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Comment by sk0g | Hacker News Reader

How are these changes necessary? What problem does moving git branches away from being references to master copies solve?

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It might make the workplace slightly more welcoming (or less unwelcoming) to people who are descendants of slaves.

So is the intended outcome a complete ban on the word "master", context be damned? What about master's degrees, skill mastery, masterpiece?

Surely if you see slavery references anywhere you find the word "master" used in any way, that says more about you?

I never saw the reference until people started pointing it out, so it says nothing about me. But if others do, then I'm not so attached to the terminology that I'd put up a fight to defend it.

What I don't really understand is why people are so outraged by renaming a bunch of stuff. It's a trivial change, who cares?

Have you ever heard of "give an inch, take a mile"?

Today is a trivial thing. Tomorrow could be something more serious but then, it would be too late to complain about it (and today social media is the best example, you can see how peoples' lives are ruined by things taken out of context or exaggerating them).

I have heard that phrase, but I've only ever heard it used in cases like these (and never the other way around):

- parents talking about children

- teachers talking about students

- management talking about laborers

- rich people talking about poor people

I hope you see what the problem is.

The list of changes already includes innocuous terms like "sanity check", "grandfathered", and "dummy value" so, frankly, it's pretty hard to make the case that the "take a mile" isn't already happening.

I have heard it also between friends when one of them is too nice and the other one pushes continously to do whatever he/she wants.

Yes, I’ve heard it used in abusive relationships too.

Aren't most of us descendants of slaves?

Humanity has been killing and enslaving each other for time immemorial, so I'd wager at some point, most civilizations were enslaved to some extent. Maybe recency plays into this, but it's been abolished in the US for a fair few generations now...

What's next? Ban "atomic operation", because some developers may be Japanese? Maybe ban Germans altogather, because what do you know, maybe someone's grandad got killed in the WWII? These virtue signaling actions are absurd and, what's worse, scary. So happily inching towrads thoughtcrime.

It upsets people because of the association with slavery, and it's trivial to use different terminology.

What about masterpiece, master's degree, skill mastery, etc? Seems like an complete ban on the word is the intended outcome.

IMHO master meaning mastery over a field will still be fine.

Master meaning owning someone is the usage under review.

From the article: "In programming speak, “master” refers to the main version of code that controls the “slaves,” or the replicas."

Nevermind that the master copy doesn't control anything at all, it is a master copy of the repository, nothing more.

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