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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

I've read about a bunch of these renaming efforts in the past weeks and I think some of these are very justified while some of them seem to take it further than necessary.

The master/slave naming seems clearly outdated to me and this one is a direct reference to slavery. A better word like replica exists so I'm using that instead. This makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand there's efforts to rename white/black list or the "master" branch on git. I've never thought of these as even being related to racism until people started opening issues on Github projects about that. A master branch in this context is just like a vinyl master, or a master class to me. The final finished product and not any kind of reference to slavery. Am I wrong?

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I always thought about it as the "vinyl master" analogy as well but it looks like it has a master/slave origin from the Bitkeeper days.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...

Interesting, thanks for finding that. I wasn't aware of that.

Honestly, why does it matter where the word comes from? Virtually no one ever used a git master branch thinking about slavery and not the "vinyl master" analogy. Shouldn't that be the actual meaning that is worth evaluating? Language evolves over time, the "master" in the git context doesn't have any reference anymore (in meaning) to the master/slave (which is a stupid wording to be honest) from bitkeeper. A soft proof to that is that every time that discussion occurs, you have lot of comments expressing their confusion given that the word in git context is actually used as a "master record".

Thank you, that's exactly how I feel. I've got a Master of Science degree, should I feel bad about that?

On the other hand, I second that "slave" is not a good terminology and trivializes real slavery, while a lot of words like "replica" or "worker" are more descriptive in a software context.

Minion is another option. (Also primary/secondary in some cases.) Replica may or may not be the same thing depending upon context; there are a lot of situations (e.g. flash/strobe) where a secondary device is under the control of the primary/master).

I tend to agree that master has a sufficient breadth of meanings that you often can't/shouldn't eliminate its use.

Should Slavic people now be required to change the name of their ethnicity too? I mean they are literally called slaves. Yup, let's force them to do that because we're being consistent now. No more Slavs. Let's call them replicas. Makes about as much sense as changing "master slave."

This is downvoted but I found it interesting that the English word "slave" is derived from Slav.

From the Wiki article [0]: "In medieval wars many Slavs were captured and enslaved, which led to the word slav becoming synonym to "enslaved person

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs_(ethnonym)

For the same reasons people argue against abusing terminology like "retard" or "gay", you could argue that using the word "slave" affects people's perception of Eastern Europeans.

We just renamed our use of whitelist and blacklist for two reasons, outside of any racial contexts.

The easy one is that we don't want to argue about it, much likes tabs vs spaces - the value for us is in having a standard, not necessarily what the standard is.

The other one is that I spend a ton of time convincing developers to be intentional and deliberate in their naming of variables and functions, and these terms just aren't very intentional. I've had to explain them to several ESL developers because it isn't intuitive.

Blacklist has been in English for hundreds of years with the current meaning... I guess it would not be obvious to ESL developers but do you avoid other difficult vocabulary? Just curious

Allowlist and denylist are great alternatives except they don't read well as verbs

The verbs would be "allow" and "deny".

It's an easy feel good change that people make to feel like they're such great people, rather than doing things that actually further the cause or help in any way.

Because the entire point is to be permanently offended. The people pushing for these changes hold political power based entirely on pushing for change. The push for political correctness can never end for them, because then they will lose power.

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