6 ms·

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 igno

by 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.
        JohnBooty 2y ago
        Can you talk about your observation (assumption?) that people talking about these issues are talking instead of helping in material ways. This is a false dichotomy. Talking about a thing is not incompatible with doing a thing. (I see from your comment history that you've talked about Typescript, and being Irish. Does that mean you don't actually write Typescript and you're, uh, not being Irish in a proper enough way? No.) It's acceptable to discuss a societal issue even if you're not actively doing something about it. There are a lot of things going on in the world and a finite amount of hours in one's day. We can only personally reach out and touch a depressingly small subset of them. I think Putin is a rather malignant head of state, but I am not actively working to depose him, and I don't see a conflict there as long as I'm clear about that. deciding that they need to "help" minorities that they've never met in some way, usually by policing language or fashion. This is a key concept and I'm sure I won't change your mind. But for the record: the belief here is that when you have a privileged group and an underprivileged group, the privileged group has a large role to play in righting this wrong. As an admittedly contrived example, suppose we work at a majority-white company where white employees are openly using racial slurs against black employees. As a white person, I've got a responsibility to confront this and steer things in a better direction. If I'm in management then part of my job is to shape enact and enforce policies to keep this from happening. I think we'd agree on that cartoonishly obvious example, but another key belief is that there are a lot of "lesser" racist acts that may not be as egregious as the "n word" but are still well worth combating. Certainly, I think that any particular policy at any company is up for discussion. I've no doubt there's a lot of overreach in this area. Some companies are surely doing real shitty jobs, but the problem here is "companies doing real shitty jobs" and not the core idea of "hey, let's shape a good company culture here." But I think you are making a lot of other unsupported assumptions: that these policies are enacted by "rich white people" with zero input from the groups they claim to protect, and that these policies are being enacted without other more material changes, and so on. Again: surely true in some cases, but I believe you are conflating bad implementations with bad ideas.
- djur 2y ago
  I assume you think it's a good thing that we don't use phrases like "[black person] in the woodpile" or "[black person] toes" or "[black person] rigged" anymore. Maybe you agree we shouldn't use names for the Romani or Jewish people as idiom for being cheated. I am certain that there is some phrase or term you wouldn't use that my grandfather would have considered harmless, or his grandfather, etc. I don't like arbitrary language policing, either. I think there was a much stronger case for eliminating "master"/"slave" than "master branch", for instance, and if people were to argue for eliminating "mastery" as well I'd consider that ridiculous. It's fine if you don't consider this particular argument persuasive, but if it's a step toward Ingsoc we've all already been sprinting in that direction for centuries.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - peoplefromibiza 2y ago
    > Maybe you agree we shouldn't use names for the Romani or Jewish people as idiom for being cheated All good and admirable, but when I meet someone from the States and say I'm Italian, it usually ends up like this https://www.alessandravita.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/italian-hand-gesture.jpg https://www.alessandravita.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12... or this https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mario-Italy.jpg https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uplo... or with a combo https://preview.redd.it/italian-stereotypes-starter-pack-v0-srgn6w00mlv91.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=f4a923864e9079b95dc51182e5129fc0e2b6e73b https://preview.redd.it/italian-stereotypes-starter-pack-v0-... It's not the words or the metaphors, it's the people! If someone wants to use words against someone else, they'll find a way, no matter what. Policing words is fascist, if anything, police people bad behaviour, actually, police how your society works and start investigating why you you masterfully created, nourished and spread to the World so many cultural stereotypes about everyone who is not you and doesn't want to be like you! They talk to us about you, it's not the words you use, but *how* you use them. Try to understand that thinking "you person of color -> you bad" it's not any better than thinking "you [n word] -> you bad".
    - deleted 2y ago
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.

by kelnos 2y ago

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.
      - JohnBooty 2y ago
        Can you talk about your observation (assumption?) that people talking about these issues are talking instead of helping in material ways. This is a false dichotomy. Talking about a thing is not incompatible with doing a thing. (I see from your comment history that you've talked about Typescript, and being Irish. Does that mean you don't actually write Typescript and you're, uh, not being Irish in a proper enough way? No.) It's acceptable to discuss a societal issue even if you're not actively doing something about it. There are a lot of things going on in the world and a finite amount of hours in one's day. We can only personally reach out and touch a depressingly small subset of them. I think Putin is a rather malignant head of state, but I am not actively working to depose him, and I don't see a conflict there as long as I'm clear about that. deciding that they need to "help" minorities that they've never met in some way, usually by policing language or fashion. This is a key concept and I'm sure I won't change your mind. But for the record: the belief here is that when you have a privileged group and an underprivileged group, the privileged group has a large role to play in righting this wrong. As an admittedly contrived example, suppose we work at a majority-white company where white employees are openly using racial slurs against black employees. As a white person, I've got a responsibility to confront this and steer things in a better direction. If I'm in management then part of my job is to shape enact and enforce policies to keep this from happening. I think we'd agree on that cartoonishly obvious example, but another key belief is that there are a lot of "lesser" racist acts that may not be as egregious as the "n word" but are still well worth combating. Certainly, I think that any particular policy at any company is up for discussion. I've no doubt there's a lot of overreach in this area. Some companies are surely doing real shitty jobs, but the problem here is "companies doing real shitty jobs" and not the core idea of "hey, let's shape a good company culture here." But I think you are making a lot of other unsupported assumptions: that these policies are enacted by "rich white people" with zero input from the groups they claim to protect, and that these policies are being enacted without other more material changes, and so on. Again: surely true in some cases, but I believe you are conflating bad implementations with bad ideas.
djur 2y ago
I assume you think it's a good thing that we don't use phrases like "[black person] in the woodpile" or "[black person] toes" or "[black person] rigged" anymore. Maybe you agree we shouldn't use names for the Romani or Jewish people as idiom for being cheated. I am certain that there is some phrase or term you wouldn't use that my grandfather would have considered harmless, or his grandfather, etc. I don't like arbitrary language policing, either. I think there was a much stronger case for eliminating "master"/"slave" than "master branch", for instance, and if people were to argue for eliminating "mastery" as well I'd consider that ridiculous. It's fine if you don't consider this particular argument persuasive, but if it's a step toward Ingsoc we've all already been sprinting in that direction for centuries.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  > Maybe you agree we shouldn't use names for the Romani or Jewish people as idiom for being cheated All good and admirable, but when I meet someone from the States and say I'm Italian, it usually ends up like this https://www.alessandravita.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/italian-hand-gesture.jpg https://www.alessandravita.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12... or this https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mario-Italy.jpg https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uplo... or with a combo https://preview.redd.it/italian-stereotypes-starter-pack-v0-srgn6w00mlv91.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=f4a923864e9079b95dc51182e5129fc0e2b6e73b https://preview.redd.it/italian-stereotypes-starter-pack-v0-... It's not the words or the metaphors, it's the people! If someone wants to use words against someone else, they'll find a way, no matter what. Policing words is fascist, if anything, police people bad behaviour, actually, police how your society works and start investigating why you you masterfully created, nourished and spread to the World so many cultural stereotypes about everyone who is not you and doesn't want to be like you! They talk to us about you, it's not the words you use, but *how* you use them. Try to understand that thinking "you person of color -> you bad" it's not any better than thinking "you [n word] -> you bad".
  - deleted 2y ago

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.