4 ms·

It seems to me that it's only the software industry that's intent on purging words. 'Blacklist' is still in wide use even on progressive news outlets.

gotoeleven 3y ago
Yeah and the alternative Africanamericanlist seems more offensive.
HideousKojima 3y ago
And blacklist's origin has nothing to do with race. It was originally coinec to describe a list of people involved in the execution of Charles I.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Words are offensive if people believe they are offensive. It doesn't matter if it's a good reason or a bad reason. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
- slau 3y ago
  The problem comes from the implied connotation: blacklist and whitelist -> black is bad and white is good. There’s perfectly reasonable alternatives: allowlist and blocklist. It’s not really that big of a deal. It’s about death by a thousand cuts. Nobody has suffered trauma by seeing those words. Nobody is going to refuse to work with you because you use those words. But they can be reminders, triggers, maybe just pain points. If by slightly patching my vocabulary I can make some people more comfortable, why wouldn’t I?
  - cassianoleal 3y ago
    > the implied connotation: blacklist and whitelist -> black is bad and white is good Well, no. And you illustrate it so well: > reasonable alternatives: allowlist and blocklist If both statements are true, then "allow" is good and "block" is bad. See, if there's any implication of value then it needs to apply to whatever words you choose to use. In reality, none of those can be qualified as good or bad. They're tools. As such, when put to good use, they will be good; when misused they might be bad. This is true for whatever (black|white|allow|block)list is used.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    >It’s about death by a thousand cuts. That's the truest part of your post, but not in the way you meant it. It's killing useful work and productivity via a death by a thousand cuts. I still have git push origin master in muscle memory, and have to regularly "fix" that to main, all because people with power over the git project insisted on changing the default branch name for made up reasons. Master refers to things other than master slave relationships, and even git's usage explicitly meant it in the slavery sense it was still a waste of engineering effort to change and an annoyance to anyone like me with muscle memory (or all of the people with build scripts they had to update).
    - sebazzz 3y ago
      Your point doesn’t make sense, because you can change your default branch just fine.
      - HideousKojima 3y ago
        Man, it's a good thing I never have to work with repos created by other developers who used the new default branch name then! Not like on a daily basis or anything.

gotoeleven 3y ago

Yeah and the alternative Africanamericanlist seems more offensive.

HideousKojima 3y ago

And blacklist's origin has nothing to do with race. It was originally coinec to describe a list of people involved in the execution of Charles I.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Words are offensive if people believe they are offensive. It doesn't matter if it's a good reason or a bad reason. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
slau 3y ago
The problem comes from the implied connotation: blacklist and whitelist -> black is bad and white is good. There’s perfectly reasonable alternatives: allowlist and blocklist. It’s not really that big of a deal. It’s about death by a thousand cuts. Nobody has suffered trauma by seeing those words. Nobody is going to refuse to work with you because you use those words. But they can be reminders, triggers, maybe just pain points. If by slightly patching my vocabulary I can make some people more comfortable, why wouldn’t I?
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  > the implied connotation: blacklist and whitelist -> black is bad and white is good Well, no. And you illustrate it so well: > reasonable alternatives: allowlist and blocklist If both statements are true, then "allow" is good and "block" is bad. See, if there's any implication of value then it needs to apply to whatever words you choose to use. In reality, none of those can be qualified as good or bad. They're tools. As such, when put to good use, they will be good; when misused they might be bad. This is true for whatever (black|white|allow|block)list is used.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  >It’s about death by a thousand cuts. That's the truest part of your post, but not in the way you meant it. It's killing useful work and productivity via a death by a thousand cuts. I still have git push origin master in muscle memory, and have to regularly "fix" that to main, all because people with power over the git project insisted on changing the default branch name for made up reasons. Master refers to things other than master slave relationships, and even git's usage explicitly meant it in the slavery sense it was still a waste of engineering effort to change and an annoyance to anyone like me with muscle memory (or all of the people with build scripts they had to update).
  - sebazzz 3y ago
    Your point doesn’t make sense, because you can change your default branch just fine.
    - HideousKojima 3y ago
      Man, it's a good thing I never have to work with repos created by other developers who used the new default branch name then! Not like on a daily basis or anything.