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> the article will definitely stop me from using the misunderstood version of events as the "true" origin of the term That's absolutely fair and if that had be

> the article will definitely stop me from using the misunderstood version of events as the "true" origin of the term That's absolutely fair and if that had been there point of the article, I'd be 100% behind it. I love learning new things about words and phrases. Etymology is my jam. But no. That wasn't the point of the article. It's saying "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore". I generally fall quite far on the left, politically. But when people talk about "woke nonsense", this is the kind of thing where I find myself agreeing with them, much as I did a couple of years ago when we were all socially pressured into renaming our "master" branches to "main" branches.

kelnos 2y ago
So what you're saying is that you agree with the underlying message, but because it was presented in a way that offends your sensibilities, you're going to ignore it and continue to use a phrase derived from something that's incorrect and never existed? And really, you're bothered by the idea that 'main' is a more neutral name for the default branch of a git repository, and want to cling to 'master', when that term has traditionally been used to describe someone who enslaves other humans? Really? You're that attached to something like a default branch name in a VCS? Or you aren't, but because it sounded like people were trying to make you feel bad about yourself for using 'master', you're just going to be obstinate and own those libs? All that seems kinda spiteful and petty. You do you, I guess.
- brabel 2y ago
  > you're going to ignore it and continue to use a phrase derived from something that's incorrect and never existed? I would guess that 90% of phrases and proverbs used in any language fall into that category.
- esperent 2y ago
  > So what you're saying is that you agree with the underlying message No, that's the complete opposite of what I said. Please read again. The part where I said that the underlying message is "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore". If the message had been "you're wrong about something, here's the truth, now make up your own mind about whether you want to keep using it", I'd be completely on board with the article. My decision would probably be that I'm gonna keep using the phrase because all of linguistics is built on misunderstandings, mistranslations, and downright lies, so avoiding every phrase that has "bad" origins is a step on the road to 1984. But that's just like, my opinion, man. You can decide otherwise and we can all get along just fine.
  - JohnBooty 2y ago
    I’m always puzzled by this common sort of tone-policing reaction to an article that says “we should do X” or even “you should do X.” This sort of phrasing of one’s opinion is as old as essays and speeches themselves, as far as I know. Here is an english translation of a speech by Cicero, the one from which our good old lorem ipsum placeholder text was derived. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Finibus/1*.html https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de... Of course it is sensible for a person to have an opinion on the conduct of others, and to express that opinion. Where is the problem? Unless said author was in a position of power over me I would understand the “we should X” phrasing as kind of like… the standard way that opinions have been expressed throughout history…
    - esperent 2y ago
      Well, maybe this - writing in this imperative tone - is something that we should work on changing? It seems like a more useful change than policing individual words or phrases because of dubious historical misunderstandings.
      - JohnBooty 2y ago
        Did you ever write something like this in a school essay? "I think that people should do XYZ" If so, and your English teacher was at least minimally engaged, they should have pointed out why the "I think" is entirely redundant and best removed. The reader knows that this is your opinion. They may reasonably presume these are your opinions and that you are not writing the essay at gunpoint or while under the influence of alien mind control. Furthermore, no reasonable reader would mistake your opinion for some sort of imperative they are compelled to obey. (Now, I hope this isn't misconstrued to mean that all opinions should be expressed authoritatively and imperatively. That is not always the right tone.)
        esperent 2y ago
        I think that your focus on high school grammar is (perhaps intentionally) missing the point here. I've explained my position on multiple other comments in this thread, if you care to look, and it's not about a grammar issue. It's a societal issue which I've seen called SJWs (social justice warriors) which is characterized as mostly wealthy white Americans (although it spread to other groups too) deciding that they need to "help" minorities that they've never met in some way, usually by policing language or fashion. It's a low effort way to appear to be affecting social change while actually not doing much and in fact most likely just alienating potential allies who would otherwise be supportive of more important changes.
- homebrewer 2y ago
  master in the context of git never referred to slavery, it's derived from the "master record" used by the audio industry. The process of renaming the default branch was started by someone outside the project who never contributed to git in any way before or after that. Thankfully, there are many countries outside the US where this sort of 1984-style language policing is not accepted and we'll continue "clinging" to our "legacy terms", tyvm.
  - heeton 2y ago
    I get that the core issue was frustrating for some and I agree it felt a bit performative, but: I’m always amazed when someone tries to claim that this incredibly thin step away via a music term _with the same originating meaning_ somehow completely disconnects “master” from slavery. Why don’t we spend energy on getting to the issues we actually care about instead of standing on shaky arguments and calling it a day. It’s lazy thinking.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      > _with the same originating meaning_ [Citation needed], as they'd say on Wikipedia. I don't think that's the origin at all. Why do you?
      - heeton 2y ago
        I personally thought it because of some exposure to that industry / video / AV over the years. But then I looked for some examples to confirm and easily found many. Some decent examples here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504086 Googling "Master Slave audio manual" has a bunch of examples. E.g. this manual from 1959 - https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Ampex/Ampex-351-Manual-1959.pdf https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Ampex/Amp...
        CRConrad 2y ago
        Aha, interesting, thanks! I had no idea; I'd always thought it was from "master copy" like in, say, a manuscript that is duplicated by hand. (Sure, the life of a mediaeval monk working in a scriptorium was pretty strictly regulated, but I doubt anyone saw them as slaves, exactly.) Though that Ampex manual isn't all that convincing in this context, IMO. It's about the hardware level, all capacitors and oscillators and stuff, in "master" and "slave" amplifying circuits. That has pretty much nothing at all to do with "master tape" per se; it's more like "master" and "slave" hydraulic cylinders in the clutch or brake system of your car. Your HN link feels like a much better argument here. (Though I admit I haven't followed any of the links in it yet; going just by the quoted bits in the comment.)
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  Do you realize that the only one offended here is you and are using that to gaslight people into feeling bad for something they haven't done and it's mostly not even wrong? for example: you should learn that main and master mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the people of the World. In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). they are just labels to us,, if you are offended by that, there are a lot of other ways to cope than attack people who don't care about them and rightfully so.
  - esperent 2y ago
    > symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). Even in English, the term "master" branch has nothing to do with slavery. It originates from a master audio recording, usually just referred to as a master, from which other recordings are made.
    - marliechiller 2y ago
      It actually has the same origin as the parent poster of your comment: Late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher" (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") from magis (adv.) "more," from PIE mag-yos-, comparative of root meg- "great." The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre. Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/master https://www.etymonline.com/word/master
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). Exactly. Which is also (what at least I think) where "master copy", which has been claimed to be the origin of git's "master branch" comes from. Whether via the music industry's "master tape" as claimed elsewhere in this discussion, or more directly from the "master's manuscript" all the other monks duplicated in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorium, who knows... But zero to do with slavery, AFAICS.
- strken 2y ago
  I read the above replies as believing the linguistic use of "cargo culting" is fine, yet also appreciating knowing that the origin is nuanced and not completely correct (although building a radio mast from bamboo is close enough). "There's more than one way to skin a cat" has an unpleasant origin, yet I'm not going to stop saying it. As someone who has recently been converting our branches to use main everywhere because they were previously a horrid mix, I don't care what American politics thinks is linguistically problematic today. In other dialects where the word master is more common, it's not a problem any more than the word "owner" is a problem. I feel roughly the same way about changing master to main as my Guatemalan friend feels about the word "Latinx": I don't want someone making $350k in San Francisco telling me how problematic it is to speak my own language.
  - psychoslave 2y ago
    There different pragmatic level of matters that overlaps, and when things are so thightly commingled, it’s hard to get one subset of the lore without the rest of it. Take "owner". What’s a product owner in a SCRUM terminology? Is that the person that when leaving the company will keep full exclusive (or even communal) rights on the product? Or is that just corporate novlang to put motivation/pressure on the "wage slave" (to honor/take/loan/steal vocabulary from an other extremity of social perspective)?
- cultofmetatron 2y ago
  the whole switch from master to main was absolutely idiotic. Especially because it was a way for corporations to appear buddy buddy with disenfranchised people while doing nothing meaningful for them. Case in point, microsoft whom owns GitHub having zero issues with helping Israel commit genocide while pretending to care about black lives. Everyone is happy to be "woke" and "diverse" as long as it doesn't interfere with making a profit.
  - esperent 2y ago
    Exactly, this was by far the worst part of it. Corporate lip service to social change, and all the people who apparently are spending large parts of their lives and energy campaigning for social change just ate it up as if it was real social change. It wasn't, it did nothing except for muddy the waters and anger potential allies.
    - stephen_g 2y ago
      I mean, if anything the whole thing caused far more harm than keeping a branch name that maybe could but didn't really have a loose relation to the concept of slavery (there are many other senses of the word 'master' with nothing to do with slavery that the git branch name would make sense to mean), in the division and debate that the whole thing caused. Didn't really help anybody, just caused problems...
    - xocnad 2y ago
      So what can a corporation do today to promote social change that isn't lip service that won't get attacked as woke? The backlash against these linguistic change efforts is spending proportional amounts of pointless energy attacking them rather than investing in more concrete outcomes themselves. I mean really keep using master branches if you want and push for things you think actually help rather than upping the engagement/outrage on something that you can easily ignore.
      - snackbroken 2y ago
        A corporation can donate to charities/provide grants/implement policies that help people based on their actual circumstance rather than their membership of some arbitrary group. For example: Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted). Such initiatives will by definition disproportionately help disproportionately disadvantaged demographics without codifying systemic racism/sexism/etc. The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures. Similarly when providing scholarships, don't limit them to certain ethnicities. Doing so tends to mostly favor the members of the given ethnic group who are already well off. Instead make the scholarship inversely proportional to household income and select applicants randomly weighted by 1/income without regard to skin color. Build community centers and libraries in poor communities regardless of who lives there. Give money to the ACLU and other organizations that help victims of abuse rather than tweeting a rainbow flag in June while simultaneously organizing an industry event in Saudi Arabia.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  > a phrase derived from something that's incorrect and never existed? As I understood from the article, "cargo cults" exactly as in the widely-used metaphor did exist; it's just that they were a small minority of what anthropologists call "cargo cults". So it seems to me it's you who are being not only spiteful and petty but above all, just plain wrong.
- poulpy123 2y ago
  I don't care about using main, master or whatever, I'm not a word fetichist. But I care about people campaigning for changing a perfectly innocuous word I'm using because they decided they didn't like it for absurd reasons. It's the word equivalent of numerology
  - erichocean 2y ago
    I call these people 'word thinkers'—they can't get past the actual words used to the concepts being expressed.
  - motorest 2y ago
    > It's the word equivalent of numerology I won't say that. As much as I frown upon the holier-than-thou attitude plaguing talks on social justice topics, the words we use do have influence on how we think and act.
pyrale 2y ago
> "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore". I didn't remember reading that in the article. Just as a second-check, I've re-read and none of what you say appears in the text. You're building a strawman. > you're not allowed to Specifically about this part, we're talking about someone writing on his blog about something he took the time to dig into and sharing his opinion. There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up. This trope of interpreting every counter-cultural opinion, in every form, as "the powers that be want to gag us" is a way of saying that you won't hear even the smallest dissent.
- esperent 2y ago
  I didn't imply that the article said those exact words, I was restating the article's subtext. I should have used italics rather than quotes though, my bad. > You're building a strawman. Given the large number of people in this thread who got the same impression from the article as me, I don't think so. I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply. > There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up. Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    > Given the large number of people in this thread who got the same impression from the article as me People count doesn't make sound logic. You will find large numbers of people believing the weirdest things, if you're so inclined. > I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply. You used the sentence "you are not allowed". How do you think the blog owner will coerce you if you do not comply with his order ? > Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind. Would you describe your own reply on HN as telling people what they're allowed to do or not to do?
    - GlacierFox 2y ago
CRConrad 2y ago
> ...much as I did a couple of years ago when we were all socially pressured into renaming our "master" branches to "main" branches. Hey, at least it's two letters -- 33% -- shorter.
- esperent 2y ago
  You're not wrong - objectively, main is an equally good or perhaps even very slightly better name than master. But it's like making a tiny change that requires a huge refactoring - in this case, literally millions of developers were involved, not to mention the countless hours of discussion which are still ongoing years later, as you can see from this thread. Was it worth it?
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    Yeah, heck, of course I didn't mean anyone should go back and rename shit in already existing repos! Sheesh, what a crazy waste of effort that would be. But for new projects it really doesn't bother me that the default nowadays is "main" in stead of "master", was all I meant.
api 2y ago
The best example of this jumping the shark is “LatinX” which was greeted by howls of laughter and genuine offense by Latin people. Latin. There is already a non-gendered word in English because English is not a gendered language. Spanish is, and trying to make it not is… colonialism? What are you going to do redesign an entire language spoken by hundreds of millions of people? To avoid offending… is anyone actually offended? This stuff isn’t harmless either. It helps push people toward the far right by making them sound reasonable.
- rayiner 2y ago
  I feel this way about “BIPOC.” I find it absolutely enraging that white people not only would other me like that in polite company, but do so in a way that lumps Bangladeshis in with Pakistanis. I tried to explain to my parents why my daughter’s teacher recruited her into a “BIPOC” affinity group and they got very upset.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    We have anti-harassment training at work, and one of the videos from a few years ago was titled something along the lines of "can you have problematic behavior against your own group" and was a confrontation between someone coded as a second-generation Punjabi and someone stated to be a first generation Gujarati. The kind interpretation of that video is that "there are always subgroups" but it really felt to me as if they were all lumped in the same bucket of "Indian" by the video producer which seems to me to be rather problematic itself.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      Exactly! If the message was “we’re all American and we shouldn’t harass each other” that would be great. But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines. All of them put white people over here and “people of color” over there. But I suspect the second strongest affinity for most “people of color”—after their own group—is white people. Because that’s who people interact with the most often outside their own group. The culture I’m most familiar with, after Bangladeshi culture, is southern British American culture, because those are the people I grew up around. If you subdivide people into any groups more granular than “American”—which I don’t think you should do—you can’t put me over there with the Taiwanese and Latinos as “people of color.” I don’t know anything about those people and have no greater affinity for them than I do for any random American. My sister in law is Taiwanese, and all her friends are Chinese or Taiwanese. And they seem like lovely people, but I’m more out of place in that setting than I am in a room full of white people in Georgia.
vincnetas 2y ago
Did you also managed to rename "scrum master" ?
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  lol “scrum main”
skywhopper 2y ago
That’s definitely not my read of the article. Are you saying you are offended by someone researching this phrase and then suggesting it’s not a great metaphor for multiple reasons? Do you understand you are the one getting mad about what you think someone said, when they didn’t? Also, “main” is far better name than “master” for the primary branch of a git repo for lots of reasons. Did it hurt anything to change the default? Why are you so attached to the old name? If anything it made our automation code better to stop having hard-coded assumptions of what the main branch was called.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > Did it hurt anything to change the default? Yes. Change always has a cost associated with it. In some cases, that cost is repaid with benefits. In this case, it hasn't and will never pay benefits. > Why are you so attached to the old name? Because I refuse to comply with self righteous busybodies who think it's their job to ensure that everyone is acting right. It was obnoxious when those busybodies were railing against comic books/rock music/rap/movies/video games, and it's just as obnoxious when they rail against "master" as a technical term.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Aeium 2y ago
I disagree with the last sentence. If you have some terminology you don't like, provide an alternative. Main is fine. But like what is the alternative to cargo cult provided here? It's a very concise representation of a pretty complex idea. "You are valuing the ritual associated with an outcome instead of the outcome." Is that my alternative? Main is more concise than master. But how do I boil that down without saying "cargo cult"?
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  "By rote". If someone is unfamiliar with the common English term or is understands it is "by habit" but isn't getting the implicit comparison with a practice following an understanding of the underlying process it, like the image of "cargo cult" referenced in the metaphor, may need expanded a bit on first encounter, but it is both more concise, and uses direct denotation rather than metaphor.
  - anthonyrstevens 2y ago
    "By rote" != "Cargo cult programming" IMHO

kelnos 2y ago

So what you're saying is that you agree with the underlying message, but because it was presented in a way that offends your sensibilities, you're going to ignore it and continue to use a phrase derived from something that's incorrect and never existed? And really, you're bothered by the idea that 'main' is a more neutral name for the default branch of a git repository, and want to cling to 'master', when that term has traditionally been used to describe someone who enslaves other humans? Really? You're that attached to something like a default branch name in a VCS? Or you aren't, but because it sounded like people were trying to make you feel bad about yourself for using 'master', you're just going to be obstinate and own those libs? All that seems kinda spiteful and petty. You do you, I guess.

brabel 2y ago
> you're going to ignore it and continue to use a phrase derived from something that's incorrect and never existed? I would guess that 90% of phrases and proverbs used in any language fall into that category.
esperent 2y ago
> So what you're saying is that you agree with the underlying message No, that's the complete opposite of what I said. Please read again. The part where I said that the underlying message is "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore". If the message had been "you're wrong about something, here's the truth, now make up your own mind about whether you want to keep using it", I'd be completely on board with the article. My decision would probably be that I'm gonna keep using the phrase because all of linguistics is built on misunderstandings, mistranslations, and downright lies, so avoiding every phrase that has "bad" origins is a step on the road to 1984. But that's just like, my opinion, man. You can decide otherwise and we can all get along just fine.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  I’m always puzzled by this common sort of tone-policing reaction to an article that says “we should do X” or even “you should do X.” This sort of phrasing of one’s opinion is as old as essays and speeches themselves, as far as I know. Here is an english translation of a speech by Cicero, the one from which our good old lorem ipsum placeholder text was derived. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Finibus/1*.html https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de... Of course it is sensible for a person to have an opinion on the conduct of others, and to express that opinion. Where is the problem? Unless said author was in a position of power over me I would understand the “we should X” phrasing as kind of like… the standard way that opinions have been expressed throughout history…
  - esperent 2y ago
    Well, maybe this - writing in this imperative tone - is something that we should work on changing? It seems like a more useful change than policing individual words or phrases because of dubious historical misunderstandings.
    - JohnBooty 2y ago
      Did you ever write something like this in a school essay? "I think that people should do XYZ" If so, and your English teacher was at least minimally engaged, they should have pointed out why the "I think" is entirely redundant and best removed. The reader knows that this is your opinion. They may reasonably presume these are your opinions and that you are not writing the essay at gunpoint or while under the influence of alien mind control. Furthermore, no reasonable reader would mistake your opinion for some sort of imperative they are compelled to obey. (Now, I hope this isn't misconstrued to mean that all opinions should be expressed authoritatively and imperatively. That is not always the right tone.)
      - esperent 2y ago
        I think that your focus on high school grammar is (perhaps intentionally) missing the point here. I've explained my position on multiple other comments in this thread, if you care to look, and it's not about a grammar issue. It's a societal issue which I've seen called SJWs (social justice warriors) which is characterized as mostly wealthy white Americans (although it spread to other groups too) deciding that they need to "help" minorities that they've never met in some way, usually by policing language or fashion. It's a low effort way to appear to be affecting social change while actually not doing much and in fact most likely just alienating potential allies who would otherwise be supportive of more important changes.
homebrewer 2y ago
master in the context of git never referred to slavery, it's derived from the "master record" used by the audio industry. The process of renaming the default branch was started by someone outside the project who never contributed to git in any way before or after that. Thankfully, there are many countries outside the US where this sort of 1984-style language policing is not accepted and we'll continue "clinging" to our "legacy terms", tyvm.
- heeton 2y ago
  I get that the core issue was frustrating for some and I agree it felt a bit performative, but: I’m always amazed when someone tries to claim that this incredibly thin step away via a music term _with the same originating meaning_ somehow completely disconnects “master” from slavery. Why don’t we spend energy on getting to the issues we actually care about instead of standing on shaky arguments and calling it a day. It’s lazy thinking.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > _with the same originating meaning_ [Citation needed], as they'd say on Wikipedia. I don't think that's the origin at all. Why do you?
    - heeton 2y ago
      I personally thought it because of some exposure to that industry / video / AV over the years. But then I looked for some examples to confirm and easily found many. Some decent examples here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504086 Googling "Master Slave audio manual" has a bunch of examples. E.g. this manual from 1959 - https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Ampex/Ampex-351-Manual-1959.pdf https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Ampex/Amp...
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        Aha, interesting, thanks! I had no idea; I'd always thought it was from "master copy" like in, say, a manuscript that is duplicated by hand. (Sure, the life of a mediaeval monk working in a scriptorium was pretty strictly regulated, but I doubt anyone saw them as slaves, exactly.) Though that Ampex manual isn't all that convincing in this context, IMO. It's about the hardware level, all capacitors and oscillators and stuff, in "master" and "slave" amplifying circuits. That has pretty much nothing at all to do with "master tape" per se; it's more like "master" and "slave" hydraulic cylinders in the clutch or brake system of your car. Your HN link feels like a much better argument here. (Though I admit I haven't followed any of the links in it yet; going just by the quoted bits in the comment.)
peoplefromibiza 2y ago
Do you realize that the only one offended here is you and are using that to gaslight people into feeling bad for something they haven't done and it's mostly not even wrong? for example: you should learn that main and master mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the people of the World. In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). they are just labels to us,, if you are offended by that, there are a lot of other ways to cope than attack people who don't care about them and rightfully so.
- esperent 2y ago
  > symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). Even in English, the term "master" branch has nothing to do with slavery. It originates from a master audio recording, usually just referred to as a master, from which other recordings are made.
  - marliechiller 2y ago
    It actually has the same origin as the parent poster of your comment: Late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher" (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") from magis (adv.) "more," from PIE mag-yos-, comparative of root meg- "great." The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre. Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/master https://www.etymonline.com/word/master
- CRConrad 2y ago
  > In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). Exactly. Which is also (what at least I think) where "master copy", which has been claimed to be the origin of git's "master branch" comes from. Whether via the music industry's "master tape" as claimed elsewhere in this discussion, or more directly from the "master's manuscript" all the other monks duplicated in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorium, who knows... But zero to do with slavery, AFAICS.
strken 2y ago
I read the above replies as believing the linguistic use of "cargo culting" is fine, yet also appreciating knowing that the origin is nuanced and not completely correct (although building a radio mast from bamboo is close enough). "There's more than one way to skin a cat" has an unpleasant origin, yet I'm not going to stop saying it. As someone who has recently been converting our branches to use main everywhere because they were previously a horrid mix, I don't care what American politics thinks is linguistically problematic today. In other dialects where the word master is more common, it's not a problem any more than the word "owner" is a problem. I feel roughly the same way about changing master to main as my Guatemalan friend feels about the word "Latinx": I don't want someone making $350k in San Francisco telling me how problematic it is to speak my own language.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  There different pragmatic level of matters that overlaps, and when things are so thightly commingled, it’s hard to get one subset of the lore without the rest of it. Take "owner". What’s a product owner in a SCRUM terminology? Is that the person that when leaving the company will keep full exclusive (or even communal) rights on the product? Or is that just corporate novlang to put motivation/pressure on the "wage slave" (to honor/take/loan/steal vocabulary from an other extremity of social perspective)?
cultofmetatron 2y ago
the whole switch from master to main was absolutely idiotic. Especially because it was a way for corporations to appear buddy buddy with disenfranchised people while doing nothing meaningful for them. Case in point, microsoft whom owns GitHub having zero issues with helping Israel commit genocide while pretending to care about black lives. Everyone is happy to be "woke" and "diverse" as long as it doesn't interfere with making a profit.
- esperent 2y ago
  Exactly, this was by far the worst part of it. Corporate lip service to social change, and all the people who apparently are spending large parts of their lives and energy campaigning for social change just ate it up as if it was real social change. It wasn't, it did nothing except for muddy the waters and anger potential allies.
  - stephen_g 2y ago
    I mean, if anything the whole thing caused far more harm than keeping a branch name that maybe could but didn't really have a loose relation to the concept of slavery (there are many other senses of the word 'master' with nothing to do with slavery that the git branch name would make sense to mean), in the division and debate that the whole thing caused. Didn't really help anybody, just caused problems...
  - xocnad 2y ago
    So what can a corporation do today to promote social change that isn't lip service that won't get attacked as woke? The backlash against these linguistic change efforts is spending proportional amounts of pointless energy attacking them rather than investing in more concrete outcomes themselves. I mean really keep using master branches if you want and push for things you think actually help rather than upping the engagement/outrage on something that you can easily ignore.
    - snackbroken 2y ago
      A corporation can donate to charities/provide grants/implement policies that help people based on their actual circumstance rather than their membership of some arbitrary group. For example: Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted). Such initiatives will by definition disproportionately help disproportionately disadvantaged demographics without codifying systemic racism/sexism/etc. The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures. Similarly when providing scholarships, don't limit them to certain ethnicities. Doing so tends to mostly favor the members of the given ethnic group who are already well off. Instead make the scholarship inversely proportional to household income and select applicants randomly weighted by 1/income without regard to skin color. Build community centers and libraries in poor communities regardless of who lives there. Give money to the ACLU and other organizations that help victims of abuse rather than tweeting a rainbow flag in June while simultaneously organizing an industry event in Saudi Arabia.
CRConrad 2y ago
> a phrase derived from something that's incorrect and never existed? As I understood from the article, "cargo cults" exactly as in the widely-used metaphor did exist; it's just that they were a small minority of what anthropologists call "cargo cults". So it seems to me it's you who are being not only spiteful and petty but above all, just plain wrong.
poulpy123 2y ago
I don't care about using main, master or whatever, I'm not a word fetichist. But I care about people campaigning for changing a perfectly innocuous word I'm using because they decided they didn't like it for absurd reasons. It's the word equivalent of numerology
- erichocean 2y ago
  I call these people 'word thinkers'—they can't get past the actual words used to the concepts being expressed.
- motorest 2y ago
  > It's the word equivalent of numerology I won't say that. As much as I frown upon the holier-than-thou attitude plaguing talks on social justice topics, the words we use do have influence on how we think and act.

pyrale 2y ago

> "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore". I didn't remember reading that in the article. Just as a second-check, I've re-read and none of what you say appears in the text. You're building a strawman. > you're not allowed to Specifically about this part, we're talking about someone writing on his blog about something he took the time to dig into and sharing his opinion. There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up. This trope of interpreting every counter-cultural opinion, in every form, as "the powers that be want to gag us" is a way of saying that you won't hear even the smallest dissent.

esperent 2y ago
I didn't imply that the article said those exact words, I was restating the article's subtext. I should have used italics rather than quotes though, my bad. > You're building a strawman. Given the large number of people in this thread who got the same impression from the article as me, I don't think so. I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply. > There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up. Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind.
- pyrale 2y ago
  > Given the large number of people in this thread who got the same impression from the article as me People count doesn't make sound logic. You will find large numbers of people believing the weirdest things, if you're so inclined. > I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply. You used the sentence "you are not allowed". How do you think the blog owner will coerce you if you do not comply with his order ? > Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind. Would you describe your own reply on HN as telling people what they're allowed to do or not to do?
  - GlacierFox 2y ago

CRConrad 2y ago

> ...much as I did a couple of years ago when we were all socially pressured into renaming our "master" branches to "main" branches. Hey, at least it's two letters -- 33% -- shorter.

esperent 2y ago
You're not wrong - objectively, main is an equally good or perhaps even very slightly better name than master. But it's like making a tiny change that requires a huge refactoring - in this case, literally millions of developers were involved, not to mention the countless hours of discussion which are still ongoing years later, as you can see from this thread. Was it worth it?
- CRConrad 2y ago
  Yeah, heck, of course I didn't mean anyone should go back and rename shit in already existing repos! Sheesh, what a crazy waste of effort that would be. But for new projects it really doesn't bother me that the default nowadays is "main" in stead of "master", was all I meant.

api 2y ago

The best example of this jumping the shark is “LatinX” which was greeted by howls of laughter and genuine offense by Latin people. Latin. There is already a non-gendered word in English because English is not a gendered language. Spanish is, and trying to make it not is… colonialism? What are you going to do redesign an entire language spoken by hundreds of millions of people? To avoid offending… is anyone actually offended? This stuff isn’t harmless either. It helps push people toward the far right by making them sound reasonable.

rayiner 2y ago
I feel this way about “BIPOC.” I find it absolutely enraging that white people not only would other me like that in polite company, but do so in a way that lumps Bangladeshis in with Pakistanis. I tried to explain to my parents why my daughter’s teacher recruited her into a “BIPOC” affinity group and they got very upset.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  We have anti-harassment training at work, and one of the videos from a few years ago was titled something along the lines of "can you have problematic behavior against your own group" and was a confrontation between someone coded as a second-generation Punjabi and someone stated to be a first generation Gujarati. The kind interpretation of that video is that "there are always subgroups" but it really felt to me as if they were all lumped in the same bucket of "Indian" by the video producer which seems to me to be rather problematic itself.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Exactly! If the message was “we’re all American and we shouldn’t harass each other” that would be great. But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines. All of them put white people over here and “people of color” over there. But I suspect the second strongest affinity for most “people of color”—after their own group—is white people. Because that’s who people interact with the most often outside their own group. The culture I’m most familiar with, after Bangladeshi culture, is southern British American culture, because those are the people I grew up around. If you subdivide people into any groups more granular than “American”—which I don’t think you should do—you can’t put me over there with the Taiwanese and Latinos as “people of color.” I don’t know anything about those people and have no greater affinity for them than I do for any random American. My sister in law is Taiwanese, and all her friends are Chinese or Taiwanese. And they seem like lovely people, but I’m more out of place in that setting than I am in a room full of white people in Georgia.

vincnetas 2y ago

Did you also managed to rename "scrum master" ?

alfiedotwtf 2y ago
lol “scrum main”

skywhopper 2y ago

That’s definitely not my read of the article. Are you saying you are offended by someone researching this phrase and then suggesting it’s not a great metaphor for multiple reasons? Do you understand you are the one getting mad about what you think someone said, when they didn’t? Also, “main” is far better name than “master” for the primary branch of a git repo for lots of reasons. Did it hurt anything to change the default? Why are you so attached to the old name? If anything it made our automation code better to stop having hard-coded assumptions of what the main branch was called.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
> Did it hurt anything to change the default? Yes. Change always has a cost associated with it. In some cases, that cost is repaid with benefits. In this case, it hasn't and will never pay benefits. > Why are you so attached to the old name? Because I refuse to comply with self righteous busybodies who think it's their job to ensure that everyone is acting right. It was obnoxious when those busybodies were railing against comic books/rock music/rap/movies/video games, and it's just as obnoxious when they rail against "master" as a technical term.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Aeium 2y ago

I disagree with the last sentence. If you have some terminology you don't like, provide an alternative. Main is fine. But like what is the alternative to cargo cult provided here? It's a very concise representation of a pretty complex idea. "You are valuing the ritual associated with an outcome instead of the outcome." Is that my alternative? Main is more concise than master. But how do I boil that down without saying "cargo cult"?

dragonwriter 2y ago
"By rote". If someone is unfamiliar with the common English term or is understands it is "by habit" but isn't getting the implicit comparison with a practice following an understanding of the underlying process it, like the image of "cargo cult" referenced in the metaphor, may need expanded a bit on first encounter, but it is both more concise, and uses direct denotation rather than metaphor.
- anthonyrstevens 2y ago
  "By rote" != "Cargo cult programming" IMHO