New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

This is the core dispute underlying a lot of critical theory vs the world culture wars. Certain types of people, typically those who have spent a long time in the education system, believe words and ideas are incredibly powerful, so powerful in fact that you can change the world by changing what words people use. This can be seen in a lot of the (IMO) bizarre or dysfunctional stuff coming out of Silicon Valley lately, like word vector models that were "debiased" to make them give politically correct but false answers about the world, this GitHub debacle, capitalising word black when talking about black people etc..

IMHO most people who haven't been exposed to the professoriate don't think like this. The function is seen as more important than the form. Stating something that's false is true doesn't make it true, it just makes the speaker seem stupid and/or dangerous.

Some time if `main` turns out non-inclusive, changing it to other term is counter-productive.

They must change to the source of bad connotation itself if they want to really contribute to those they claim they are helping. If the bad connotation `master` comes from slavery, then fight slavery or slavery-like acts to get rid the bad connotation from the term `master`.

I don't understand why this is not a common sense. Smh

Slave is never used once in git documentation, never has been and never will be: https://git-scm.com/search/results?search=slave

That tweet is from the original creator who made "master" the default branch in git.

Why though, it has nothing to do with skin color. Black and white, grey area, there are lots of things involving these colors, but they aren't about skin color, they're about opposites. And there are plenty of other things including color, e.g. black hole, white vest, carte blanche, but they're not about skin color either.

As a white man, I cannot tell if some black people are offended by that, but I hope not. I had never thought about racism when discussing technical matters using this terminology... until a few weeks ago.

What surprises me it that some people think that changing technical terms will change the lives of victims of racism.

This debate made me think again about a quote from some engineers from the erlang/OTP team:

"We were working on the R1 release of OTP when a group of us left the office and took the commuter train into Stockholm. We were talking about the ease of killing children, children dying, and us not having to worry about it, as supervisors would trap exits and restart them ... we failed notice the expression of horror on the faces of the old ladies sitting next to us "

Should we now rename child/parent relationship too, to please old ladies?

A) Own shortcomings and lack of healthy self-doubt.

B) That life is 100% subjective. There is no objective authority to be found.

I'm sure any terminology can make some engineer (underrepresented or not) uncomfortable. Therapy may help if it becomes recurrent and hard to manage.

I'm pretty sure most engineers, underrepresented or not, would appreciate a healthy, dignifying and diverse management structure and workplace so that uncomfortable language not only is less likely to naturally happen, but when it does happen everyone (underrepresented or not) is adult enough to know if a line was crossed.

I'm pretty sure that underrepresented groups would prioritize stopped being randomly killed, be evicted, be massively encarcerated, be without healthcare and be in a constant dog-eat-dog environment.

    sed -i 's/master/main/g' *

It set me back a moment the first time I saw it, and took me about 30 seconds to mentally internalise the change. After that first time, no issues as a reader of the code/config.

Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this attempt to remove these phrases for less well understood phrases just seems like an attempt to whitewash history for little to no gain.

I'm a firm believer that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them.

Switching from master to main is a good change.

The 'master-slave' terminology has been used in tech for a while (for example, IDE [0]). Yes, it's not intended to be a direct reference to slavery, but that's where the term originated and it's clearly used to mean "one thing is in charge, the other thing follows orders". Yes, there's no explicit 'slave' term in git, even though BitKeeper did (apparently - I've never used BitKeeper).

It's not effortless, but it's not hard to change from master to main ( [1] ).

Plus, it's a great excuse to learn (or sharpen) your grep/awk/sed/etc skills :)

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[0]: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm#pt4

[1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBra...

Leader, for instance, implies a more fluid arrangement of the chain of command that better reflects what happens when a new machine takes over for a server that is having problems or being maintained.

I am a minority in that I am left-handed. I have not yet discovered my minority powers but I'm sure they are growing and will make themselves clear to me one day so I can take my rightful place among the pantheon of minorities.

To be honest, I hope the opposite is true in that I do hope that the "diversity theatre" will be closed before that time, never to be opened again. Those who play in that theatre claim to support minorities but in fact all they do is drive people apart. It is as if their real purpose is to corral people into minority enclaves, to divide and conquer.

I also disagree that it’s especially political. It’s a small name change to be more considerate. The only reason this is “political” — and “merge requests” wouldn’t be — is that for some reason a small group of people are very loudly offended by it.

"main" suggests it is the main branch under development whereas "default" doesn't as clearly.

But both terms are better than "master" if we disregard the weight a bad default name has gotten after years of continued use.

In reality though you can't expect programmers to code for eventualities that occur only in extremely rare cases (until now).