I wonder how much of this is occurring in tech companies because of the same phenomenon - people are just probably don't want to risk their jobs over something so unimportant.
As always, paycheck comes in, jira ticket gets dragged from left to right. Whatever.
I can't wait till 4chan weaponizes this with some innocuous term as a joke, and everyone else either goes along with it thinking it's genuine, or doesn't speak out despite the absurdity. Kind of like how they turned the "okay" hand gesture into meaning "white power". eg. https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3c5e24b75e755aa25bd603...
Basically this[1] in action.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082
"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."
It's maybe a bit like the term "master" (decoupled from slave) which has very differently nonces in many countries outside of the US. Mainly it's then often not strongly (or not at all) associated with slavery or suppression of people of color.
For example the German word "Meister" is often translated as "Master" but is mainly associated with someone who became really good at a skill, i.e. who mastered it. It's also used in a context of a person who is qualified to teach some from of craft (job), through there the roots are somewhat similar as historically you complied pretty strictly with what your teacher told you.
Anyway, using more inclusive terminology for anything new doesn't cost anything and as such should be done.
This has to stop. Slavery was long gone and finished when master/slave began being used in computer science. They were not used as a meaning to reproduce and glorify the past, they are simple words that explain how the protocol works. Would you rather « master » and « servant »? King and serf? Bully and victim?
This is to me just as irrelevant as continuing the superstitions about 13 and 666: a reactionnary behavior that people should tame and focus on something more important, like actual code correctness, fuzzing or something actually useful.
We should find names that reflects the concept best, while keeping its meaning understandable. Period.
PS: obviously i don't know anything about your personal situation, so i'm not blaming you for anything.
Let me repost a comment I made recently:
In some contexts (e.g. Jenkins), a "master" tells the "slave" what to do and the "slave" does it. This at least is plausibly connected to the real-world meanings of the term, although given that the "slave" is free to start and stop work at any time and the entire job of the "master" is to keep track of that, the analogy isn't great. "Coordinator/worker" works well here.
In some contexts (e.g., MySQL), a "master" sends a copy of all its work to the "slave," and both of them execute it. The "slave" stands ready to replace the "master" if the "master" becomes unavailable, and usually at that point the "master" becomes the new "slave" once it catches up. This makes no sense. "Primary/replica" works well here.
In some contexts (e.g., network device bonding, certain types of logical partitioning or RAID), a "master" is a logical construct, consisting of multiple physical "slaves". All interactions with the "master" are actually algorithmically sent to one or more "slaves," and if all the "slaves" are offline, there's no "master" left. This, also, makes no sense. Terms that would make sense include things like "bond/member" (the members being bonded to each other, and the bond being the resulting abstraction), "LV/PV", etc.
In some contexts (e.g. disk drives), the "master" and "slave" are both devices that provide the same type of service to the host, but the "slave" connects to the "master" instead of directly to the host, and while the "master" is communicating, the "slave" can't. The "master" exercises no control over the slave beyond occasionally blocking the communication channel and it pays no attention to communications between the "slave" and the host. This, also, makes no sense. "Primary/secondary" works well here.
In pseudoterminals, the "master" is a limited API to the PTY object, held by the terminal emulator, which copies text to the screen, interpreters rendering commands, and sends input. The "slave" is a more featureful API to the same PTY object, held by the shell / the command under execution, which does what it wants. This, also, makes no sense. I don't know of a standard term here, but I'd sort of suggest "monitor" and "session," which has the benefit of keeping the initials. The M side is the one connected to your actual monitor and it's also the side that monitors output; the S side is the one connected to the application, and it's associated with at most one session in the sense of setsid(2) (see als credentials(7)).
All of these are different uses, and you can't generally map one to another. For instance, if you're used to a database where "master/slave" is used in the primary/replica sense, and you see a database where the "master" just coordinates requests for work and all actual data is sent to/from some "slave," your knowledge of primary/replica architecture is misleading here.
It's the same really as not questioning things in the soviet union. See the fine HBO program "Chernobyl" for details on what happens when truths are avoided in favor of bullshit.
The danger with the new leftist fascism we see in the US is that people are afraid of saying the truth. Eventually this will be a problem.
The vast amount of people on traditional and social media saying all the things that you claim people are afraid to say refutes this. Whatever you think people are too afraid to say, there is somebody saying it.
Free speech doesn't mean people get to voice any idea without scrutiny. Other's people's free speech also exists. What people tend to mean is "I used to be able to say this without being criticised" and the loss of that privilege is unsettling. If they can't express an opinion and sufficiently support it against objections and criticism then it might not be such a good opinion.
This is an oxymoron. Fascism is a well defined ideology and doesnt mean what you think it means.
That's why they mandate it for new parts merged into the kernel tree.
In which case it's basically free.
"As always, paycheck comes in, jira ticket gets dragged from left to right. Whatever."
10,000% agree with you my friend.
So, social norms? There are plenty of things we collectively don't say or do because of enforced social norms yet all of a sudden when those social norms start to include the perspectives of traditionally oppressed groups, certain people start acting like Western Society as we know it is collapsing by the hands of the censorship police.
(You've been punished for questioning geocentrism? Should have respected those social norms, Galileo my friend.)
Why do people still use this line of argument? Universal social norms used to treat POC, genders, and other protected classes as second class citizens or worse for centuries. That should make it pretty clear why "social norms" can't be used as a justification or logical reason for anything.
If anything, "social norms" is a stance from political conservatism; it's arguing that things should forever stay just as they are now.
I'm assuming you weren't.
Edit: Glad to see the true nature of your culture. I probably won't come back.
So you feeling strongly about it means that you get to decide another person, who has been a member of this community much longer than you, no longer gets a say? Ideas like this are infinitely more damaging than any technical terminology could ever be.
My ancestors were / are from Eastern Europe, i.e., Slavs. The etymology of which is where the word slave actually comes from.
Do I get a say?
In the same way it's proper to use same concept as a metaphor to describe other relationships where one thing is owned by other. There is nothing wrong or offensive in the concept of slavery. Even when the context is enslaving humans.
Slavery is immoral, but the concept of slavery is not.
So, you are the only one allowed to have feelings about this?
So his opinion does not matter? Only yours does?
I was not only taught these words in the context of colonialism, because that‘s not only where they belong. Societies based on slavery were common in the ancient world, including Greece.
All of this changing of vocabulary is not going to help anyone. But it will happen regardless, I‘m okay with watching this phenomenon play out over the next 30 years or so. Eventually society will figure out that this has done nothing to fix social injustices.
In all honesty, it doesn't matter how you feel about it. I do feel strongly about it, and I'm Native Mexican, “
So let me get this right. Your Mexican views count but his white views don’t matter? Ok..
How about don’t discount someone’s view just because they are or aren’t a certain skin color.
I think that's pretty much the gist of everything these days.
I'm with you, 100%.
Most white people think the slavery/genocide of america's past is just that - it's in the past. So, when they hear people pushing on verbiage associated with it today, they think "oh, that person is dredging up ancient history, why don't they get over it?"
I (and many others) would argue the legacy of that genocide and slavery is _alive and well_ and shapes our lives today, daily. [0][1]
If one could reasonably complain about master/slave language in the south in the 1850s, they're reasonable to complain about that language today.
Anyway, I think this work of getting rid of language rooted in violence and white supremacy is _very_ worth doing. It's just renaming branches, no one is asking someone to do anything more than press buttons on their keyboard.
Certainly, not everyone has to, but I hope some companies do this work, they're thoughtful and intentional about their language, and then they deliver better products and services by virtue of having healthier culture than their competition, and grow wealthy. Wealthier than the companies who think this work is not worth doing.
I'd never force someone else to rename branches, but I've renamed all of my branches I can control!
I emailed Github Support to see if I could get away from using `master` on Github Pages on my personal site, and they said they are working on it, but this isn't available yet.
Even this comment feels risky. It's attached to my name. I'm honestly a little intimidated to leave it, but it feels like a cop-out if I set up an anonymous account to say "I agree!"
[0] https://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-white/
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-police/id15...
While the policy should happen whether or not he supports it. I think it does matter how he feels though. He should feel that these words shouldn't be used in this context. Because, we're not going to solve non-whites being second class if a white people can't see the pain cause by the use of the terms. There are so many bigger problems that should be easier to see and acknowledge that seem to just be over looked, because we don't see the pain.
I am with you SambalOelek. I may not understand everything you and your ancestors have gone through so forgive me when I'm ignorant and tell me about it. That said I don't want you or random people like you to have to do all the work, so I'm reading. https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/black-lives-matter
If it brings just one more person into OS isn't it worth it?
Wouldn’t primary/replica and allowlist/denylist be more explicit anyway?
Society doesn’t have to just do one thing. And because whatever momentum is causing this to happen now, doesn’t negate other reasons why it should happen regardless, and shouldn’t be a reason for it not to either.
As for master/slave, I think changing over to primary/replica makes a bit more sense, though then we should also ban the word "robot" while we are at it.
The police one is especially interesting. If the word police becomes banned, wouldn't police themselves simply change their name? Start using Law Enforcement more prominently, etc - and then how long until Law Enforcement becomes a bad word like Police did?
Words definitely shape culture. Using "gay" as a derogatory term like i did when i grew up is clearly wrong, it shapes culture in my view. I _could_ see the argument for whitelist/blacklist also shaping culture, though drastically less i'd imagine. However i think we need to take care not to change things that themselves are not defining culture, like Police. The Police reaction is, i think, effectively an avoidance of a trigger. Of which, the science seems unclear on if even avoiding triggers is healthy (at least, based on a recently study i saw, but did not read).
With that said, if i were to use my comment as logic to decide this.. `master/slave` seems perfectly fine. Slave does not imply who is the slave. If you make associations to a specific group of slaves throughout history, and even currently, the word does not seem to be the cause. Removing it from a dictionary will not help anyone. Compare master/slave to whitemaster/blackslave. The latter would _obviously_ have a .. not so implicit implication. The former, i don't feel implies anything.
On the other hand, blacklist/whitelist could - perhaps - have implied associations in a way that master/slave does not. I could easily support removing that, because the implication seems clear.
We should take care to draw the lines in these complex topics where they might shape our culture. Not removing triggers.
The words aren't the problem, their usages are. I'm not convinced that we should allow the meaning of words to slip and replace them when they become offensive.
I think people may (hopefully) be getting fed up with being politically correct to the point of finding something everywhere they look that they are offended by and needs to be changed.
Primary/replica would be far, far less explicit for describing the relationship between the CPU and an ADC (or ethernet switch, or accelerometer) over something like the SPI bus.
To be fair, the suggestions in the link are more encompassing.
> The state papers of Charles II say "If any innocent soul be found in this black list, let him not be offended at me, but consider whether some mistaken principle or interest may not have misled him to vote".
But it keeps us busy :-)
Many projects have replaced these terms with more accurate ones in the past and it’s a very minor shift. It took very little time to do and years later, only aggrieved right-wing activists are still talking about it. Everyone else is just using software without the distraction of wondering about the origins of the terms they’re using.
Black/White magic White lie Dark patterns Black/Grey/White hat Black comedy Whitewash
Personally I feel these usages of black/white don't come from skin colour, rather from something like night/day.
I'm a black man from a black neighborhood. We like Joe Biden. When Joe speaks freely without preparation, he makes racists and tone-deaf comments continuously. Sometimes they are really horrible. We don't care because we understand the era he comes from and we understand the difference between intentional and unintentional. He has evolved at least little and aspires to do more. Perfect is the enemy of good.
We know that when programmers talk about master/slave, they don't even think about slavery. It's just damn good metaphor. I might get fleeting negative association but I'm not offended. Offense is taken, not given. No need to disarm the world from strong metaphors just to show others that we are not racist.
Racism is power structures, not in innocent use of metaphors.
Sigh.
Possibly! But the main reasons I've seen people are arguing in favour of different terms are moral rather than practical. - I don't think moral reasoning mixes well with practical reasoning. (If it were morally worse, but practically better, would it be better overall?).
You should see the Slashdot thread. It is amazing how hard people will fight for the status quo, even if it's over a small change that doesn't really hurt anyone. It's always a good time for a code review, anyway.
Changing names in software isn't really that hard if you understand the code base. It can even help you understand it better-- and we do it all the time for non-politically-charged stuff. If you find yourself feeling emotional & indignant when someone wants to change a word that bothers them, you should look real close at why. Does it really hurt you that much? Is it honestly hampering your freedom of expression, or any other actually meaningful freedom you have? I'd like to see a good argument for that. And if it doesn't... why are you so upset?
It's quite telling how much this pisses people off. As soon as race enters into it, it's obvious that most minds are already made up. For the last 6-10 years, racists and misogynists have become increasingly bold, and their insidious 'arguments' poison all discourse. I'm done putting up with their sophistry.
Using more accurate terms such as those on the kernel’s list immediately tells you the nature of the relationship AND doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. That seems worth it alone, and it’s really unclear what good reason could explain why a few people would spend far more time complaining about work which someone else will do than it will take to complete that work.
> Although they were in common use, the terms "master" and "slave" do not appear anymore in current versions of the ATA specifications, or any current documentation. Since ATA-2 the two devices are referred to as "Device 0" and "Device 1", respectively. This is more appropriate since the two devices have always operated, since the earliest ATA specification, as equal peers on the cable, with neither having control or priority over the other.
> It is a common myth that the controller on the master drive assumes control over the slave drive, or that the master drive may claim priority of communication over the other device on the same ATA interface. In fact, the drivers in the host operating system perform the necessary arbitration and serialization, and each drive's onboard controller operates independently of the other.
> While it may have remained in colloquial use, the PC industry has not used ATA master/slave terminology in many years.
The slave listens to the master and responds when asked to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaybros/comments/68rrmi/whats_the_i...
(And doesn't write a column for the Guardian or make money out of claiming offence everywhere).
You really ought to look into a bit more history than what you got taught in school as slavery has gone on since as far as civilization and is in no way unique to the US. Slavery still goes on today and changing the terminology has done nothing to help that in any way.
(Is your skin colour relevant to your answer in any way? I have no idea why you included that)
Obviously the history of slavery isn't exactly a happy topic regardless of nationality, but it may not necessarily have the racial tinge to it in other cultures.
Master and slave in this context has nothing to do with human slavery.
I'm a bit more puzzled by the blacklist/whitelist change. I've literally never once heard of anyone having a problem with this. But, if there is an equally descriptive alternative, I'd love to hear it.
i think mostly it's millennial and below just wanting to change "something" that they have control over. i see how millennial and below are feeling the "squeeze" of the society that they wanted to not be apart of (renting instead of owning, freelancing instead of corporate job, code camps instead of college) and now realize that they completely screwed themselves.
this whole movement is there way of lashing back and trying to have a voice. personally i (and probably most Gen Xers and above) could care less which is why there isn't really any "push back" not to go along.
They are not going to say that publicly on the internet, as they expect the alt-right to rain fire and death threats on them if they come out in public.
White people: we will change the terminology in the Linux kernel, you are welcome.
Do society a favour and get this cancer out of your HR departments, and start saying no while you still can; because if you wait long enough, all of the activism will be fake, because it's cheaper and you're not allowed to notice the difference.
This will never happen. Critical race theory and displays of anger are quite in vogue in the academy; actually engaging with police departments requires patience and working with police departments (which your colleagues will find icky). Meanwhile the politicians just want to take advantage of general outrage for their own benefit and that of their party. We'll get a little reform out of the current protests as they stand, but not nearly enough.
This comment will not prevent police from killing black people, but there's an outside shot it will help one or two people in the world actually treat the problem like they actually want to solve it, so, I'll chance it.
Better said in someone else’s words than my own:
https://mobile.twitter.com/btanderson72/status/1279507428128...
It's a very often encountered expression in many European languages.
Historically, white/blacklist did not have racial origins, but history is always happening. The original intent of a word can be erased by its proximity to new taboos and new circumstances, and in this case, white/black have been racialized.
See also: the disappearance of the words "niggardly" and "feck" from common English usage, or how some Thais are uneasy using the word "fuk" (gourd, pumpkin) [0]
[0] https://sci-hub.tw/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808190.013.10
Do you have any citations to the actual etymology? I wasn't able to find anything definitive.
— Ol' Billy Shakespeare, apparently.
You declare that using blacklist/whitelist does harm, yet you provide no evidence. If it does, shouldn't the black belt being the highest grade (and the white belt the lowest) in Karate etc be a positive thing? Shouldn't the white flag being the sign of defeat, while pirates have cool flags that are mostly black really make the difference?
I'm sorry, but no, of course not. I see some (albeit very little, it feels more like avoidance coping, which is more harmful than dealing with your feelings) merit in "I don't want to hear the word slave, it triggers thoughts of the slavery somebody having a similar skin color as me had to go through", but blacklist/whitelist? Black hat? Black Death? Black Hole? No.
It has nothing to do with Africans, and going out of your way to create a connection where none exists for the sake of being offended feels like a mental health issue that needs to be addressed, not encouragement.
It's ironic, since decades of fighting communists in the USA rendered any class-based rhetoric a taboo.
> If we find that much of the overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal justice system is because black people are often poor and poor people often get sucked into the system, should we describe this as “the problem isn’t racism in the criminal justice system, it’s poverty” or as “the problem is racism in the criminal justice system, as manifested through poverty”?
– Scott Alexander https://web.archive.org/web/20200523051001/https://slatestar...
She wants it to have never happened, she wants justice, her community wants to be able to call the police in an emergency and be sure one of their own won't get murdered and they want equality in mind, not just on paper. What good is more money right now when walking in a 'good' neighbourhood you just bought into, or driving a nice car you just bought with your salary can still get you murdered by the police just for being black.
White people have lost their damn minds. It's not about you and how awful you feel your ancestors behaved.
They murder men, women and children alike with impunity.
A death is a tragedy to someone, but the society can't miss forest for the trees, as somebody already mentioned here.
P.S. I'm not at all familiar with US mindset, but isn't making generalisations based on race("White people have lost their minds") racist as well?
2. Police officers help black (and white) people millions of times per year.
3. Police officers murder black (and white) people at most dozens of times per year.
4. Black criminals murder thousands of black people per year.
Any black person who is more afraid of being murdered by a police officer than a black criminal is being highly irrational.
Any person that can't accept the reality that a small number of murders of black (and white) people by police are inevitable in such a big and well armed country is being highly irrational.
A totally reasonable goal is to try to reduce the number of murders as much as possible, which is something that no one disagrees with.
The idea that police are murdering in huge numbers, or that the problem is growing precipitously, is simply a result of people unable to overcome selection bias. They're watching a handful of videos and then exaggerating the problem in their minds.
Was anyone offended by these terms and called for change? Or was this a preemptive move by those thinking something along the lines of, "Gosh, what if someone else sees this? They might get the wrong idea! Better remove it."
I suppose black box testing is on the chopping block next? Or Master's degree/thesis?
Master's degree implies a superiority to the lower degrees, clearly establishing a dominance hierarchy. Is that much different from the master/slave terminology? Or is it just the use of the word "Master" combined with the word "Slave" which is the problem?
The header of Hacker News is orange, and orange is the national color of the Dutch, and the Dutch were slave masters (VOC era). I'm sure once you make the connection, someone can be offended.
So, why not change it?
This shows that there is precedence for widespread name changes if a name becomes offensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_changes_due_to_the_Islami...
I'd be more interested in who didn't change their names despite the connotation.
There's a town in Australia called Isis, who didn't change, nor did their local football team called the Isis devils.
Going through Wikipedia there's also Oxford University's magazine http://isismagazine.org.uk/
A peer reviewed journal: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/isis/current
A British prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Prison_Isis
USGS planetary software used by NASA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Software_for_Imager...
A Dutch aerospace company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovative_Solutions_In_Space
But who is actually offended by the term blacklist/whitelist? This seems to be more like trying to fabricate "potential offenses" out of whole cloth then deal with offensive words?
This is more like "killing a process" ("but people get killed"), "deleting a file" ("minorities are getting erased", "you aren't even removing anything, you're just changing some bytes, so it isn't even accurate"), "touching a file" etc.
It matters what you read into it, but that's mostly you, not the word. Is MariaDB sexist because it's a software that is expected to silently and flawlessly do things for you for free so of course it was given a female name, or is it a programmer's dedication to his daughter?
I understand that git was made by a Finish developer, but in the historical context of the US any allusion to slavery can be problematic because it implies disregard for some people. Imposter syndrome is a big issue with developers, I certainly don’t want to add to that with any extra hints of ‘you don’t belong here.’
I would much rather use the word ‘primary’ for the central branch. I can certainly change that. But our repos are maintained by a dedicated configuration management department in consultation with a quality department. Any change requires meetings and lots of questions by lots of people. When we have 50 other priorities with dollar values attached to them, this type of thing is ranked very low. Plus we would be the only team to do that, we’d stick out like a sore thumb and future merges to primary would require special instruction for our support departments.
I welcome an industry wide shift away from these terms. Although I have no evidence to point to, I feel like this would increase retention. If one day management mandates that we need to rename ‘master’ to ‘primary’ it will make the shift easier because all the meetings where we get asked ‘why’ won’t happen, my team won’t stick out and be different. The change will happen across the board. Most importantly there would be less reason for people to feel like they shouldn’t be there.
It seems a bit racist to me to consider use of the term "Master" in a very technical and unrelated context to refer specifically to U.S. slavery.
Check out the large number of senses in which the word ‘black’ represents something negative. Vice versa for ‘white’, ‘light’, ‘dark’, and more.
This issue runs very, very deep in the English language.
I guess this was behind the late-20th-century culture of deprecating the word black and replacing it with words like “colored”. As if that era had conceded that ‘black’ was an intrinsically judgemental word and should no longer be used to refer to people.
But there was no getting away from the fact that the African skin tone really was black, and so denying use of the word black began to feel more offensive, as if it were something shameful to which attention should not be called. “Don’t worry, son, you’re not really black, you’re colored.” Pretty rough, right?
And so we seem to have flipped in the other direction, and the word ‘black’ is increasingly worn proudly.
So if ‘black’ is now to have a positive sense, it is all those negative senses which must come under scrutiny.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I wonder how we manage to use the word ‘black’ for hair color without negative connotations.
"The land was filled with light"
"The land was covered in darkness"
One of those phrases has a positive connotation, the other a negative. Saying that this is an "issue" with the english language because coincidentally some humans have dark skin is absurd.
Black has a natural association with night, darkness, and shadows. While white is associated with day and sun light. This is deeper than the English language.
This is the moral equivalent of just cleaning the mirrors alone in a dirty public restroom. Probably only done to be able to admire yourself, it doesn't clean any of the real shit.
Words like you’re referring to are offensive to a number of people, and their reasoning is something I don’t quite understand, so I won’t offer an explanation, because I’m not qualified.
Terms like those being discouraged in the linked post are offensive to people for an entirely different reason. Again I don’t find them offensive myself, but I respect those who do and see absolutely no problem with steering clear of them to be kind. Kindness wins here over claims of nannying.
I agree that a minor change of nomenclature isn’t going to solve anything on its own, but it’s symbolic, an act of solidarity, a piece of a puzzle, perhaps some or all of these and more. Let’s just get behind it instead of being negative about it.
I think a bunch of people want to be helpful and do anything that they believe would be more inclusive for others.
What irks me is it comes across more as an expression that their worldview is the one that matters, others aren't to be tolerated.
To people upset about CHANGING the terminology: I would ask.. Y so mad?
What happens when tomorrow somebody complains about male and female connectors not being inclusive. Should we change the names?
What about killing a process? Some people have family members who were killed. Lets change that too.
What happens if a person was assaulted by someone with your same name. Should you change your name to appease that person? "I say: fair enough."
I find this type of virtue signaling very annoying and a slippery slope on the free speech/rage culture front.
> All they that take the S word shall perish with the S word. –Jesus
> Never give a S word to a man who can't dance –Confucius
> There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the S word. –Ulysses S. Grant
> The pen is mighter than the S word
> I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the S word. I will tell the truth wherever I please. –Mary Harris Jones
> There's a huge difference between stage fighting and real S word fighting. –Kit Harington
> So we're living by that S word, and we're going to cut every now and then from it's backlash. –Vince McMahon
> There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a S word. –Mark Waid
What I see are people criticizing these changes because of a fear that perhaps, on some level, they have participated in a language and a culture that continues to demean or ostracize others. It is not a good feeling to realize this. Please ask yourselves why you are so attached to using terms like master/slave. If it had been different from the start, would you even care?
master/slave, maybe there's a case to be made there. But "master" in general has other meanings besides "owner". And black/whitelist have been around for centuries and have nothing to do with skin color.
I, for one, am sick of being bullied by politically correct language police forcibly imposing their ideals on society via shaming and mob justice.
> Dummy value => Placeholder value, sample value
Any clues on who this terminology is excluding exactly?
[1] https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733305190342656/ph...
Master/slave, maybe. But doing so as a reaction to BLM complete ignores the rest of the various people's who've been enslaved at some point in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Abductions
https://jddavies.com/2017/02/20/the-barbary-corsair-raid-on-...
Imagine if major parts of systems architecture casually referenced the holocaust, gassing civilians, or other recent historical acts of violent oppression. Wouldn't you advocate for the same thing?
To assert white-/blacklist or master/slave have anything to do with discrimination or were in anyway offensive is just beyond stupid. If not for this measure, there would be no connection between those contexts; just as there is no relationship between black humor and black people, or between slavery and masters/slaves in BDSM.
Heck, I can still consider removing master/slave acceptable—it is just as more of less a casually chosen terminology anyway—but the rest only creates more problems and solves none.
I'm less inclined to change my behavior for people who just want to be offended or who take it upon themselves to be outraged for someone else (who isn't themselves outraged).
I was concerned about hurting people so I talked to my only black friend (also a developer) and he said:
"I think people are going overboard with political correctness.
Maybe when we switch to the metric system we can change terminology"
What's A Good Substitute for Master/Slave?
Robot: 1920s: from Czech, from robota ‘forced labour’. The term was coined in K. Čapek's play R.U.R. ‘Rossum's Universal Robots’ (1920).
At the end of the day I think there are other (more important) cultural issues with open source development but you can't pat yourself on the back and call them fixed with a git commit lol
I can go on , but basically this is getting ridiculous.
On the other hand I'm just not a fan of the proposals for blacklist/whitelist. I've nothing against changing them, but denylist/allowlist or blocklist/passlist just doesn't "sound right". Blocklist sounds fine, but whitelist and passlist just sound... awkward?
I think they just miss the point. I don't see any reason to not fix this. There are studies that claim language does transmit values and cultural norms. So it isn't only about someone being hurt or reminded of something when (s)he sees a word.
These issue is so big that no single action or change is going to fix it. It requires commitment and lots of small and big changes. And yes a lot of companies aren't going to do anything more than tiny changes while portending that they support the cause. It doesn't mean that others should stop.
If someone's looking for a reason to be offended, they will find one, no matter what you do.
George Orwell warned us about this kind of thing.
Edit: If you downvote this post, perhaps you could leave a comment explaining why?
I don't understand how linus tolerate crippling code for the sake of politically correct. It doesn't look like him
If these changes are truly merited, they will occur naturally over time.
No solid evidence is given, no input is received from the hypothetical “harmed” group. All that happens is a blank check is handed to the people claiming that they’re totally a force for good.
When has this ever ended well?
