Hacker News Reader

Comment by methodover | Hacker News Reader

This is a fucking awful blog post. Just because you aren’t offended by it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be changed. That’s an awful argument.

It’s trivial to avoid these racially charged words when programming. So just do it.

Like, if a subordinate at work came to me and was like, “I wish we could do X, it would make me feel better about working here,” and X is some trivial thing, it kind of doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if I don’t understand it. I just fucking do it. It’s trivial, it makes them happy. It costs me nothing to do. I happily pay $0 to make a happier employee.

This principle isn’t hard, and pays huge dividends in life: listen to people, and when they tell you something bothers them and it costs you little to fix, fix it, even if you don’t understand it.

View on HN

Please don't. Down this path madness lies.

I understand that it seems easy to accommodate this one simple request, because that's just the one that article discusses. However the folks who really push this nonsense won't stop at program code, and they won't stop at racial sensitivity. Be prepared to scrub all of your user documentation, design documents, and marketing material as well. Be prepared to accommodate the charismatic christians who take offense to references to daemons and 666 file access permissions (I personally know such people). Be prepared to accommodate such sensitive (and politically powerful) individuals as Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, who will publicly label you a racist if you utter the phrase "black hole", in either a scientific context or to describe an inefficient process [1]. Be prepared to police office communication to minimize gendered language; phrases such as "man-hours" and "you guys" are often used as examples of sexist language. On and on.

1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/newsandviews/2008/07/is_black_h...

I don't know, I can see why words which have absolutely no intent of being racist are associated with racism. Is it any more offensive than calling a node with no parent (which is going to be garbage collected) an orphan node? Or using 'kill' to end a process or (to be ridiculous) separating things by "Class", and calling things equal (instead of different or not different)

Intent is everything and giving into pressure like this just reinforces consideration of every word you speak or write and in what possible dimension it can be deemed offensive. In your life you can contort your language and behavior to please everybody but at some point you are no longer behaving for yourself but for everyone else. You have to pretend like you want to speak different pronouns, you have to pretend that calling someone black is much more offensive than calling them African American. You have to make sure that you specifically don't interrupt women, you have to double check (and counter) your implicit bias towards women and minorities when you think they didn't do a good job in the interview.

Some of these things are hyperbole and some of them are not. I know the standard response is that I'm over exaggerating but its par for the course to get diversity training, to have quarterly updates on how more women are being hired! (as if the company were actually eliminating discrimination instead of just bumping numbers up). This is all new and its moving faster and faster.

The mistake you make is that you expect banning these specific words will satisfy their problem.

Time and time again this has been shown to be wrong. There is not some objective wrong being righted, there is just a subjective irritation being magnified because it makes people feel self important to have a pet issue they can parade around for pity and to gloat when they get their way.

Listening to people means listening to everyone, and that includes all the ones who have learned it's better to shut up lest they become the target of these moral bullies. Especially because you actually need to make an effort to hear them, as opposed to those 'victims' with suspiciously loud and wide reach.

I do understand it. That's why I say no.

But take your own advice: when people say these neo-puritans bother them, and that the fix costs as little as just saying no to a handful of busybodies ruining it for everyone, why not listen to _them_ and fix it?

See, your justification is not a justification at all. It's just a rationalization, based on a preconception of what kind of offense, taken by what kind of person, is valid in the first place.

Would you stop using the word “fucking”? Do you think anyone is offended by it? Probably not since it’s so pervasive. In this case when you immediately use it to dismiss what the other side is saying it can alienate others from learning and changing their perspective.

> This principle isn’t hard

Rewriting all those computer science books, dictionaries, retraining all those professors, rewriting all the software that uses these term.

> and pays huge dividends in life

Citation needed.

> listen to people, and when they tell you something bothers them and it costs you little to fix, fix it, even if you don’t understand it.

It costs you your freedom to say anything, which if you read some history books, you'll see that many people had to die for.

How do you feel about changing for example "race condition", or "controller" or "model" (which may be offensive for fat people, could remind them of fat shaming), or heck, even "server" next?

Will you still support this?

This game does not end well. The best move is not to start it at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com