GitHub plans to replace racially insensitive terms like ‘master’ and ‘whitelist’ | Hacker News Reader

GitHub plans to replace racially insensitive terms like ‘master’ and ‘whitelist’

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22 pointsfbnlsr54 comments

This strikes me as a bit silly, because "master"/"slave" are simply words that describe a relationship. One that unfortunately still exists in many parts of the world. We're certainly not going to stop using them to describe the original thing. These aren't derogatory terms, they're just terms. Terms that describe bad things, but terms. Surely people can see the difference between this and something like the "Washington Redskins" name, which is (arguably, but imo) an actual derogatory term.

I don't really have any concerns about whitelist/blacklist (I'm aware of the history) because alternatives are more explicit. Allowlist/Denylist seem strange to hear at first, but they're intuitive, so I'm fine with it.

With master/slave, in Djangos case[0], they replaced it with "leader" and "follower", which obviously have different meanings. Master and slave have a very explicit connotation, which is that one controls the other, and the other has to do everything the other says. Leader/follower does not fit the bill to describe that relationship. We're explicitly and objectively losing precision because we've decided that non-derogatory non-outdated accurate terms in the English language make some people uncomfortable.

And again, to really drive this point home, these are just words. They are not derogatory terms. They're used in accordance with their dictionary definition. This is like saying we should stop using "kill" to describe the termination of a program because people have been killed and that makes some people sad when they think about it.

[0]https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692

I always learned that in language context matters. In the current context master has nothing to do with slavery. Perhaps once when bitkeeper had master/slave you could see it different.

Apparently these people focus only on the word without any consideration.

That said, I do understand it in the master/slave context.

Do you also understand it in the owner/slave context? Want to get rid of 'owner'? What other words are you willing do expunge? Will you be able to say anything at the end?

This movement is so stupid. It's like the novlang in 1984. Master meaning is very large:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master

Yes, some times it was used in the master/salve context but it is far from its most common meanings. It's not even its meaning in the case of a git branch.

With all of that, I think that the world is on the straight line of the future described in the Idiocracy movie!

CS is filled with such terms like zombies, orphans, reaping dead children, etc but nobody finds them offensive as we know it has nothing to do with their literal meaning.

Seems easy enough to imagine who would be offended by the use of terms “orphans” and “dead children,” and why they would prefer not to bring it up constantly.

The issue is that you can have that with nearly every term that has some meaning. Leader/follower? But I've once met a terrible Leader and they had many followers that made my life hell.

If the argument is "but that's only true for very few people": what percentage of the population (or the subset of the population that is programming) does need to be affected before it needs to be changed? Orphans aren't that common either, neither is losing a child.

We should avoid offensive language if there is a simple alternative without any loss in clarity / semantics.

EDIT: Misread and deleted parts.

Reaping, not raping.

They would find it offensive - just look at the santa hat debacle of vscode. But they don't know the terms you listed. It's not like these people know anything about or even have an interest in software dev. They're a purely destructive force, hopping from victim to victim and spreading wherever they find weakness.

This appears to be a deliberate distraction from Nat Friedman's decision to continue the contract with ICE.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20906213/github-ice-micro...

Unlike that, this change doesn't cost anything.

Git does not have the "slave" term, only "master" term. But the "master" term is being removed because it is derived from master-slave connotation from Bitkeeper allegedly.

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/renaming-master-branch-to-main...

Master-slaves have been replaced in many projects, such as Drupal (primary/replicas), Django (leader/followers), OpenSSH (parent/children).

I wonder what would happen to robot term? Robot comes from Czech language, which is robota. It means forced labour.

https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/14/origin-of-slave/

This is the one I don't understand.

Changing blacklist/whitelist is fine, we can make this better.

Changing master in instances where no pairing exists with the word slave doesn't make any sense to me.

The word doesn't make any sense in the context of something that is constantly changing. And Gitnis graph based and the is no real concept of a trunk, like in SVN. So we start calling the dog a dog, instead of a rock.

Discussed many times in the past week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23531032

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23527093

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526311

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23517843

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583005

I like how @antirez put a case against such renames in writing http://antirez.com/news/122

OTOH, what i am worried about is a change for the sake of the change. It gives opportunities to dishonest people with hidden agendas.

It allows developers working for multi national corporations who exploit people around the globe to feel better and safer and purify their workplace of certain negative things, toxic people and retrograde attitudes. If it means that a developer has to change their language to something better to be able to continue to extract wealth from the poor, so be it.

These kind of actions in a non profit or activist space would go unnoticed

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Mass hysteria - everyone needs to take a 7 day holiday from the news media and the internet.

master->slave can be replaced with: employer->employee... omg what have I done with my life (O_o)

"If I don't see it it doesn't exist"

I can understand removing master/slave, but by the logic of blacklist/whitelist, the color names "black" and "white" should also be removed.

The dictionary says that a definition of master when used as an adjective is "main; principal." 'the apartment's master bathroom has a free-standing oval bathtub'"

This has nothing to do with slavery.

The bedroom where the Master slept

Master of course not being specific to slavery - it was in wide use before. Mastering a subject means to be better than those who aren't masters.

The term comes from Latin magister, which means things like 'head' or 'teacher'. It evolved to maestro in Italian, and predated the atlantic slave trade by over a millenia.

A dictionary first and foremost tells you the use/meaning today. You need to look into the etymology to understand if it has something to do with slavery.

What's the point, though? I doubt you have a deep knowledge of the etymology of every single word you use, even for the ones you use all the time. I bet you would feel forced to use a very different and extremely narrow set of words if you did. You might even have chosen another username if you were "sensitive" to how "saber" alludes to an instrument of historical oppression and suffering.

And yet not many people do or seem to care. Why? You might say it's because our culture is still not enlightened, but it really is just because it doesn't matter what the usage used to be as long as it's used with a different, more-or-less harmless meaning today. Not only that, but what about words that have had countless interpretations since forever (black/white)? Why pick the one that happens to be racist?

And I may be making a wild conjecture here, but it's not like talking about a "master branch" will make you more likely to become pro-slavery. I mean, what would "master branch" even mean out of the context of version control?

Words are just labels to meaning. It makes no sense to care about the label. People have declared love with N-words and advocated for genocide with flowery language. Banishing words is a prime example of bikeshedding.

> I mean, what would "master branch" even mean out of the context of version control?

stop being mean. you shouldn't impose your control. whip me for telling you not to. and scold them for whipping me. decentralize the git commit hierarchy! no order!

So I guess describing people as a flower or snowflake in a derogatory manner means that we will have to remove these words soon?

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