and whitelist to allowlist and denylist is however stupid.
- dmarcos 3y ago
  Notice that “master” in the context of git has nothing to do with slavery. Master means the “reference” like “master” copy for CDs / Records that duplicates are made from. Etymologicaly master comes from magister that also means expert / teacher. This is more apparent in some Latin languages like Spanish (I’m Spanish) where we have words like Maestro meaning teacher. In Spanish Master copy translates to “Copia Maestra”. Nothing to do with slavery. Most progressives in the US don’t know anything about this and / or conveniently ignore it.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
It’s the enshittification of everything and the pervasiveness of “pop culture”. Every HR person needs to touch something to feel useful and “changing something”.
- thelastparadise 3y ago
  Well good riddance them in this great tech recession.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
askvictor 3y ago
I work with SPI devices a bit, and _some_ places have shifted from MISO/MOSI (Master in Slave out etc) to CIPO/COPI. Or PICO/POCI (Pico? Like the really cheap and popular RPi device?). MISO/MOSI is at least consistent, unambiguous, and is _literally a master/slave situation_. Unless the end game is to remove the words master and slave from the dictionary in case someone gets offended, this is stupid.
woodpanel 3y ago
> and nobody cared about it you see, this is the gift of American progressive cultural imperialism. Suddenly, the only historiography that can exist in the world is that of American trustafarians who try to minimize their shame of being born wealthy heirs of the slave-owner class by spreading the shame on white immigrants that arrived way after slavery got disbanded. And once you set the precedence that you can at will shame innocent people - the majority of white Americans - into obedience even though it’s technically impossible that their ancestors had anything to do with slavery… well then why stop at Americans at all? Now its every European country and culture that has to subvert itself to the viewpoint of Ivy league grads. Brownfacing, Blackfacing, minstrelshows, Kuklux you name it - it doesn’t matter what Poles could possibly have to do with it, or Germans or Swedes - you are all guilty by being born white. God bless America.
- developer93 3y ago
  I'd say at least some Europeans have their own guilt to deal with, if we're saying the sins of the parents should be visited on the children... Not like the US has a monopoly on terrible history
  - woodpanel 3y ago
    > if we're saying the sins of the parents should be visited on the children I’d say this is the binary option we routinely fail to make the right choice. > renaming master branches/HDDs to main because of rAciSm Sticking to OP‘s topic its just ridiculous to have such a discussion in Europe because we are supposedly to feel guilty about what other people did to African Americans. Lest for the majority of US slaves well into the 1700s were European catholics, or that much of European borders and coasts were routinely raided in the hunt for white slaves (Cornwall, Ireland, Russia…)
    - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      As a brit I didn't know cornwall + ireland were raided for slaves into the 1700s (earlier, with viking Circa 1000 yes, but not after). Could you provide some solid links please? TIA
rewmie 3y ago
> The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho. If I recall correctly, the point of reflecting upon the usage of specific terms was not that every single person thought it was B.S. but that a minority might feel negatively impacted by them, and it took no trouble at all to accommodate them by switching to less charged terms. Basically it's the same argument behind not swearing at the workspace. Were you negatively impacted by replacing references to "master/slave" or "blacklist" with terms like "primary/secondary" or "allowlist"? I hear a lot of people whining about these but I'm yet to hear any coherent argument against it. It's also telling that this dead horse is being flogged in a discussion on the US Federal Government looking into recurring accusations of racial bigotry.
- thunky 3y ago
  But that's not even what "master" means in git. There is no "slave" branch.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > But that's not even what "master" means in git. There is no "slave" branch. I think you're trying to cherry-picking debatable examples as strawmen. The central argument was not that some inclusive terms may or may not extend to all applications. The central argument being made in this thread by anti-inclusiveness proponents is that each and every single proposal to use terms that are not racist or bigoted should be rejected, regardless of their suitability. In addition, I don't see anyone even try to argue that "master" branch is suited of even makes sense, while alternative terms such as "mainline", "development", "production", or even "release" are extensively used.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - thunky 3y ago
      I'm not cherry picking, your comment is a direct reply to: > The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho.

roenxi 3y ago

But it is also a technical improvement. main is easier to type. It takes a lot of effort to overcome the inertia of a default, so even if the reasoning is a bit suspect the outcome is going to be a win eventually.

iakov 3y ago
This is such a silly argument. Let’s call it “m” then - it’s even easier to type, so should be an even bigger win, right? Thousands of scripts and workflows be damned.
- roenxi 3y ago
  Less silly than you might think. An important part of life is letting people you don't like make the world better. The people behind this change are the up-in-others-business personalities. They're always going to be destructive, but we should appreciate when they do a little good nevertheless.
  - TheHappyOddish 3y ago
    > make the world better I really try hard not to mock people on HN, but you need to take a look in the mirror. Your sheltered world view of what "makes the world better" isn't reflective of everyone elses, nor objectively true. I'm glad you think it's good, but you must understand that those who don't agree aren't generally 'bigoted racists' or even people who "don't like" those making the changes.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      Literally everyone who renamed their master branch to main thought it was good, that is why they did it. There isn't some international police force conspiring to strong-arm unwilling coders into renaming their default git branch.
krona 3y ago
Except its a very common adjective, so any time you refer to it you have to say 'main branch' otherwise you've introduced unnecessary ambiguity. Whereas 'master' refers to one thing and one thing only in most contexts (unless you're selling bedrooms).
- thefounder 3y ago
  >> Whereas 'master' refers to one thing and one thing only in most contexts. What contexts? Should we also ban "master" key because it implies it enslaves the other keys?
  - SSLy 3y ago
    I think krona is not arguing against using `master` as default branch name.
olalonde 3y ago
Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia. Consider the QWERTY keyboard, which is far from the most efficient design. JavaScript is notorious for its quirks. Unix commands often lack intuitiveness, suffering from poor naming conventions. Linux is coded in a language that has memory safety issues. Even the English language itself, is riddled with inconsistencies and arbitrary exceptions. The list goes on. To surmount the inertia for any of the mentioned examples, the replacement solution has better be significantly superior. A marginal improvement simply won't suffice, given the large costs of change. To many people, the switch from "master" to "main" had benefits that were, at best, debatable, while introducing substantial costs such as fragmentation, outdated tutorials and scripts, and confusion for beginners, among others. That's what got people worked up.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia. What colossal cost do you see in granting users the choice of, say, picking their default branch name instead of being forced to use "master"? What cost do you see in referring to "blacklists" as "allowlist" instead? Have you ever noticed that critical projects like Kubernetes managed to adopt clear and unambiguous concepts such as "control plane node" and "worker node" without making dubious remarks regarding "inertia"? Any argument regarding "inertia" frankly sounds like a lame excuse to stick with bigoted and racially-charged terms without any valid reason other than a refusal to extend the most basic of common courtesies.
  - olalonde 3y ago
    The costs were moderate, not colossal. But they were still bigger than the benefits, which were tiny to non-existant. Because 99.99% of people do not actually see a "master branch" as a racially-charged or bigoted term. In the case of Kubernetes, I suppose those terms were chosen from the beginning so there was no cost of switching. And hence why no one complained about it. Which incidentally supports my claim: that people were upset about the cost of changing rather than because of their secret admiration for slavery.
Zetobal 3y ago
Coming from an electronics background I hate it.
tjpnz 3y ago
Replacing one well known default with another non-retroactively increases cognitive load. At that point it being easier to type is meaningless.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > Replacing one well known default with another non-retroactively increases cognitive load. It's quite clear that managing cognitive loads is the least of all concerns considered by proponents of sticking with non-inclusive terms. For example, the terms "blacklist"/"whitelist" do not impose a lower cognitive load than "denylist"/"allowlist", but somehow this argument is used in favour of sticking with the legacy/non-descriptive terms. Also, there is no objective meaning to "slave". In the times of old, people talked about "slave drives" and I bet that most of the proponents of sticking with racist/bigoted language cannot even describe what it's supposed to be.

gumballindie 3y ago

Yeah I dont think germany is a good example of mutual respect. Far from it actually. Racism and discrimination are rampant in that country, including in tech. Any german moralising americans on racism should first look at their own 10x issues.

blueflow 3y ago
Germany is not the one with the "black person shot by police" protests setting stuff ablaze.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Because it’s not in the german media. Censorship ensures the image is clean but in reality germany is at an extreme that makes the us shine. Perhaps not shootings but other types of discrimination.
  - thefounder 3y ago
    >> Perhaps not shootings but other types of discrimination. Like what?

kentrado 3y ago

As a black person, the switch from master to main, is the most condescendingly racist thing that has been widely adopted in tech. It says "black people are too stupid to understand context. We (small group of white people) must protect them against words." Another thing it does, is that it promotes the identification of blacks as slaves when all races have been enslaved (and continue to this day).

sleiben 3y ago
100% with you here! Great arguments edit: It also reminds me of men playing feminist and stepping (aggressively) up to protect women’s rights. I heard from my female colleagues that they hate this since it implies that women are like children and aren’t able or mature enough to speak up for themselves. So the «strong men» need now to protect them…
- SSLy 3y ago
  I don't live in USA, but this very week one of such staunch feminists was ousted as a groomer and violent partner. https://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/gargamel-jakub-chuptys-przemoc-byla-dziewczyna https://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/gargamel-jakub-chuptys...
  - gadders 3y ago
    Many such cases.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
The “white saviour” complex is well documented. Well-meaning but racist in their ignorance white people try to save people based on racist stereotypes and caricatures of imagined problems.
about3fitty 3y ago
I would like to ask: do you have a position on the following? - an allowlist/blocklist to replace whitelist/blacklist -primary/replica to replace master/slave Also, how old are you? I’m not young but not old and I don’t associate racial overtones to the latter terms

blueflow 3y ago

Thats also my observation. Whats new is that people now base their identity around it and expect some kind of validation to happen. Do a mental scenario where people did that not with gender identity, but with their heritage or national identity.

sschueller 3y ago

I can understand the master/slave thing as it does directly come from "slavery" so although I think it's stupid to change git I can see it being an issue. Not being from the US I never realized why the large bedroom in a house was called the master bedroom. Changing blacklist and whitelist to allowlist and denylist is however stupid.

dmarcos 3y ago
Notice that “master” in the context of git has nothing to do with slavery. Master means the “reference” like “master” copy for CDs / Records that duplicates are made from. Etymologicaly master comes from magister that also means expert / teacher. This is more apparent in some Latin languages like Spanish (I’m Spanish) where we have words like Maestro meaning teacher. In Spanish Master copy translates to “Copia Maestra”. Nothing to do with slavery. Most progressives in the US don’t know anything about this and / or conveniently ignore it.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

It’s the enshittification of everything and the pervasiveness of “pop culture”. Every HR person needs to touch something to feel useful and “changing something”.

thelastparadise 3y ago
Well good riddance them in this great tech recession.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

askvictor 3y ago

I work with SPI devices a bit, and _some_ places have shifted from MISO/MOSI (Master in Slave out etc) to CIPO/COPI. Or PICO/POCI (Pico? Like the really cheap and popular RPi device?). MISO/MOSI is at least consistent, unambiguous, and is _literally a master/slave situation_. Unless the end game is to remove the words master and slave from the dictionary in case someone gets offended, this is stupid.

woodpanel 3y ago

> and nobody cared about it you see, this is the gift of American progressive cultural imperialism. Suddenly, the only historiography that can exist in the world is that of American trustafarians who try to minimize their shame of being born wealthy heirs of the slave-owner class by spreading the shame on white immigrants that arrived way after slavery got disbanded. And once you set the precedence that you can at will shame innocent people - the majority of white Americans - into obedience even though it’s technically impossible that their ancestors had anything to do with slavery… well then why stop at Americans at all? Now its every European country and culture that has to subvert itself to the viewpoint of Ivy league grads. Brownfacing, Blackfacing, minstrelshows, Kuklux you name it - it doesn’t matter what Poles could possibly have to do with it, or Germans or Swedes - you are all guilty by being born white. God bless America.

developer93 3y ago
I'd say at least some Europeans have their own guilt to deal with, if we're saying the sins of the parents should be visited on the children... Not like the US has a monopoly on terrible history
- woodpanel 3y ago
  > if we're saying the sins of the parents should be visited on the children I’d say this is the binary option we routinely fail to make the right choice. > renaming master branches/HDDs to main because of rAciSm Sticking to OP‘s topic its just ridiculous to have such a discussion in Europe because we are supposedly to feel guilty about what other people did to African Americans. Lest for the majority of US slaves well into the 1700s were European catholics, or that much of European borders and coasts were routinely raided in the hunt for white slaves (Cornwall, Ireland, Russia…)
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    As a brit I didn't know cornwall + ireland were raided for slaves into the 1700s (earlier, with viking Circa 1000 yes, but not after). Could you provide some solid links please? TIA

rewmie 3y ago

> The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho. If I recall correctly, the point of reflecting upon the usage of specific terms was not that every single person thought it was B.S. but that a minority might feel negatively impacted by them, and it took no trouble at all to accommodate them by switching to less charged terms. Basically it's the same argument behind not swearing at the workspace. Were you negatively impacted by replacing references to "master/slave" or "blacklist" with terms like "primary/secondary" or "allowlist"? I hear a lot of people whining about these but I'm yet to hear any coherent argument against it. It's also telling that this dead horse is being flogged in a discussion on the US Federal Government looking into recurring accusations of racial bigotry.

thunky 3y ago
But that's not even what "master" means in git. There is no "slave" branch.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > But that's not even what "master" means in git. There is no "slave" branch. I think you're trying to cherry-picking debatable examples as strawmen. The central argument was not that some inclusive terms may or may not extend to all applications. The central argument being made in this thread by anti-inclusiveness proponents is that each and every single proposal to use terms that are not racist or bigoted should be rejected, regardless of their suitability. In addition, I don't see anyone even try to argue that "master" branch is suited of even makes sense, while alternative terms such as "mainline", "development", "production", or even "release" are extensively used.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - thunky 3y ago
    I'm not cherry picking, your comment is a direct reply to: > The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho.