I believe the people those terms affect that they hurt them and subtly reinforce bias. That doesn't feel unimportant to me. What's unimportant is using antiquated, hurtful terms when it would be easy to simply not do that.
This has to stop. Slavery was long gone and finished when master/slave began being used in computer science. They were not used as a meaning to reproduce and glorify the past, they are simple words that explain how the protocol works. Would you rather « master » and « servant »? King and serf? Bully and victim?
This is to me just as irrelevant as continuing the superstitions about 13 and 666: a reactionnary behavior that people should tame and focus on something more important, like actual code correctness, fuzzing or something actually useful.
Before we assume that such things are stupid superstitions or applying race on a term (or choosing not to apply terms in race context) we should listen to the other side of the plate.
We don't have to rename it all immediately, but let's start with the easy stuff and ripple it thru. How hard can it be?
In any case, blocklist, allowlist is way more descriptive than blacklist and whitelist. It describes WHAT the thing does, whereas the black/white relies on a cultural mnemonic that black is bad and white is good. Just name things for what they do, how hard is that?
Why not use pastel colors for chess and checkers because colors black and white are so effing bad?
Should we review the Yin and Yang color semantics too ? Am I offending people when I print my financial statement on WHITE paper? With BLACK ink?
Will there be forbidden words everywhere soon? Should I be able to pronounce the word "slave" in public or will I get stoned for it? Is there going to be a police dedicated to monitor people's use of "disturbing words" that we collectively decided would hurt the sensibility of communities, and started enforcing?
Am I going to loose my job if I commit a diff with forbidden words by the Great List Of Acceptable Words That Don't Discriminate Any Minority In The World? Will my commits to the linux kernel be refused if I chose one word badly, regardless of the actual VALUE of my code? Are we going to cleanse the Kernel from words like fuck or shit or arab? Will there be a PG rating when opening github's project pages so that we don't expose our children to these subversive tractations?
People are starting to confuse their own sensibilities and the greater good. When people start banning words and ideas, they slowly start communitarism and self-isolating rhetorics. They restric their views by hiding the rest of the things they don't like. This just looks like another puritan American move, and it's spreading like karens around the developer community.
This is just like the fake inclusivity where devs are starting to put in their repos what they call "Code of Conduct" where you are now asked to think about the cultural impact of your "Typo FIX" commit over the N communities that would prefer that you call your global variable "allowedList" rather than "whiteList". Oh my.. I don't care. I want my code to be functionally correct, not make BHL happy. Shit, I'm not writing to make a political statement, I'm fixing my SCSI driver implementation.
I've never like colour based names anyway too ambiguous.
If you really want to build something for all times, don't load it up with cultural baggage that will go obsolete.
That's the problem with replacing an actual word with a new term. You get something that would be equivalent, but it doesn't have that innate understanding.
It's not a big sacrifice, but it's less immediately clear.
I don't disagree with your conclusion, but this is such an America-centric statement. Slavery is alive and well today. There are more slaves now than at any past time.
The reductio ad absurdum where any mention of a color is considered harmful is based in the assumption that the issue is with mentioning color. It might be useful to distinguish when a color is just a color (e.g. red/black trees), and when a metaphor is borrowed from an actual crime against humanity (e.g. master/slave).
Funny how you're much more hysterical about how renaming things has to stop, than you are concerned about how slavery has to stop, when you directly deny the harsh objective reality that there are actually many more slaves today than ever before in history.
Get your priorities right. Renaming things isn't taking away your freedom or cramping your lifestyle.
https://www.abc.net.au/radio/perth/programs/focus/modern-sla...
>There are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history. Its estimated that there are 40.3 million slaves throughout the world today, more than at any other time in human history.
https://bis.lexisnexis.co.uk/blog/categories/governance-risk...
>There are more slaves today than EVER before in the history of the world.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-...
>One in 200 people is a slave. Why? Slavery affects more than 40 million people worldwide – more than at any other time in history.
That's not called for.
As for the rest, it seems to me that it's slavery based on race that is the biggest motivator to changing the term. Obviously all slavery is a horrible problem, but other kinds of slavery are much less relevant to the terminology debate.
Leon, why did you flip the tortoise on its back? You aren't helping it, why is that?
> false-call for civility
Is this another "fact"? Got the proof that the call for civility is false? Otherwise this is bad-faith.
> ignoring the reality
The "reality" you describe is disputed.
> people REFUSE to help
they refuse to participate in a bad-faith, antagonistic discourse. There is no attempt at "help" here, just demanding your perspective be accepted as fact, and insulting all who do not obey.
And I'm still not seeing which part was "hysterical".
Exactly who besides you says "slavery based on race that is the biggest motivator to changing the term" and why? Give me some evidence, or retract what you said, because it's outrageously wrong. And where did you get that ridiculous unfounded belief? And what motivates you to propagate it, despite it being false? Just because it "seems to you" doesn't mean there's any truth to it.
It seems to the person who I was replying to, and many other people in this thread, that slavery no longer happens, and they're terribly wrong. Do you also falsely believe there is no more slavery, too? (Yes you do, I see from your other comment: "Nobody is enslaving anyone" -Dylan16807) Is that the basis of your false belief that "it seems to me that it's slavery based on race that is the biggest motivator to changing the term"?
It really puzzles me what motivates people like you to make such unsubstantiated statements whitewashing slavery, and then feign outrage at having your feelings hurt, while so many human beings are currently suffering from slavery every day, more than at any time in history, that you refuse to acknowledge. Can you explain why?
But language DOES matter, and it DOES help people. It's a bit more abstract and decoupled, but shit, you're supposed to be a coder (you ARE on a programming forum), so I'm sure you can handle adding 1 and 1 and getting to 2.
Then address what I said: Do you deny the evidence I just posted about there being more slavery today than ever before in history? What is your evidence that "Slavery was long gone and finished when master/slave began being used in computer science"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_contr...
https://www.mediaite.com/sports/breaking-washington-redskins...
>BREAKING: Washington Redskins Expected to Announce Retirement of Team Name on Monday
The problem is the us and them mentality exists, is very prevalent but basically invisible to or ignored by those on one side of the divide. Addressing issue already present isn't significantly furthering the divide, it's making people aware of what's already there. All the people saying "look how divided we are now!" fail to realise this has always been the way.
In what context can we use the terms master and slave?
The term slave means to be controlled by another entity in its most basic definition. Just because there are loads of people who are slaves in the world doesn't make that term less accurate for its other uses.
Businesses already tend not to use sensitive words, especially publicly. This is just adding to that list. For example, whilst you can kill a process we don’t use the word murder. Same for lots of other negatively emotional words.
People do get hung up on naming & terminology. But as has been mentioned elsewhere, master/slave is often chosen through convention when other names would be clearer. We have a whitelist application at work that is actually an event routing gateway. If we renamed it it’d be easier to explain.
To me it seems an easy task to not use master/slave and white/black when I’m naming things, not something worth arguing about, especially if there’s a chance it removes some negativity for some people. I’m happy to spend a few minutes helping someone with a chore and I see this as the same low level of effort and impact.
You can frame it as "bowing down" either way. The other option is to "bow down" to those who do no want to change but have no good reasons beyond that it's what they are used to and, typically, negative partisanship (that on principle they object to anything promoted by the other side of the political divide, simply because). People need to find better arguments than emotionally & illogically driven defensiveness.
The other option is to have a nuanced debate from both sides where one side isn't thought of as hateful and evil. One side is saying "hey this is a slippery slope" the other side is saying "no you're wrong and you're what's wrong with the world today".
Also, where has my defensiveness been at all illogical or emotional? The arguments presented against doing this seem pretty sound from the people who can explain their reasons.
Is there a net benefit of coddling unreasonable people to such a degree that we're no longer allowing words to have different meanings, and holding integrity through requiring critical thinking to understand language properly? Organizations playing into this are either pandering to the mob and/or aren't grounded in reason. Let's be strong for our brothers and sisters, even if discomfort increases temporarily due to a mob.
Edit to add: it's interesting my top comment was quickly downvoted 3 times right around the time of the above reply, and then my reply here got 3 downvotes quickly too.
Why is your position the one of critical thinking and "understanding language properly" while the people you disagree with want "unreasonable options?"
As the original article shows, what's being asked for is straightforward and simple to do.
There's no mob. No one is getting canceled. We're just changing some terms we use in a software project to be more appropriate.
The phrase "he doth protest too much" comes to mind every time I see comments like the above.
You're argument tactic is to just dismiss which at minimum is lacking integrity.
Sorry, but your framing of this as "coddling" is itself dismissive. That, combined with complaining about downvotes, might be driving the unpopularity of your comments.
I can't see how you can demilitarise police in USA without restricting access to deadly weapons across the board. Who's going to enforce the law if the citizenry have access to disproportionately greater force than the police do.
USA needs to start with rule of law, as the current administration, at least, has subverted that you've no chance to move forward IMO.
One more important issue here is that police have been trained only to use force to execute their duties. An alternative would be for cops to focus on de-escalating conflict.
Another more important issue here is that police forces are used to handle problems that are better served by smaller, more specialized agencies. Psychologists and Psychiatrists for mentally ill people. Social workers for the homeless.
A third issue here that is more important than access to excessive force is the rampant and catastrophic lack of oversight for cops. Protests went on for days before George Floyd's murderer was arrested. If video hadn't made the news that man would still be policing today. George Floyd's death didn't involve a gun, it involved a cop who didn't expect consequences.
Beyond all that, police agencies have empirically demonstrated that they have significant and deep seated racial bias across the board. Even if that can be fixed the simplest way to stop the bleeding is to reduce the funding and therefore power of the police. Once they show they can uphold the law without a tax of innocent lives they can have their funding back, but TBH at that point I doubt they'll need it.
Defunding the police is a simple to understand slogan that covers a lot of possibilities. Plenty of places have abolished their police and rebuilt from the ground up. When people use the slogan that's generally what they mean. Saying they literally expect there to be no police and everything is anarchy is a strawman position no one besides a couple bros in hoodies in seattle actually takes seriously.