This same conversation came up at my job. I personally don't think that the effort put in is worth the advantages that it affords, or if there are any real advantages at all. However, I largely kept my mouth shut because I was afraid of the social repercussions.<p>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.<p>As always, paycheck comes in, jira ticket gets dragged from left to right. Whatever.
While I'm sympathetic to the idea of being respectful of everyone, I question whether these changes make any meaningful difference at all.<p>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."<p>I suppose black box testing is on the chopping block next? Or Master's degree/thesis?
Language matters but you should also understand the language you're using or censoring.<p>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.<p>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.
Can anyone find me someone who actually gets offended by this?<p>(And doesn't write a column for the Guardian or make money out of claiming offence everywhere).
This is reaching stupidity levels I never thought possible. This is coming from a code base where you can find the word fuck hundreds of times, as well as other curses. This is coming while Linus has probably directly personally attacked people with profanities on their commits in front of whole mailing lists.<p>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.
My philosophy is to change my behavior to avoid hurting other people. This isn't being weak, this is just good manners (being kind).<p>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).<p>I was concerned about hurting people so I talked to my only black friend (also a developer) and he said:<p><i>"I think people are going overboard with political correctness.<p>Maybe when we switch to the metric system we can change terminology"</i><p>What's A Good Substitute for Master/Slave?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23811866" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23811866</a>
Really surprised to see a comment pool that is completely negative.<p>Wouldn’t primary/replica and allowlist/denylist be more explicit anyway?<p>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.
But I like the ironic sound of "Robot Overlords"!<p>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).
This is one of those changes that does little to actually improve things yet somehow manages to piss a lot of people off, despite the fact that other areas of tech have long been moving away from the "master/slave" terminology (see RDBMSes).<p>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
primary/secondary is even an alternative to master/slave? To me it means that they're on the same level and can do the same thing, while master means that it operates over slave devices.
When the terrorist group ISIS rose to prominence in 2014, many product names and even company names were changed to avoid connection with ISIS. For instance, in the computer world, Cornell's Isis distributed computing library was renamed Vsync. These changes seemed to be uncontroversial; I didn't find any HN discussion of the Vsync name change.<p>This shows that there is precedence for widespread name changes if a name becomes offensive.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_changes_due_to_the_Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_changes_due_to_the_Islami...</a>
I used to disagree with this before realizing that I cared more about them being changed than I cared about the words in the first place. I don't care what the words are. This is a smaller change than learning a new JS framework, and I already care very little about that.
How about we just call them "the M word" and "the S word" as we're already accustomed to that. /s<p>I find this type of virtue signaling very annoying and a slippery slope on the free speech/rage culture front.
What is the point of this? What, is using a "yellow" color for "warning" going to be removed next? What about "red" for stop or "remove"?<p>I can go on , but basically this is getting ridiculous.
The comments here on HN seem really knee-jerk. Some people like to claim no one is made to feel erased or reminded of their otherness when they hear this terminology. Some people seem to think we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.<p>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?
When my team got a black developer I realized that it’s slightly awkward to say the word ‘master branch’.<p>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.’<p>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.<p>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.
Does anyone know the etymology of "blacklist" or "whitelist"? To me, this would be a relevant factor in deciding whether the terms should be deprecated.
I've got no problem with removing master/slave, especially in cases where you could use more descriptive terms.<p>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?
Twitter is already way ahead of curve[1]<p>> Dummy value => Placeholder value, sample value<p>Any clues on who this terminology is excluding exactly?<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733305190342656/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733305190342656/ph...</a>
Voices against this idea are pretty loud. But nobody is giving a real argument. I don't see anything other than "oh it doesn't solve world Racism or Sexism problems" or, "I never thought about slavery when I use my git branch".<p>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.<p>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.
Interesting because we made this change in the Netscape Directory Server in 1996. Ever since I've been a little surprised to see the usage appear here and there. It felt like a memo had failed to get delivered.
Which of course doesn't change a bit, not politically, not historically, nothing. Those words will most likely survive in the jargon, because a) it's hard to change an established terminology overnight and b) they belong to a complete different semantic area than the politics we are discussing about.
If someone's offended by this, they are looking for a reason to be offended.<p>If someone's looking for a reason to be offended, they will find one, no matter what you do.<p>George Orwell warned us about this kind of thing.<p>Edit: If you downvote this post, perhaps you could leave a comment explaining why?
To people upset about master/slave in CS terminology I say: fair enough. We can find metaphors for our tools without punching down.<p>To people upset about CHANGING the terminology: I would ask.. Y so mad?
And will accountants stop using "in the black / in the red"?<p>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.
Great, can someone explain Americans their society is not the world, these projects are international and everyone's tired of American politics leaking in anyway. When will it end?
(throwaway for obvious reasons)<p>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?
While everyone should say: Can we end the extreme wealth disparity where millions of people are couple pay checks from being homeless.<p>It's ironic, since decades of fighting communists in the USA rendered any class-based rhetoric a taboo.
but it IS a master/slave relationship.
Giving something the correct name doesn't mean you're actually promoting it !<p>I don't understand how linus tolerate crippling code for the sake of politically correct. It doesn't look like him
Immediately linking any resemblance of racial identity politics to meaningful programming terms, and then demanding that the vernacular of an entire discipline be ideologically reshaped, means that you are the one who is on the 'wrong side of history'.<p>If these changes are truly merited, they will occur naturally over time.
This is dangerous because it’s a wholesale enforced linguistic shift pushed by a group which claims that the goal is to protect other people who are being “harmed”.<p>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.<p>When has this ever ended well?
<a href="https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/black" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/black</a><p>Check out the large number of senses in which the word ‘black’ represents something negative. Vice versa for ‘white’, ‘light’, ‘dark’, and more.<p>This issue runs very, very deep in the English language.<p>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.<p>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?<p>And so we seem to have flipped in the other direction, and the word ‘black’ is increasingly worn proudly.<p>So if ‘black’ is now to have a positive sense, it is all those negative senses which must come under scrutiny.<p>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.