4 ms·

Agreed, people get bizarrely up in arms over how git's 'master' doesn't have a matching 'slave' but also set max line width to 80 characters. I don't know if y

Agreed, people get bizarrely up in arms over how git's 'master' doesn't have a matching 'slave' but also set max line width to 80 characters. I don't know if you ran into this one but I was convinced to use 'allow list' and 'block list' over white/black list purely on the basis that its just a bit more descriptive. I sort of wish we could clean language up like this more regularly, just imagine a world where we didn't maintain the notion of an electrical current that flowed opposite to the flow of electrons. So tidy.

Ekaros 2y ago
Maybe we should replace positive and negative when talking about electricity. After all later certainly carries negative connotations... I suggest protonic and electronic with sähkö going from electronic terminal to protonic one. Sähkö is nice and easy to write and much simpler word than electricity...
- burnished 2y ago
  I think your suggestion has much merit, though I think the positive/negative thing may have value due to coincidentally lining up with the math used to describe the forces that act on those particles. Though 'protonic terminal is positive, electronic is negative' isn't any more difficult or arbitrary.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    I used to have this memorized and I've lost the details... So Benjamin Franklin established the standard for charges being positive and negative (based on a theory he was operating under that electricity was a fluid that flowed from place to place, and too much fluid was a positive charge and too little was a negative charge). He declared that glass rubbed by cloth was positive and the charge from rubbing fur or rubber was negative, and we were off to the races. (Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)
    - burnished 2y ago
      That is my understanding as well regarding the path here. That is a good point, but, it would still be really nice if the convention for current just so happened to match the flow of electrons through a wire since it is the common case. At least, I remember that being pretty disorienting for me at times in some electrical engineering classes. Wish I could remember something specific though! Do appreciate you pointing out some counter examples though, always fun.
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        It definitely matters when you start actually caring about electrons leaping through space over long distances. Like... You'll get the wrong answer if you think the electrons in a CRT go from the screen to the gun, or if it's positively-charged particles that are causing carbon deposition inside a vacuum tube. But that actually turns out to be (for most people) a specialized context. I'm startled to discover (because I was in the same camp as you) that the math is so symmetrical that it really almost never matters how the physical charge-carriers are moving, since it's the change in electric field that is causing things to happen.
shadowgovt 2y ago
It felt weird in my mouth the first few times I used it, but I find allowlist and blocklist to be a lot more descriptive too.
Grustaf 2y ago
"Allow list" is only more "descriptive" to someone that doesn't know what whitelist means. It is generally not considered a problem if you can't guess the meaning of a word from how it looks, most words are like that. Why does there have to be a slave just because there's a master? That is just one very specific meaning of the word, out of several dozen, and in the git context it was pretty clear that it wasn't used in that sense, but rather something like "master copy". So the master to main renaming thing was especially silly.
- burnished 2y ago
  You should probably think more about that first sentence yours and about what I said. I'll try to help: which phrase requires less knowledge to understand due to being self describing? does that mean it is more, equally, or less descriptive than the other? do you need to have a specific problem in order to improve something? did I ever say or even imply that there was a problem? You are unironically doing the thing I was talking about by not noticing that I already said that about git's master branch. Master/slave is also a pretty common phrase in computing when talking about hardware, and its a pretty ugly concept when applied to humans, so I'm also not terribly surprised people chose to change their default branch name even if the association is only tangential. You wouldn't be surprised if the old name was 'ScrapedCornea' and people didn't love it. But again, its bizarre that a shift from 'master' to 'main', which is shorter, provokes this response. Do you feel personally critiqued by it somehow? Genuinely curious.
  - Grustaf 2y ago
    If you had ancestors that were slaves in the 1800s and for that reason want to avoid any word that looks like "master", even if used in a different meaning, then by all means go ahead and change your git branch name, that's your business, as silly as it is. I only object if you want to project this absurdity on others, and make THEM change THEIR branch names. I personally have much closer ancestors, that were tortured by the communists within living memory. What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me? Or in analogy with the github situation, if I asked people to stop wearing Che t-shirts? Would you say that was reasonable, or a sign of insanity? As I said, "allow list" is more descriptive if you don't know the word whitelist in the sense that it's easier to guess its meaning the first time you see it. My point is that this is not generally considered important, just look at 100 random words, most of them would be hard to guess the exact meaning of, even if like me you studied classical languages.

Ekaros 2y ago

Maybe we should replace positive and negative when talking about electricity. After all later certainly carries negative connotations... I suggest protonic and electronic with sähkö going from electronic terminal to protonic one. Sähkö is nice and easy to write and much simpler word than electricity...

burnished 2y ago
I think your suggestion has much merit, though I think the positive/negative thing may have value due to coincidentally lining up with the math used to describe the forces that act on those particles. Though 'protonic terminal is positive, electronic is negative' isn't any more difficult or arbitrary.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  I used to have this memorized and I've lost the details... So Benjamin Franklin established the standard for charges being positive and negative (based on a theory he was operating under that electricity was a fluid that flowed from place to place, and too much fluid was a positive charge and too little was a negative charge). He declared that glass rubbed by cloth was positive and the charge from rubbing fur or rubber was negative, and we were off to the races. (Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)
  - burnished 2y ago
    That is my understanding as well regarding the path here. That is a good point, but, it would still be really nice if the convention for current just so happened to match the flow of electrons through a wire since it is the common case. At least, I remember that being pretty disorienting for me at times in some electrical engineering classes. Wish I could remember something specific though! Do appreciate you pointing out some counter examples though, always fun.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      It definitely matters when you start actually caring about electrons leaping through space over long distances. Like... You'll get the wrong answer if you think the electrons in a CRT go from the screen to the gun, or if it's positively-charged particles that are causing carbon deposition inside a vacuum tube. But that actually turns out to be (for most people) a specialized context. I'm startled to discover (because I was in the same camp as you) that the math is so symmetrical that it really almost never matters how the physical charge-carriers are moving, since it's the change in electric field that is causing things to happen.

shadowgovt 2y ago

It felt weird in my mouth the first few times I used it, but I find allowlist and blocklist to be a lot more descriptive too.

Grustaf 2y ago

"Allow list" is only more "descriptive" to someone that doesn't know what whitelist means. It is generally not considered a problem if you can't guess the meaning of a word from how it looks, most words are like that. Why does there have to be a slave just because there's a master? That is just one very specific meaning of the word, out of several dozen, and in the git context it was pretty clear that it wasn't used in that sense, but rather something like "master copy". So the master to main renaming thing was especially silly.

burnished 2y ago
You should probably think more about that first sentence yours and about what I said. I'll try to help: which phrase requires less knowledge to understand due to being self describing? does that mean it is more, equally, or less descriptive than the other? do you need to have a specific problem in order to improve something? did I ever say or even imply that there was a problem? You are unironically doing the thing I was talking about by not noticing that I already said that about git's master branch. Master/slave is also a pretty common phrase in computing when talking about hardware, and its a pretty ugly concept when applied to humans, so I'm also not terribly surprised people chose to change their default branch name even if the association is only tangential. You wouldn't be surprised if the old name was 'ScrapedCornea' and people didn't love it. But again, its bizarre that a shift from 'master' to 'main', which is shorter, provokes this response. Do you feel personally critiqued by it somehow? Genuinely curious.
- Grustaf 2y ago
  If you had ancestors that were slaves in the 1800s and for that reason want to avoid any word that looks like "master", even if used in a different meaning, then by all means go ahead and change your git branch name, that's your business, as silly as it is. I only object if you want to project this absurdity on others, and make THEM change THEIR branch names. I personally have much closer ancestors, that were tortured by the communists within living memory. What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me? Or in analogy with the github situation, if I asked people to stop wearing Che t-shirts? Would you say that was reasonable, or a sign of insanity? As I said, "allow list" is more descriptive if you don't know the word whitelist in the sense that it's easier to guess its meaning the first time you see it. My point is that this is not generally considered important, just look at 100 random words, most of them would be hard to guess the exact meaning of, even if like me you studied classical languages.