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I understand that this effort is well intentioned but IMHO this is a colossal waste of time, ad here is what I mean: many of these terms have become well under

I understand that this effort is well intentioned but IMHO this is a colossal waste of time, ad here is what I mean: many of these terms have become well understood in the programming/software space, have unambiguous meaning and serve as communication shortcuts in conversation, documentation and sometimes code itslef. Image how much time will be wasted understanding and disambiguating the proposed alternatives.

mytailorisrich 1y ago
Considering how extremist and orientated this is, I think you are being too generous in calling it "well intentioned". IMHO, it's in the same category as the Cultural Revolution and, interestingly many Chinese who live in the West say the same.
zahlman 1y ago
> I understand that this effort is well intentioned My experience with similar forms of argument (going back to at least 2007) leads me to believe otherwise. The same people who prescribe these kinds of changes will call themselves linguistic descriptivists as they chastise you for accepting the notion of a "standard" English or for buying in to treating certain dialects as more "prestigious" than others. And at the same time that they ask you to give up words that they think have harmful connotations (based on associations that they make without heed to actual etymology or history), they will also push upon you modern coinages that were constructed to do the same, in the same way. Where this document asks me to avoid "jargon", I am quite sure they do not have in mind words and phrases such as "patriarchy", "toxic masculinity" or "man-$VERBing". (Not that there's any reason these concepts would come up in technical documentation, but policies like these are not by any means unique to tech.)
- HankStallone 1y ago
  Agreed. I watched an open-source project I was involved in go through this some years back. Some people used an expansive code of conduct to drive out others who made polite objections to some of its sillier rules, while those who had the upper hand engaged in nasty, personal attacks and were untouched. Saner minds eventually got things under control and replaced the code, but it took a couple of years and some good developers never came back. This kind of thing can do a lot of damage, not all of it obvious.

mytailorisrich 1y ago

Considering how extremist and orientated this is, I think you are being too generous in calling it "well intentioned". IMHO, it's in the same category as the Cultural Revolution and, interestingly many Chinese who live in the West say the same.

zahlman 1y ago

> I understand that this effort is well intentioned My experience with similar forms of argument (going back to at least 2007) leads me to believe otherwise. The same people who prescribe these kinds of changes will call themselves linguistic descriptivists as they chastise you for accepting the notion of a "standard" English or for buying in to treating certain dialects as more "prestigious" than others. And at the same time that they ask you to give up words that they think have harmful connotations (based on associations that they make without heed to actual etymology or history), they will also push upon you modern coinages that were constructed to do the same, in the same way. Where this document asks me to avoid "jargon", I am quite sure they do not have in mind words and phrases such as "patriarchy", "toxic masculinity" or "man-$VERBing". (Not that there's any reason these concepts would come up in technical documentation, but policies like these are not by any means unique to tech.)

HankStallone 1y ago
Agreed. I watched an open-source project I was involved in go through this some years back. Some people used an expansive code of conduct to drive out others who made polite objections to some of its sillier rules, while those who had the upper hand engaged in nasty, personal attacks and were untouched. Saner minds eventually got things under control and replaced the code, but it took a couple of years and some good developers never came back. This kind of thing can do a lot of damage, not all of it obvious.