GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'
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(I know bitkeeper used master/slave terminology for repositories; that is completely irrelevant to git).
Also, it's not reading comprehension, it's subconscious level associations that people basically can't avoid.
1. Where did I say anything about emotional trauma?
2. Even if that was the case (for most it is not as far as I can tell), I am surprised to hear an argument for "ah yes, let's not decrease emotional trauma if we can for low/no cost".
How about decreasing the emotional trauma by actually helping people heal, so they can be calm and not have to fear police brutality or a police state etc, to implement accountability and integrity in our systems? And in another reply I made I suggested that coddling people makes them and us weaker as a society, and allows worse consequences to grow. Arguably doing "low/no cost" things is lazy and procrastinatory, especially when it's relating to something unreasonable or incorrect like associating master-slave in programming to master-slave in human slavery; yes, an unreasonable request not given into by a child being unreasonable will likely lead to a tantrum.
Not responding would be bad and further traumatizing, responding with thought and an actual plan would be deep and powerful, giving into people's unreasonable requests or for-profit company opportunism to look good doing something shallow because people are misinterpreting language is something else.
In another comment I made: "Coddling will only lead to greater problems later, though yes, it certainly is a gesture showing respect — because of the improper associating, trigger it is causing an unreasonable mob. Coddling people makes them and society weaker, it doesn't strengthen them - it turns their anger into something other than critical thinking. Large for-profit corporations who are happy to jump to an easy decision like this seem to be more opportunists than leaders to make a statement like you said in response." - that statement I was referring to is: 'If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch.'
Sounds great, even better for sure! Let's do both! At your day job (if you're in the tech world), which do you have more control over?
> A subconscious association, if using reason, critical thinking,
This is now how subconscious/unconscious biases work, you're again skipping right into "but just logic out of it". People don't react to it with some emotional or anger emotion in the moment, they engrain the association subconsciously in their head, and you have to take massive effort to catch yourself with this. An effort that would be far more than changing the word, and one that tech companies are also trying to work on generally with implicit bias trainings recently.
This is focused on sexism but discusses implicit bias, the training, and its flaws in depth: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...
Most implicit bias trainings at tech companies today are targeting the same things. While the effects of said trainings are muddy to say the least, the theory behind them is well agreed upon and studied.
I'll leave the generalized psych research to you, but here's an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/
I am not a native speaker so my brain might work differently but I don't believe the theory on associations. We're even talking of a noun vs an adjective. Do people make the same associations also when you hear about a Masters degree? Or when you hear about Slavic people, do you feel for the times when they were enslaved?
I have no problem with replacing master/slave, there are usually clearer names since that pair has been overloaded (though changing master/slave to master/replica should be just as acceptable as e.g. primary/replica or active/backup, for the same reason!). Even outside distributed systems other names are clearer (controller/device for example).
"Masters degrees" as far as I linguistically understand means "mastery of subject", which is indeed the same language, though perhaps closer to feudal master/subject, which was more ethnic slavery in Europe than the specific iteration in the US. Maybe we do eventually change that one too. Higher education has the same problematic founding as everything else. Let's not forget that Harvard and many other top schools were literally constructed by slaves. As said elsewhere, this is very much about engrained subconscious defaults and norms and you've just highlighted another.
I think generally these are indeed small effects and you have to pick your battles, but I am always saddened when people spend so much effort fighting and arguing against these really costless changes. No one is saying to change overnight and break everything, but it costs nothing to slowly transition away. Those who argue it "changes history" I also find curious as those people seem to be doing a great job ignoring or denying the histories of the words in those same arguments.
Otherwise, it would be "merge to the master" which I have never heard.
It's not a costless change; all documentation would be split between that for "master" and that for "main". The cynic in me sees Embrace, Extend, Extinguish all over again.
> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
How did we get from "change one word, find/replace basically" to an entire predatory policy by Microsoft?
If anything, this proves that it is possible over time. The issue with EEE was not the change itself but the power Microsoft gained by enforcing examples itself. Where's the power issue in making a change that is a positive for the world without negatives once past the transitional issue?
Again, my point here is that this just feel like people put more energy into fighting it than the change costs, and I think often that speaks more to people marginalizing the underlying issue than caring about the problems with the change itself.
If you name your git branch "maint", that proper noun comes from the common noun "maintenance".
If you name your git branch "master", that proper noun comes from the adjective "master".
> The issue with EEE was not the change itself but the power Microsoft gained by enforcing examples itself
Exactly, making things different is effectively a potential lock-in issue for GitHub vs. other git hosts.
Even if it was an adjective, you act as if that magically excludes it from being associated with the master/slave distributed systems reference, but it's still a CS term at the end of the day and I fail to see how there would not be a subconscious association there.
> Exactly, making things different is effectively a potential lock-in issue for GitHub vs. other git hosts.
Or all the others can change too for the low cost of near zero, at the same time. If those companies don't want to change for the societal good, maybe that's a legitimate reason not to use them. Do you really believe a single rename in the name of societal good that anyone can do with low cost is going to cause vendor lock-in?
I don't believe there's any gain at all to achieve in terms of societal good, therefore any possible damage is going to be greater than zero. I am ready to be called a racist or fascist for this, which would be quite ironic given that my grandparents and great-grandparents had several unpleasant interactions with the Italian fascist party.
The only thing I can say then is to look to psych research, implicit bias, and biases in decision making studies. The conclusions there clearly point the opposite direction. I'll drop one such example to start[1]
> I am ready to be called a racist or fascist for this
People walk into these assuming this hostility, but if you want such hostility to change, it's a two way street. It's been well established we are all a little racist, ironically here thanks to ingrained biases such as the one we are discussing. What matters is that you're trying to fight against those tendencies, learning, and correcting where you can. No one is asking for perfection. When people bring in hostility into these conversations though is where that then becomes interpreted as a choice, not just subconscious.
> my grandparents and great-grandparents had several unpleasant interactions with the Italian fascist party
I don't see why we are still trying to use this line of argument. There are plenty of sexist women, racist BIPOC to other races, etc. Being of or having been related to X can help statistically at a macro level, but does not magically stop an individual from developing any of those ideas.
That said, both origin and practical use have relevancy here.
This is the coddling referred to in a sibling comment. What basis do you have for thinking such misconceptions are unavoidable? This is tantamount to saying "people can never change", which flies in the face of all evidence I've seen. It seems to me entirely more likely that most folks simply don't take the time to practice decent cognitive hygiene.
Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward.
Rather than pushing back on the issue, challenging these people to perform the self-analysis needed to disabuse themselves of faulty logic, decisions like GitHub's only work to foster and perpetuate a distorted world.
Evidently, this is somehow too much of an ask. How did it ever come to pass that it's _everyone else's_ responsibility to kowtow to the lowest common denominator? Why is it verboten to hold them to a higher standard?
> Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward.
This is an approach that is not productive, but also not applicable here as those types of actions are usually once the rest of the world has moved, and a small minority has not. This is quite early in such a transition and if anything I would expect Github to be praised for it. I certainly appreciate Github starting the process and conversation here.
Coddling will only lead to greater problems later, though yes, it certainly is a gesture showing respect — because of the improper associating, trigger it is causing an unreasonable mob. Coddling people makes them and society weaker, it doesn't strengthen them - it turns their anger into something other than critical thinking. Large for-profit corporations who are happy to jump to an easy decision like this seem to be more opportunists than leaders to make a statement like you said in response.
Political parties do the same, I can't remember what that's called though.
As a white person, the term "slave" in distributed systems always made me feel that way. Not as much for master and whitelist/blacklist personally, but I see no harm in transitioning our terminology away from these types of terms. It's simply a subconscious effect that helps engrain bad defaults we shouldn't be teaching people like "white good, black bad". Study after study has shown that has bigger psychological effects. None of that has to do with anger.
Can we please get rid of this narrative about "coddling" and "triggering" and "anger" when the reasoning for changing terminology has nothing to do with it?
See how deep this rabbit hole goes...
Look at how many words we use without these types of issues too! If you're worried about keeping up with a few intentional linguistic changes a year among many other natural ones, I'd be more concerned elsewhere.
Do we dumb down our language to appeal to every less capable person's abilities? How large or small of a group size to we appeal to? How do you determine that?
So let me get this straight, you're wanting to switch away from master-slave in the context of programming - and now you're wanting me or "us" to stop using the words coddling, triggering, and anger - arguably because you're creating a strawman argument to defend? Is instead that you're simply just not understanding fully what I am saying, like the people misassociating master-slave to human slavery, and so I need to arguably simplify my arguments simply because it "doesn't sit right" with you? Do you see the slippery slope insanity of your process yet?
What does "not sitting right with some people" mean to you? Are you suggesting that anything that "doesn't sit right with some people" we should just change? When do we stop, who's the arbiter of it - you? Or maybe instead we hold integrity for proper language use, people developing emotion regulation, and helping people heal past and ongoing trauma by fixing the structural-systemic sources of their trauma, fear-anger? Explaining to them "master-slave in programming isn't referring to human slavery, and X, Y, Z is what we're going to do to help fix up this fucked up system."
Do you see logical fallacy and potential irony in your statements? And maybe that "slave" in distributed systems always made you feel a certain way is you in fact not differentiating, wrongly connecting, the term to human slavery - attached to it? There are practices of mindfulness like meditation that can allow you sit with and analyze and differentiate by learning to detach to let those improper associations/attachments and the emotions they stir to settle, to not come up - so you don't react and then you refine and hone your sharpness of associations. Do you or have you ever had a mindfulness practice?
> and now you're wanting me or "us" to stop using the words coddling, triggering, and anger
It's ironic this followed by accusing me of a straw man while doing that quite liberally to what I said. I said nothing of the words, I am referring to your line of argument. Those words are simply the typical ones that are often signifiers of the same argument which people have had to waste time on again and again instead of addressing the actual issue here, which I mentioned at length at this post and the parent but you didn't address at all.
I'm all for improving the rights of minorities, but this behavior of eradicating all trace of references to anything tentatively related to historical racism seems like useless noise at best and dangerously naive at worst...
If our society becomes so sensitive that we cannot even utter a word that implies another word which when placed in an entirely different context and the assumption of malicious intent becomes racist then we are doomed to repeat history as a species - i.e unchecked, this pattern of behavior can only evolve into censorship which is itself detrimental to future generations understanding racism in our history.
My hypothesis there (that most people bothered by this change WOULD be bothered by the spelling mistakes) doesn’t apply to you since you are applying a consistent approach to contextual interpretation. My guess could be quite wrong.
Here’s a question along similar lines: the word “niggardly” is a synonym of “stingy”, but through an etymological accident is almost a homophone of a very charged word. Do you also think that “niggardly” is a word worth keeping around? Would you use it while talking with or referring to a black person? It’s more archaic than “master”, so it’s not an equivalent situation, but the overtones strike me as being similar.
This is a genuine question in the spirit of curiosity. There’s both a logical and emotional/visceral component to many words we use, and the overlap is not usually a problem. I’m trying to better understand how people evaluate a charged word’s usefulness in communication. If “master” is charged—maybe not for you personally, but potentially for people you’re talking with—and “main” serves just as well, what’s the issue with swapping it out?
There are several comments by other white people who see this as a highly commendable act. Does anyone actually subject to racism see this move as a positive step that addresses a real problem?
I agree with your hypothesis with respect to master/slave, in fact. In this case the word master has nothing to do with slavery though.
An equivalent to removing "master" from git is removing Spanish names of colors from crayons to avoid having "black" and... "the n-word" written next to each other.
This will just add yet another inconsistency to confuse newbies as they transition from using github directly to plain git cli... The more cynical side of me would think that may even be intentional.
A lot of this bullying evaporates when there's some risk involved in doing it, but that doesn't happen because companies are filled with people that have no strong moral foundation to their lives. So they aren't really sure if they're good people and easily pushed around by anyone who comes along and says with conviction and clarity, "you are a good person if you do X and a terrible bad evil person if you don't".
At the speed this is going, I'm beginning to worry about my master's degree, male/female connectors, and color coding in electrical code.
Unlike SVN (trunk), in git "master" really has no value to the VCS.
I also assume this will be for new repositories, so Github won't break builds by changing existing repositories - because that would indeed mess up a lot.
The virtue signalling can't stop right now.
"Race condition" is just as offensive as "Master Branch" - neither are relating to prejudice / historic injustice; but use different meanings of these potentially loaded words.
That said, nothing against switching to non-loaded terms; especially if the effort to do so is less than the effort to debate it. But we mustn't accuse people of being racist just because they're using terminology that some are offended by when those using the terminology are simply using terminology they've learnt, and could have no reasonable expectation to have considered that it may be deemed offsensive.
Yay.
Like I know some projects set their default branch as develop.
Also the set upstream command, that let's you have a local branch name different from remote, right?
I don’t have a fully-formed idea of what I’m getting at yet, but I suspect that the overlap is high, and it seems inconsistent. Like for “master”, especially when coupled with “slave”, the expectation is that the context of its usage in computing makes it clear that this has nothing to do with humans claiming to own other humans. But use “loose” where “lose” is the right word, and you’re gonna get a snide or “helpful” response about the misspelling, even though the context makes it perfectly clear what the intended meaning was in the vast majority of cases.
Let's do this industry wide and never talk about it again.
With a little work, we can ensure that future generations don't even know what a "double plus meanie" was. In fact, maybe we can even forget that the bad times happened.
It's like with content that is needlessly sexualized. We should keep stuff like that to the context it belongs.
Will the silent majority bend over to these extremists on Twitter?
I would contend, however, that those who are trying to combat racism and it’s markings in our culture are in more of an uphill climb.
Much the same way RMS did not defend Epstein. Truth is often the first casualty.
Because the link here is just saying "that's a good idea and we're working on it" in response to someone asking about changing the default branch name.
Like default sounds like new project creation time.
Creating a different branch requires commiting to the repo, at least from what I understand.
And and branch name is just a text field.