Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main | Hacker News Reader

Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

lore.kernel.org

106 pointsTrisell258 comments

If I say "you are the master of your own destiny", is that offensive, because the word "master" is always offensive?

I think that "main branch" sounds fine, it makes as much sense as "master branch", but I'm irked that people are always caving to word policing. Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended? The other day, people at my workplace were saying that expressions like "blind spot" and "falling on deaf ears" needed to be purged. AFAIK, "blind spot" is not actually about blind people, it's a term related to driving and the angles seeing people can't see in without looking.

Not sure I understand the idea of banning words being taken so far. I always interpreted Git’s usage of ‘master’ to mean the original replica. Like the golden master of a record or CD.

this has been explained further again and again

Nobody banned anything. They changed a default.

Git was developed to replace Bitkeeper. Git's usage of master probably comes from Bitkeeper's usage of master and slave.

Ok, that’s maybe a bit different.

No, the guy who picked the name "master", Petr Baudis, explained why he picked it:

> "master" as in e.g. "master recording".

https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441

I hadn't seen that. Thanks!

He also said "it's not unlikely at all" it was influenced by Bitkeeper[1] and he's "wished many times" he picked main instead[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272958618124595201

[2] https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577

Not only this, but the idea that we should focus our efforts on these utter non-problems (no one has ever been harmed or disenfranchised in any way by the use of this term) as opposed to any of the very real problems our society faces (environment, growing inequality, etc) is itself a real problem. And the people who are meant to be the "victims" of these issues almost never take offense or issue (e.g., Japanese opinions on the little girl's geisha-themed party or Chinese opinions on the traditional-Chinese themed prom dress, or African American opinions on defunding the police, or etc). The people who take offense are very often not even members of these "victim groups", but rather people who believe race is the preeminently useful characteristic of any person and that races have agency and collective guilt/accomplishment and so on (i.e., "racism" in a literal, classical sense).

To me this point never makes much sense, do you really believe that a change as small as a naming convention switch means that we can't focus on real problems? It doesn't make sense and is a non-sequitur argument

At a minimum you should be considering organizational change fatigue. It takes expenditure of political capital to enact these changes even if you don’t see it right away. Spending it on this does mean you’re less able to spend it on others. So asking “is this the most important thing to spend that capital on?” doesn’t seem like a bad question. Additionally, if someone perceives you as being wasteful in how you choose to spend that capital they may be even more resistant in the future to changes that are far less cosmetic.

> a change as small as a naming convention

This "small" change had to be split into 29 parts, so that each part stays below 100kB. This means nearly 3MB of changed code. How many hours did developers have to spend to consider what needs to be changed, make the change and then validate it? In my opinion these are hours wasted, that could be better spent on some real problems.

The post says it was a single global search/replace (probably a grep) operation, plus some automated merge checks. Because most of what was most affected was literally test scripts, almost all of it sounds like it was automated and the vast majority of the "hours wasted" weren't person hours but machine hours.

The reviewer still needs to read it one by one if he decides to adopt it. And it is likely to be many hours.

In the grand scheme of slippery slopes this change isn't even at an angle.

I fully agree that this specific change is insignificant, but the biggest deep learning conference has been renamed, after something like 20 years, because of this kind of pressure.

Word policing has a bit of a 1984 feel to it. Some desire to control you and how you think by controlling which words you use, with new arbitrary words being banned all the time. Instead of actual change, we're focusing on the superficial.

you're having it both ways in your comment here: if it's only superficial and doesn't actually change anything, then you can safely ignore it. it only matters if it is actually controlling how you think (in which case, it is not superficial and is an actual change)

you can argue that it is the wrong change, or that the end doesn't justify the means, etc, but it doesn't make sense to say that it is both thought control, and superficial

It's superficial as in it's addressing the wrong problem. You're not going to undo racism by eliminating the word master from spoken and written language. A word, which, once again, has multiple meanings. It's like you guys don't understand that context and intent matter 1000 times more than the choice of words.

It's wrong because trying to censor the way everyone expresses themselves because a hypothetical person might be offended is a form of bullying.

I can assure you that I have seen 30+ year old graduate students giggle and try not to laugh in the Machine Learning Departments at CMU whenever that conference name was dropped in the office.

I mean, you would think people would grow up, right? I am glad our female colleagues don’t have to suppress their embarrassment while mentioning the conference anymore.

> ...the biggest deep learning conference has been renamed, after something like 20 years, because of this kind of pressure.

This was interesting:

> Of the survey respondents, 1,881 were men and 294 were women. Of the women, 44% agreed a name change should occur and 40% disagreed. Of the men, 28% agreed a name change should occur and 55% disagreed.[5] More than half of those surveyed were against the change, but 30% of those surveyed were in favor. In response, the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation Board of Trustees decided to change the official abbreviation and acronym of the conference from NIPS to NeurIPS. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_on_Neural_Informati...

As a non native-english speaker.

Was this about nipples? LOL is that an acronym for something else I don't know about?

On a slightly related note, the Personal Access Token (PAT) used in Azure DevOps translates to tit in Danish.

Having two PATs or more makes it even worse (or funnier depending on who you are).

A concern would be that the feature Personal Access Token would be avoided, solely to avoid that part of the language. I hope it won’t come to that.

Changing a default isn't banning a word.

The conference was called NIPS. It's slang for nipples and a racial slur. It isn't like everyone was mature about it. There was an unofficial event called TITS. People wore shirts proclaiming "my NIPS are NP hard". Funny but hardly professional.

> Changing a default isn't banning a word.

Yes it is. This change is effectively reflecting a push, by bullies, to ban the word master, to eliminate it from spoken and written language, that's exactly what's happening.

No, it’s not. By changing the default, the majority of people will likely use “main” for new projects because there’s not much incentive to override it besides the attitude you’ve expressed here (and most people are probably not motivated by that attitude), but you’re still free to have that attitude, to use the word, and to override the default trivially.

Language evolves. One of the ways it evolves is that certain expressions become understood as hurtful or impolite... and people with empathy learn to use other expressions in their stead out of respect. That’s not “banning” those expressions, it’s choosing to adapt for the benefit of a broader subset of society.

A great deal of social expectations are the consequence of this kind of process of empathy and adaptation, and they make living on the planet with other people more joyful and safer. Sometimes in small ways, other times in big ways. But you don’t have to meet those expectations if you value the symbolic freedom of using language that’s gone out of vogue for these reasons... you just have to accept that people may view you as inconsiderate as a consequence.

What bullying was done?

I it was anything like the SQLite push to adopt a CoC for a private project then at least some organized harassment on social media and the very real threat to cut various forms funding.

If.

Isn’t the obsession with professionalism a hallmark of “anti-Blackness”?

/s I say this in jest but only because it’s incredibly easy to reproduce the absurdity of all this discussion, it’s all discordant and trivial

Some people do discriminatory things and call it professionalism. Like arbitrarily banning traditional hair styles. I've never heard anyone say avoiding sexual innuendo is anti black. Have you?

What you’re saying is really tone de— I mean insensitive

A lot of people here have nerve damage from RSI. Pick another term.

says the pot

It depends on the person. Likely some people could be offended and some people wouldn't. The more relevant question is, should we care about those people's feelings. We could apply this suggested rationale to any hypothetical or actual use of language. What people find offensive tends to be deeply personal. Look at comedians who tell a joke that 'cross a line' -- some people will say it's nothing, some people will say it was far too much. Interpretation and judgment of offensiveness is largely shaped by individual life experience.

It seems to me like the people actually forcing these superficial changes through shaming and bullying are actually, for the most part, privileged upper middle class white people. That was definitely the case with the NIPS => NeurIPS conference renaming. That whole thing got started by some white dude on twitter.

So, let's apply the process. Suppose Person A says something, and Person B thinks another colleague, Person C, might find offensive.

That alone may be enough to offend Person B. They feel Person A may be creating an uncomfortable environment, intentional or not. Person C may not even be actually offended, but other people of Person C's {race,sex,etc} have been offended by similar statements. How people apply judgment is an individual process.

Should we care about how any of these people feel? Is Person {A,B,C} right or wrong to feel how they do? We can't control how other people feel about things, but we can try our best as individuals to promote welcoming environments, but recognize we are human and won't always get it right.

The problem (IMO) is a growing distrust of Person B, because that guy keeps policing everything and everyone such that he appears to be using Person C's {race,sex,etc} to prop up and brandish his own moral authority in a way that Person C finds to be annoying and perhaps even actually offensive. Person B doesn't even care about the real issues affecting Person C or even the collective as a whole, and every time these issues are talked about Person B interrupts to speak on behalf of Person C or perhaps even accusing Person A (or whomever) of racism/sexism/etc for bringing up these issues which distract from Person B's personal crusade with respect to Person C's identity. By all appearances, Person B isn't acting in good faith, and his behavior in aggregate is causing a lot of problems and certainly isn't advancing his purported goal of "promoting a welcoming environment".

I’ve seen a lot of the following: Person B is mildly competent, but keeps having their bad ideas shot down. Person D is not, but uses their diverse identity as a crutch. Person C ends up a bystander, blamed for the bad deeds of Person D because B+D have formed an unholy alliance with B providing the technical cover and D providing the outrage, making the bad technical decision about identity instead, despite them not speaking for all of identity. Between the two of them, the are able to wield power for mediocre ideas, and mediocre ideas are often much worse than bad ones. Bad ideas get thrown out or die. Mediocre ones gum up the works for ages to come.

Master vs Main is not a big deal. Changing the default without any technical advantage is a pain in the ass. Had they bundled it with Git V3 when moving to sha256 and everyone having to rebuild their repositories anyway (another mediocre technical idea), it would be palatable.

> we can try our best as individuals to promote welcoming environments

I think what's often missed is that this creates an unwelcoming environment for minorities who don't share your ideology.

> The more relevant question is, should we care about those people's feelings

We pretend to care about pretended feelings.

If we care about people who are offended, we would: a) if they a fake offended (99%): tell them to stop appropriating other's concerns in bad faith b) if they are really offended: help them to understand that the only way forward is being more resilient

I don’t really get this sentiment. Are you so absolutely dedicated to the phrase “falling on deaf ears” that if somebody says to you “hey, that phrase might hurt somebody’s feelings, can you use an alternative” you take it as some sort of massive imposition on your life?

I don’t understand why small changes that can be done in kindness are seen as so inconvenient as to be worth this level of rejection.

I’m hearing impaired. “Falling on deaf ears” is a phrase that honestly does kind of bug me. People use it to mean being ignored for idealogical reasons but often the reason I, somebody with an actual hearing impairment, don’t react to something is because the person trying to communicate with me isn’t doing a great job of accommodating that. I tell me coworkers “I’m hearing impaired, please speak loudly and slowly if the environment is noisy” but they still mumble and get annoyed with me when I ask them to repeat.

Idk man, if you feel like this is language policing I recommend you walk a few years in my shoes and come back to me.

I think you make a genuine argument with respect to "falling on deaf ears".

Thank you! Given that, why is it so difficult to assume that folks might be making a genuine argument with respect to "master/main"?

If “small” change offends me because of my tiny stature would you please consider being more precise and saying “inconsequential” or “trivial” change instead of making a spatial analogy for its magnitude?

I said this to another commenter who pointed out that "walk in my shoes" could be excluding language to folks who are paraplegic, I'm honestly happy to hear this feedback and consider using more inclusive language.

Frankly this is good feedback simply from a precise communication perspective. We often use special metaphors when we mean to describe complexity, and "trivial" would more easily communicate what I meant regardless.

This came up recently in my romantic relationship: I used "small" to describe an emotional feeling I was having and it did hurt the feelings of my partner, who is short. They didn't like that size was used to describe a negative emotion and I appreciated that they shared that with me and gave me an opportunity to think about a more precise way of communicating my feelings that didn't connect a negative connotation to something they identified with.

Why is this so hard to understand that I would seek to live this way? I think we should be excited to practice radical compassion with each other.

Yep. My comment was 90% tongue-in-cheek but ‘small’ in the way you used it also accurately describes my lived experience with being small: unimportant, you probably won’t even notice, easy to ignore, etc. However, it’s not a big deal. If you want to strip all the analogies, flavor, and richness out of the English that you use until you you’re left with some hyper-literal newspeak go ahead. I, and judging by this thread many others, am not interested in devoting half of my brainpower to self-censoring in real-time as I try to mutter my way through giving a presentation or speak to a group.

Being conscious of your partners emotions and not minimizing their feelings is one thing. Being offended by phrases like “a little problem” or “a big deal” in public is ridiculous and laughable.

I think maybe we're a bit too far afield. I don't think people are talking about phrases like "a little problem" or "a big deal". Do you take issue with the point I raised about "falling on deaf ears?" Why are we talking about hypothetical complaints people might have about the word small when we have real examples about the use of "falling on deaf ears" or "master" terminology in tech.

I think people are making good faith attempts to communicate that those phrases hurt their feelings. I think it's not wrong to make a good faith attempt to avoid hurting people's feelings. I think complaining about a hypothetical slippery slope misses the point.

> I am not interested in devoting half of my brainpower to self-censoring

But we already do this. You don't just blurt out everything you think. If you walk by somebody in the supermarket who smells strongly of perfume do you just shout "you stink"? When you're speaking to a group you're probably picking appropriate language to use. You're not dropping a bunch of f-bombs at work and probably not using a ton of programmer-specific technical jargon or metaphors with your friends who aren't in tech.

When one of my closest friends from childhood came out as trans it took me a month to stop using the wrong pronouns for them. I had to think about it in the moment... until I didn't anymore because I built up a habit and got used to it. Now it takes no brainpower at all. This is normal. This is how normal habit-building works.

> Being conscious of your partners emotions...

But not my coworkers? Not my black peers? Not a potential hearing-impaired contributor to one of my oss projects on github?

You think we’re too far afield now, I think we were several levels ago. Tomato, tomato.

I feel for your problems, but I don't think you being hearing impaired gives you a right to be offended at the usage of the word "deaf". It's a functional description, not a slur.

I have some similar things which I'd rather not expand upon, but I don't think that gives me the right to be offended at terms unless they are slurs. As a comparison, people shouldn't be offended at any usage of the word "smart", but they're allowed to be offended by the word "nerd".

Not being able to hear isn't a functional description of choosing not to listen.

I don't really understand why it's okay for you to tell other people what they have a "right" to be offended about, but not okay for them to tell you that they're offended about it.

Additionally, common usage of the phrase "falling on deaf ears" is almost never used to actually describe communicating with a deaf person. It's usually used to describe communicating with a hearing person who, for some reason other than physical hearing impairment, did not listen.

Therefor I think it is the exact opposite of a functional description. Instead it uses a physical disability to describe folks without that disability behaving in unproductive ways. Given that, it seems quite reasonable to say "this phrase could be seen as excluding to folks who have that disability".

I don’t understand why small changes that can be done in kindness are seen as so inconvenient as to be worth this level of rejection.

I don’t get this either; I’d guess it’s just a personal overreaction. When asked to change something like the language they use to describe something, some people interpret that as an attack. They tend to then overcompensate with a bit of “but I’m not a racist and anyway this is so insignificant it doesn’t even matter” bluster which seems like it probably takes more effort than just doing the thing that’s so insignificant to them anyway.

Life for me felt a bit brighter after I started reflecting more on the language I used, and realised that using an idiom like “falling on deaf ears” or “he’s a bit mental”, or even in some cases technical terminology like “master and slave” might carry different shading with different people that I wasn’t immediately aware of. The people you interact with are all going through their own shit all the time, and it’s nice to be mindful about things you say having an impact on them that you’d rather avoid.

> I don’t get this either; I’d guess it’s just a personal overreaction.

Maybe some of us frogs can tell the water is slowly getting close to boiling. Maybe we just don't like being bullied and told what to say and think.

> master and slave

Master as in record, not as in "master and slave". There haven't been "master and slave" IDE hard drives for about 15 years now. FWIW, I would give someone a funny look if they purposely used the word "slave" in their codebase or as part of technical jargon, but the word master isn't automatically about slave ownership. That's just incorrect.

What do you imagine boiling water looks like, if stuff as small as this is "close to boiling"?

What is the boiling point that we should be so afraid of? I'm genuinely curious to hear what you think we are hurtling towards

By your logic, how can you can casually say "walk in my shoes," when you can be sure it bugs people confined to wheelchairs?

Do you owe us all an apology and a promise to never use that common and easily-understood idiom again? I don't think you do... but do you think you do? If not, why not?

Well, Honestly, this is a great point.

However, I don't think I owe you all an apology, and you'll notice that I never asked anybody for an apology for using "fall on deaf ears" or anything else. I did say we should practice radical compassion and if somebody says to us "hey this phrase bugs me or hurts my feelings" there's very few reasons I can imagine why we shouldn't accept that and consider using different language.

I'm happy to trade "live my life" for "walk in my shoes" in order to make folks who use wheelchairs feel more included in my communities. Why not? What do I lose? It's not like "walk in my shoes" is some deeply important idiom to me and if I never say it again I will be forever a less-happy person.

I totally agree with you in the context of small settings. There, it's correct to avoid phrases that are harmful to people, once you are aware of the issue they have. That's just part of not being an asshole.

But in public forums--and relevant to the article--public software/documentation, I believe the number of problematic phrases approaches 100%. Even referencing "years from now" can bring a Stage-4 cancer patient to tears--100% real pain I have seen with my own eyes--and there are many people in that state. Yet, obviously we have to accept that we will cause those people pain and go ahead referencing the future that was taken from them.

Therefore, to me, the only social contract that "works" in public is that we all try not to offend, and anyone who gets hurt by everyday language realizes their reaction is mostly an internal issue, and no harm was meant or could be reasonably avoided.

I'd expect that latitude of the wheelchair-bound person who winces at references to walking, and from the developer who thinks of slavery at the sight of a "master branch." The tinge they felt was real, but in my view it is not our responsibility to avoid it in a public space. As a result, I must disagree with the handful of advocates who want to change every git repository on the planet. But maybe I am in the wrong. It is just my opinion.

Thanks for your reply. I always worry these topics will get unnecessarily heated.

(edit: removed a bunch of text that was just reiterating stuff I already said).

as a matter of principle, I don't like to be told how/what to think.

> I don’t understand why small changes that can be done in kindness are seen as so inconvenient as to be worth this level of rejection.

I think one key disconnect is that some people form complete sentences in their head before they speak, and have an opportunity to effectively “edit them”, as if you would read and edit an email before sending. Others, like myself, communicate a thought directly from mouth to brain. I try my best to change patterns and think about my words in professional settings, but, every additional thing I must avoid saying is effectively another branching point in the filter function for my speech. Each individual thing may not be a big inconvenience, but cumulatively, it becomes quite an inconvenience. In the last few years, I feel a constant pressure and anxiety about the words that I say. I have no bad intention and really truly don’t want to make anyone feel bad, but no one cares about my intention... once I say the wrong thing it’s done and I’m judged by others for it. This is the first time I ever heard of “fell on deaf ears” being offensive, and I can definitely understand why, and I’d never want to make you feel bad by saying it, but it’s yet another common phrase to add to my list of filters. I’m now thinking of all of the people who I may have offended by saying it.

I feel like context is everything. If I said that in context of a deaf person not hearing something I said, that would be offensive and hurtful and rude. If I said it in the context of an objection I raised being ignored, it should be understood that I’m not literally referring to deaf people. If I said something was “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, everyone knows I’m not literally putting straws on a camel.

I really appreciate your thoughtful take here. One thing I think is important to note is that I don't want, and I don't think any hearing impaired person would want (though I can't speak for all of them) for you to spend really any time feeling guilty about a potential offense you might have caused.

What I'm advocating for is radical compassion and empathy. When you hear somebody say "this thing can hurt me" worry less about all the times you were involved in that, and consider more how you can help folks avoid that harm in the future.

That's not to say we should ever introspect. I noticed that with a friend of mine who recently came out as trans I was still often using gendered language "dude, man, etc" from before they came out, even if I usually got their pronouns right. They didn't ask me, but the introspection I was doing prompted me to offer them an apology and commit to doing better about those kinds of things. That has brought us closer and given me a better perspective for being a good friend and ally to them.

I don't think anybody thinks you're trying to be a jerk, or intentionally seeking to hurt people's feelings. What I'm reacting to is a vocal minority of folks, often in tech, who seem to react to being told "Hey, this thing sometimes hurts my feelings when I notice it" with "How dare you accuse me of being literally Darth Vader. This is THOUGHT POLICING."

Just... try your best to be kind to people. If that means you're the CEO of github and you can change "master" to "main" why the heck wouldn't you?

Thanks, I appreciate your perspective and I agree with a lot of it. I absolutely try to be kind to people. There is though, unfortunately, a vocal minority of people who really exact judgement when the wrong words are used, and they’re usually not even part of the group whom would feel hurt by hearing such words. I’m sure they have good intentions also, but I really do think there is too much “word policing” going on. It’s very hard to unlearn every common word or phrase that someone may find offensive, and the feeling is somewhat similar to having a piece of duct tape over your mouth for someone like me. I find myself over analyzing my words and saying “uhhh” a lot trying to make sure the things I say don’t contain any bad words/phrases. As a software engineer, I tend(ed) to use “blacklist/whitelist” a lot, and the new replacement words of “allowlist/denylist” still feel awkward and don’t fit every situation. I’m trying my best to slowly come around and try to adopt all of the new phrases, but it’s a lot more work than the “think before you speak” communicators realize.

I think a better strategy would be to just lead by example and use the phrasing you think is appropriate, as others will likely naturally adopt it as we do with other group context phrases. After all, I learned words like “blacklist” from reading code and technical books and running CLI programs. I just think we should be patient with people, assume good intentions, and never shame people for using the wrong words with the best of intentions.

>If that means you’re the CEO of GitHub and you change “master” to “main” why the heck wouldn’t you?

Because it doesn’t really do anything to solve the underlying issues, and I question the intention behind it. I’d rather see GitHub work to make their teams more diverse, provide assistance to open source projects created by people of color and women, improve access to technical education, etc. than to make a change like this and act like “okay I did it guys, I fixed racism” (I realize that’s disingenuous). It also has a nonzero cost to GitHub and its users, for arguably not much benefit.

Similarly, I have worked in places where the word "brainstorming" (as in, "a brainstorming session") was banned because of its apparent offensiveness towards those with epilepsy. The funny thing is, 93% of people with epilepsy do not find the term offensive.

https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/press/facts/brainstorming-offens...

Do people have nothing better to do with their time than research and implement these policies?

What's funny to me about your comment is that you actually chose a perfect example of the importance of critical thinking in how we discuss terminology.

The message behind the English idiom you chose is clearly one of self empowerment; /you/ are the master of /your own/ destiny implies independence, freedom, and agency.

In the context of git, and distributed systems more broadly, `master` is specifically chosen for its association with a power differential between one special entity giving the orders, and some collection of other entities taking the orders. In some DB systems, for example, the language is as literal as `master/s`. Even without "s" in use with `git`, there's a clear association with `master` being the branch that broadly holds sway above the other branches.

We chose symbols and metaphors to aid in our mental modeling of complex systems. I'm further amused by your own choice of "policing" to describe a push for cultural healing coming from a minority population. I recommend reading up on the history of policing to see why this metaphor is ill-advised.

> Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended?

This is a strawman; nobody is calling for this.

> The other day, people at my workplace were saying that expressions like "blind spot" and "falling on deaf ears" needed to be purged.

Based on your use of "policing" and "[scratching] from the dictionary" I'm wondering whether these folks literally said "purged" in their own language. But otherwise, cool, it sounds like they are exhibiting the positive human trait of compassion. If a disabled person tells me they'd prefer I don't use this idiom, I'd happily find another way of saying the same thing. What's the big deal?

> AFAIK, "blind spot" is not actually about blind people, it's a term related to driving and the angles seeing people can't see in without looking.

This isn't really how language works though, is it? When people are forging associations with words or phrases, they're not opening a webster's dictionary, but rather drawing on a complex web of cultural associations. A more extreme version of your argument here is that it's unreasonable to be rattled by the use of a swatstika in western culture, since the /original/ meaning behind that symbol was one of peace. Nobody would buy that. However, in certain east asian cultures, the symbol is still in use for more positive associations.

The specific choice of `master` as a symbol in distributed systems holds meaning due to its evocation of a power differential. Whether this is intentionally "bad" holds no meaning whatsoever. What does it say about us if we can't honestly hold some degree of empathy for someone who, affected by a violent history of subjugation and dominance, might not love the idea of using symbols chosen for their hierarchical power association?

Do you care that in this context the meaning of master is "an original from which copies can be made" or is it irrelevant as you want to have bit of rightous rage?

He said:

> Whether this is intentionally "bad" holds no meaning whatsoever.

His emphasis is on empathy for the people who are affected by the usage of certain terminology. If it's a trivial change we can make to accommodate them, why shouldn't we?

Because a line should be drawn somewhere.

You use he in "He said", should you not be more careful about your gender assumptions? Are you sure they won't take offense?

I don't take offense, but thanks for your genuine concern.

1) I don't think a line has to be drawn somewhere. It's fine to evaluate on a case by case basis.

2) Even if I make a mistake, I think it's fine to apologize, say I didn't realize (and not repeat it with that person), and move on.

It doesn't have to cripple me into not being able to speak... we're all reasonable people.

Well it should be obvious for the reasonable people that if this line isn’t drawn the situation is going to be exploited by the unreasonable people. Or by the people who are willing to take advantage of this situation. You understand it of course, but it’s not important to you, just a collateral damage.

Consider re-reading what I wrote. "master" has many meanings, and the whole point I'm making is that context is key. I am not sure what you're referring to with "righteous rage".

Can we change the use of the symbol + for addition? it reminds me of the suffering my people went through at the hands of the Inquisition and the crusades.

thanks!

And I’m scared of snakes, can we rename Python?

Well said. We lack as a society in holding some degree of empathy for people who are affected differently by situations, experiences, historical context than us.

I thought the same but when I looked it up out of curiosity I was surprised to see the primary (probably most established) definition of master is ~ “one who owns people”.

Oh really, where did you look it up?

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

Pack it up, we need to rename the Masters degree to something else. Heh.

You mean the “main degree?”

Certification of Proficiency?

Sometimes I tend to divide the world into developers and non-developers. It is just another way of saying those who gets things done and those who don’t.

People who take offense with these minor issues are very likely those who don’t get things done.

Not sure what to do about it except fight it every step of the way.

Like I heard someone say, Julius Cesar was a bad guy, but we probably don't wanna change the name of the month of July.

Oh man, can you imagine that?

It‘s a matter of time. What‘s stopping somebody? Nothing, you can use all the same arguments.

> Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended?

This. Context and intention is everything.

I hate this, we shouldn't be accommodating people being irrationally offended. Sure it's not much work in this instance, but what happens when people move on to being offended by blacklist, or sanity check, or one of the other thousands of terms that can be warped to be offensive. And then if you refuse to change because it makes no sense and is a lot of work, you become some kind of racist/sexist because the expectation is that you change your language to accommodate the tiny number of people who are offended for no reason.

Language is a tool, and changes over time. If the meaning of a word actually changes to mean something offensive of course we should change it. But that isn't what has happened here, instead people are picking out one offensive definition of "master" and trying to apply it to places where it doesn't make sense. Are we going to rename "master of ceremonies", or "master record"? Of course not, because in a language where words have multiple definitions, context matters.

You are welcome to be as unaccomodating as you'd like in your own projects, but if the people doing the work in projects such as git want to make this change that is their choice. what you're really arguing is that they should be accomodating to your opinion and not others'.

"master" in a computer science context isn't named after master of ceremonies, but after the offensive master/slave meaning.

It's their choice, but I still don't like the precedent it sets. I don't really care what they call it, I just don't want this kind of thing to become an expectation, resulting in me either having to do a bunch of renaming work or risk being seen as some kind of ist.

I'd try worrying less about possibly having to do some menial work or being perceived as an ist, and instead try to understand why some might be offended by such terms or what impact their prevalence might have on our profession and wider society.

This is a motte/bailey bait and switch argument. Please refrain from doing so in further discourse.

It's no such thing. It wasn't even an argument - not everything on HN needs to be. As per the guidelines please assume good faith in further discourse.

You misunderstand me. There was no need to assume anything. You used a manipulative debate tactic called motte and bailey. It invalidates your point entirely.

I wasn't debating anything with that comment, so quite obviously you are incorrect

> understand why some might be offended by such terms

Easy: attention seeking in attention (or, rather, outrage) economy. Who gets offended in most absurd way wins all their retweets. And then they get to be taken seriously.

Can we please stop wondering about being politically correct and focus on the real problems of the world? Thanks!

I would also like to add the fact that politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general. I don't think that any other engineering field has this much drama over some words that have been part of our whole life until now like IT is having.

> politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general

How would that work?

right? maybe Op would care to give examples of software issues that have no social or political ramifications?

Pure algorithms, for one. I don't think that Merge Sort for example has had or will ever have any political / social ramification.

On the contrary, I see that now the SJW trend is to attack IT in general and make a huge deal out of terms that (given the context) are perfectly fine.

I wonder how much it will take before we'll have to assign pronouns to the connetors or to the USB cables

We already assign pronouns and gender to connectors. Seems like you've not actually worked in IT if you don't know that?

Pure algorithms have the capacity to change the world. Sometimes for the worse. An example of a pure algorithm with massive political and ethical considerations is crypto currency algorithms.

I think a lot of people here would've benefited taking a basic "ethics in CS" class.

I wasn't talking about calling a female connector or a male connector, I was referring to the somewhat new trend of having to specify a pronoun in your Twitter bio because genders are non-binary.

> Pure algorithms have the capacity to change the world. Sometimes for the worse. An example of a pure algorithm with massive political and ethical considerations is crypto currency algorithms.

Nobody was arguing that. I just said that we shouldn't integrate politics into software, not the other way around. Obviously the code that we write is going to have an impact, but that's completely different from adding the impact from day 0 (e.g: software that spams propaganda in the stdout)

> I wasn't talking about calling a female connector or a male connector,

then you’re gonna need to explain, because that’s pretty much exactly what you said.

> Obviously the code that we write is going to have an impact, but that's completely different from adding the impact from day 0 (e.g: software that spams propaganda in the stdout)

So it would seem you have no issue here.

Tell that to Dominion Voting Systems...

Imagine if instead of master/slave the terms were master and "n-word". Would there be a reasonable argument to change it at that point?

If you say "yes" then you agree there is a line somewhere. If that's the case then we should discuss where the line should be and why it should be there instead of saying "stop [worrying] about being politically correct".

If you say "no" then your argument is that no words are too offensive to use or we shouldn't care if people are offended by any term at all. Which is an argument that you're free to have but if that's what's happening then make that argument and advocate for why it would be ok to use the n-word as a terminology as well.

I think that in these discussions it's easy to get sidetracked because people are actually arguing different points without realizing it. You're talking about the same scenario but you're arguing from different premises which means there's no hope of coming to a shared understanding because you're not actually talking about what you disagree on.

Master/slave has a technical meaning beyond the sense of one person enslaving another. "Nigger" has no use case outside of making horrible and offensive remarks, aside from historical writing (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird) or making a point about racism, cases in which it is accepted.

So, two things (and I realize you aren't the person I originally replied to).

1. Your argument here is implicitly agreeing with my point number one. There are terms that would be considered too offensive and so the conversation is about where the line falls. We can't just say "let's not ever talk about whether a term is offensive" because there are some that we really wouldn't want to use, and so we should be talking about what terms are too offensive and why.

2. This is the conversation what what's too offensive and why. "Master/slave" only has technical meaning because we've been using it that way for awhile. But master/slave was originally picked because of its meaning in the historical context of slavery. The terminology itself has no inherent technical meaning. So, to me at least, that is not a great argument for why we shouldn't change it now. But at least this part of the discussion is two people talking about the same premise and not arguing past each other.

My point is that master/slave actually conveys a relationship between two things. It was picked for technical use because of that. Naming something "nigger", even in a technical would do what, offend some other piece of code? If somebody chose an offensive name arbitrarily (like, say, "git"), I would understand the impulse. Though the former is fraught with specific and awful connotations towards a very specific group (American blacks) whereas the latter is simply a general derogatory term (which is tacky, but not unbearably so).

To me master and slave is soemthing that shouldn't convey a relationship.

Slavery exists with the shitiness of our culture. That's not something that should be used to convey a relationship between things.

Abuse shouldn't be part of our technical language.

Maybe it’s you who should stop being abused by random words? Change yourself, leave me my technical language I’ve been using for decades, please. Also a fun part of it is that in my (non-english speaking) country the terms master/slave are being used in their technical meaning only (as loan words). Why do we need to change our technical language and adjust to the concept of guilt that is completely foreign to us? I find this offensive.

> My point is that master/slave actually conveys a relationship between two things.

yes, it implies a negative one though. What about manager/worker? mentor/mentee? commander / responder? I could go on and on. So we do reach a point where one has to wonder what the point of clinging to master/slave is.

I agree it isn't the same as a racial slur but master and slave mean completely different things in different systems. Usually if not always there are more descriptive terms like primary and replica.

> Master/slave has a technical meaning beyond the sense of one person enslaving another

It's not “beyond”, it's literally the use of human slavery as a metaphor for relations between technical components.

There was no master/slave in Git so your strawman doesn't apply.

>Imagine if instead of master/slave the terms were master and "n-word".

This is absurd. Hypotheticals are important thinking tools but please don't set the parameters of a discussion to be absurd. No quality content/insight can emerge.

n-word is inherently racist unlike master which has acceptable uses.

master/slave is an analogy that is used in technology which has an obvious origin and personally has always made me slightly uncomfortable since I first heard about it with reference hard disk priorities. Similarly the terms male and female make me slightly uncomfortable with respect to cables and sockets.

However, master in the context of git has no connection to the concept of master and slave. They are two different words with different meanings. So to answer your question yeah I think there is a line and it is somewhere near to that drawn by master/slave but nowhere near that drawn by master as in the concept of "original".

The thing here is that master has meanings that exist outside of the context of master/slave. Yes, slavery is wrong, and hopefully everyone agrees, but there are no slaves in GitHub. There are no slaves when it comes to master records. Erasing the word master from our language isn't about healing, it's more akin to forgetting or denying the past, and everything that could remotely be construed as having a connection with things we shall not speak of.

As for male and female connectors... It seems like an apt analogy, no? And uh, when it comes to male and female connectors, they are both equal, they both play a part, neither is better than the other.

Except it was not about HDD priorities.

> To allow for two drives on the same cable, IDE uses a special configuration called master and slave. This configuration allows one drive's controller to tell the other drive when it can transfer data to or from the computer. What happens is the slave drive makes a request to the master drive, which checks to see if it is currently communicating with the computer. If the master drive is idle, it tells the slave drive to go ahead. If the master drive is communicating with the computer, it tells the slave drive to wait and then informs it when it can go ahead.

This pattern of truth flowing from one agent to another is called the master/slave pattern.

It is the simplest coordination pattern there is, which is why it was used to control people doing menial tasks. We agreed it's not a good idea and no longer deprave people of agency (as much), but it still remains the most simple coordination pattern.

I think there is a growing awareness in the mainstream that, in fact, everything is political, and that people who thought thing X wasn't previously and are upset that it apparently is now are simply in the early stages of discovering the privilege they've enjoyed in being society's default gender, race, culture, etc:

https://brettclt.medium.com/why-is-everything-political-beca...

I’m fascinated when people, including myself, are offended by noises other people make with their faces.

You can try to ban words, but that doesn’t abolish the thought that generated the word. However, that doesn’t stop people from trying.

Ultimately compelled speech is an attempt at mind control.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

“Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism in Oceania, the ruling English Socialist Party (Ingsoc) created Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy.”

—

In the future, how will people be able to judge whether they are enslaved or oppressed if the concepts and historical records of slavery are erased?

The branch name "master" does not have "golden master" or "master copy" roots: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...

The error message in the commit that introduced that change uses the word “insane”. I hope they changed it to “mentally challenged”.

https://github.com/git/git/commit/cad88fdf8d1ebafb5d4d1b92eb...

This should be the top comment to foster a conversation around sources we can dig up. The digital roots to word usages should be preserved as understanding is the first step to changing. I can’t casually read the bitkeeper “HOWTO” now without cringing at the word choice - it’s not that it didn’t age well, it’s that I used to lack empathy for its usage.

I think treating this human relationship as a light hearted metaphor disregards the gravity of this painful history. Plenty of alternatives exist, and if one doesn’t in someone’s eyes the brilliant thing is new words and meanings can be invented.

I accept criticism of using master/slave as a consequence of the actions taken by citizens in my country in the past. I’m willing to accept responsibility even when my self and family aren’t at fault.

Edit: A second source of word history to review https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminolo...

And let's remember slavery is still a major part of our lives. Even to this day.

Not making the word trivial is important in creating disgust and outrage, which eventually leads to policy changes to stop slavery happening right now.

That's incorrect. Petr Baudis explained why he picked it:

> "master" as in e.g. "master recording".

https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441

That's straight from the horse's mouth. The thread you linked to is pure conjecture.

There is also a thread above with source links of him saying "it's not unlikely at all" it was influenced by Bitkeeper and he's "wished many times" he picked main instead.

The answer to the direct question of "What was it [master] meant to convey?" was '"master" as in e.g. "master recording".'

There's no "likeliness" or "influence" in that direct answer. That's pretty straightforward.

The fact that he "wished many times" he picked main instead has no bearing or relevance on why "master" was chosen.

That seems like a try-hard. Unless Linus intended "master" to mean "owner", drawing parallels to other VCS is purely speculative. If Linus really intended "master" in git to mean "owner"... where are the "slaves"?

Or are you saying Linus made the default branch "master" because of systemic racism ingrained into him from previous VCS?

Sigh... sad to see the tech community bullied into compliance over a non-issue by political correctness activists.

It's not really that big of a deal (and in some ways "main" is better anyway because it's 2 characters shorter), it's just the principle of the thing that bothers me. I would rather see projects and people stand their ground instead of caving to pressure anytime a twitter mob comes along.

Git is Free software so nothing is stopping people from forking it and excluding these patches if they feel that strongly about it.

You're then forced to maintain a fork because of someone else's immaturity. That's not a solution to the problem.

I feel like complaining about a disagreement in direction of an open source project while not wanting to put effort in directing it in the way you like via the normal channels, forking or contribution, to be immature.

I feel like demanding contribution as a response to criticism of open source software is immature. Just because you decided to let everyone see and use your code, doesn't mean someone can't say something negative about it. That is not some sort of privilege reserved for contributors.

>Just because you decided to let everyone see and use your code, doesn't mean someone can't say something negative about it. That is not some sort of privilege reserved for contributors.

Of course not. It's just extremely immature when there are direct ways via work and effort (forking or contributing) to gain social capital in the community to influence change and direction.

So what are the downsides of git changing this?

How is this going to impact your day to day work flow?

"Lemme go run main" is now ambiguous. The main entry point? Or the main branch?

>> I would rather see projects and people stand their ground instead of caving to pressure anytime a twitter mob comes along.

You didn't respond to this in any way.

How do we know "they caved to pressure" as opposed to "were convinced of the merits of making the change"? Like I said, if enough people don't like this change, they can start their own fork called originalgit or something. It would be fairly easy to backport changes to it. Let the market decide whether the default branch should be called "master" or "main". Or, you could start a twitter campaign about how "main" reminds you of the Spanish colonization of the Americas and all the attendant horrors of that. Worse than the Atlantic slave trade? Maybe! If you can convince enough people that "main" is bad, maybe they'll switch it back.

That is not the point. The point is millions of man months of time an money are being spent doing something that has zero meaning. Changing master/slave on networking, ok. Changing master copy to main copy doesn't remotely help black lives or black pride or anything whatsoever. If all the time and effort doing this was actually spent on useful things to help black lives it would be 10000x more effective. Instead all that time and effort is being flushed down the toilet.

It is meaningful in ways that are not measured in development time. There is a genuine effort to be less offensive regardless of how big of an impact it currently makes, or how meaningless individuals may believe it to be.

I think there is disagreement over whether "master record" is offensive, and frustration that time and energy are wasted arguing over it (as commenters here are doing).

Person months*, you can’t say that anymore.

It’s sad to see so many in the tech community waste electrons by complaining over and over again about how something is such a non-issue for them that they can’t stop talking about it.

What is the principle that's at stake here?

That things that have nothing to do with US politics shouldn't be dragged into it. Words can have multiple meanings.

Instead of removing a word and all it's homonyms from discourse we should embrace polysemy. Master key, master record, music maestro, master git branch...

What is the principle of standing ground in and of itself? Standing ground for a good reason, yes, but without a good reason, what is the virtue of just standing?

The intransigent minority [1] strikes again.

Perhaps the tech community should grow a spine and stand up to the minority that demands these sort of changes. That is: if the tech community /really/ doesn't want them, which (to me) is unclear.

[1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

As an actual American minority I'm a little upset that instead of someone trying to do something meaningful about racism they bikeshedded this solution. Git was made by a man from Finland, I find it highly unlikely he had nefarious intentions in naming the default branch 'master' and anybody who disagrees really needs to reevaluate everything we know about Linus. He doesn't care about people's attributes, he cares about code quality above all things, not to mention in the context of the project the word master can only fit under the simple context of a golden master. Context matters.

Will I lose any sleep over it? Probably not, because this changes absolutely nothing in the racism landscape. It just confuses some, maybe outrages others. They've made something that was never racist into something racist (at least in their heads).

Sidenote: I do wonder if the person who proposed the change wrote it up from their master bedroom.

> Git was made by a man from Finland

... and deliberately named it using a word that's offensive in British English.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Git

If you said 'git' to someone in an English pub you'd be looking for a punch.

For USians it's roughly comparable to 'asshole' on the spectrum of offensiveness.

Git is a couple of pegs down from asshole. Better analogy in American English would be "jerk," without, perhaps, the implied sexual connotation.

The fourth definition does not sound so bad ;) I mean, yeah he did that as a punch to himself because he felt naming another project after himself would be bad. Heck some would argue the UX of git command line makes the name fitting.

As another American minority I welcome changes to our tooling landscape and updating out of date language.

No this doesn't do anything, but it significantly reduces the amount of time I have to say master in discussions related to code. Something I personally don't feel comfortable saying.

No this isn't going to fix systemic racism, but it is setting the precedent that our standards can and should evolve with culture and people.

I myself am a minority as well.

I'm genuinely worried that all of this talk and social shaming related to "systemic racism" is actually going to create more of the monster it purports to try to defeat.

I mean, seriously. How do you think right wing people feel when they see left wing people on TV chanting that we should abolish the police? They clutch their guns even harder, that's what happens. By making an immense deal out of race issues, I think we might be making the problem worse.

In the 1990s, people generally had an attitude of "race doesn't matter", and now, it's become the opposite, "race is the only thing that matters". It's splitting us into factions and helping nobody.

I mean, I'm also for abolishment of police.

Police in basically everywhere of the world was made by the ruling class to keep people in order. This matter is even worse in the US that a LOT of police departments were literally made after the emancipation proclamation (or somewhat before), to capture runaway slaves. This is the history of policing in the US.

I think what it generally comes down to is a LOT of Americans, and a lot of people in the world haven't learned the history of their own country. People probably know more about WW2 than they do about the history of abuse in their own country. I unfortunately was one of these people and until I decided to listen to people and start studying the history of America I understood a lot of the things I stood for were based on essentially lies.

I do think saying "lets abolish police" without the context of "why", or "wait what about the murderers?" is harmful. I think people on the left generally assumes too much of people, and assumes that they've also spent many hours reading and understanding and discussing history.

> I think people on the left generally assumes too much of people

I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask "what about the murderers, thiefs, rapists and criminal gangs? The obvious answer is that you need a police force. You can call it the flower-and-peace-corps if you want, but you need both enforcers and detectives to protect the population.

If what you mean is "reform the police", then don't call to "abolish the police".

No I mean abolish the police.

> The obvious answer is that you need a police force

Yes, you've been conditioned by society to assume that's the only answer to this. Again this is what I mean by people are uneducated about policing and state power.

I suppose I have been conditioned. What are the other answers? I'm not sure I'm familiar with what the options here are.

I've come to the conclusion that such inept statements can only come from people who have lived their lives in very safe environments where they have never needed police protection. Such environments do not represent the safety of the country or the world in general.

It strikes me as odd that someone as familiar with history as yourself would single out the US and the practice of slavery whereas slavery has existed almost everywhere in the world, including here in Europe. Yet nobody in Europe thinks that the formerly enslaved peasants' much temporally disconnected descendants are substantially worse off because of that or that this would somehow translate into today's policing.

In conclusion, abolishing the police is a completely stupid idea that the American people in general do not even support [1] that hurts not the tech elites of Silicon valley, but normal people living in high-crime areas.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dcBdhE...

> This matter is even worse in the US that a LOT of police departments were literally made after the emancipation proclamation (or somewhat before), to capture runaway slaves.

This is going to need a citation. Cursory searching leads me to Sheriffs being elected in the early 1800s in Ohio. Ohio was also a free state in 1803 when it joined the Union.

Near as I can tell, it's reasonable to say that there were organized groups of state-empowered people in the slave states back as early as the 1700s, whose job was to hunt down escaped slaves. There were also some similar groups across slave and free states who were empowered in part to guard against / control Native Americans.

These early slave patrols / night watches then fairly organically became the "police department" when that concept became widespread in the mid-1800s. I don't think it looks like said spread is really linked to emancipation, but rather (as with the creation of Peel's Metropolitan Police in London in 1829) in response to increasing urbanization / industrialization. Given that the industrial revolution also fairly-strongly caused the US civil war and thus emancipation, we could say it's more a parallel trend than the implied causation.

The cities going "well, we have a somewhat organized group of people whose job is to enforce some laws... why don't we wedge them into this new trend and have them enforce more laws?" gets us that link.

This summary seems reasonable, though I feel it elides the Peelite influence: https://law.jrank.org/pages/1640/Police-History-Early-polici...

But the word master has multiple meanings, only one of them is related to slavery. The fact that all the homonyms are tainted by just one possible meaning is strange and reductive.

Master has cognates in romance languages to mean school professor or music lead. Removing a entire cognate root from discourse because of one of its realization makes the language poorer inmho.

I am happy to see this.

You say bullied into compliance but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive.

It may not be that big of a deal for you but it is a big deal for those who don’t share the same worldview as you. Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others?

What do you think about people who curse like a sailors in their personal life but wouldn’t utter an F in office/professional settings - do they have no principals?

Same here, I honestly don't even get why people are angry about this.

You're saying master isn't a big deal, well, neither is main. Would've you cared if git updates this without the discourse of "let's remove master from our everyday conversations."

Because next time yall say that 'main' is offensive because it puts some branches into position of power and actually they need to be more equal.

> but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive

In my opinion, agitating for these types of changes makes tech communities more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized.

It's not clear to me how changing the default branch name in a version control system and similar "inclusivity changes" makes the tech communities more inclusive, but I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc).

And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that).

I think a better, more compromising change would have been to leave default as master, but fix up the code base (remove hard-coded instances of "master") so that you can choose a different default branch name more easily (i.e. with `git init <default name>`. It's forcing the default name change upon everyone that people find unpalatable.

> I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc).

> And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that).

One measure of inclusivity might be hiring, retention, and promotion within the tech industry (and the developer subset of that) relative to the general population. Looking at the Stack Overflow 2020 survey results as one (admittedly biased) indicator, it's pretty clear that the tech industry does abysmally. As two quick examples: <5% of developers surveyed were Black, and <12% were women and non-binary. Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro...

Speaking from personal experience as one of those minorities, I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome.

Something like changing language that is rooted in ownership of people is not a huge change, admittedly, but the fact that so many people within the industry complain and fight it definitely serves as a reminder to me that I'm tolerated more than welcomed here.

Edit: Added some clarifying language

> I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome.

IMHO (and I didn't downvote you, btw), I believe you (and other minorities) are choosing to interpret things like complaining about political changes to code and projects as persecution. That is a choice you are making. You could also choose to see it for what it really is - people disagreeing about politics. Interpreting a political stance as a personal insult or persecution is not the right way to go, IMO. Assume good faith; give the benefit of the doubt.

If a project maintainer pushes back and complains when internet mobs try to force him to remove the word "red" from his codebase because it triggers soviet refugees... that doesn't mean the project maintainer is persecuting soviet refugees or that soviet refugees are "unwelcome" to contribute. Soviet refugees may choose to interpret the project maintainer's actions as such, but that doesn't make it so. In reality the project maintainer disagrees with the politics on the issue of removing the word "red" from his code and is pushing back.

The beauty of GitHub, HackerNews, and internet fora in general is that nobody really knows your race or gender or really anything about you (unless you make it known). From my experience, people on the internet are just usernames with personality, judged on the merits of their insights and contributions. I've worked with some great people online in the past on different projects, and to this day I have no idea if they were male or female or non-binary or black or white or asian or blind or deaf.

I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective. I think where we disagree is in characterizing making inclusive language changes as "political" and keeping the status quo as "non-political", when the status quo is demonstrably not working for a lot of people. Changing "master" to "main" is admittedly likely near the end of the list of what the tech industry needs to do to in that regard, but if we can't even get low-effort token gestures like that to happen without a lot of outcry I'm not optimistic about any kind of substantive change.

The idea of places like HN being meritocratic tech utopias where race and gender are irrelevant and everyone's just a username with some neat ideas is really compelling. I can only offer that in my experience it's common knowledge among woman developers that if you want to have a good day, it's best not to read the comments here. It seems I've forgotten that myself!

> I think where we disagree is in characterizing making inclusive language changes as "political" and keeping the status quo as "non-political", when the status quo is demonstrably not working for a lot of people

Sure, your perspective is valid too, I just tend to lean the other way. I tend to believe that it is impossible to please everyone and that we should not strive to unless it has clear, demonstrable value.

> we can't even get low-effort token gestures like that to happen without a lot of outcry I'm not optimistic about any kind of substantive change.

Well, I think part of the reason for outcry in this particular case is that it is (again, IMHO) not a "low-effort token gesture". I mean, if you look at the patch being submitted in the email linked at the top of the thread to make main the new default:

> 351 files changed, 3903 insertions(+), 3890 deletions(-)

and for me personally it means that all my future git repos are going to have a different default branch than my past repos which breaks some of my utility scripts. And if I configure the default branch of my future repos to remain "master" to avoid this then some people might take offense and see it as a dogwhistle.

So to me this whole thing seems like a big charade, but maybe the silver lining is that Git really should have been designed from the start to easily take arbitrary default branch names, and this patch will enable that.

Is there any evidence that the submitter of the code did not want to make the change? It seems quite possible that the contributor wanted to make this change and volunteered their time. If that’s the case, the complexity of the change should not be relevant. The only complexity to consider is the downstream complexity. And besides, the change seems to be a one-liner plus find-and-replace in thousands of unit tests. Could probably have been done in a matter of minutes.

I am just speculating of course and maybe they were very unhappy to have to do this.

> more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized.

I mean, how many people are __actually__ offended by master/slave terminology? 1%? 2%?

Now how many people are offended by this change, how many think that this is useless waste of time, how many think that this is tech industry being once again bullied into compliance over nonsense and it's all one sneaky slippery slope? I don't know, but it seems like a half or at least a third.

These changes with this reasoning are not making it more inclusive, they make it more exclusive.

What exactly is the difference between a Californian white liberal changing spoken language forcing the whole world care about their petty politics and those nutjob charismatic Christians trying to ban rap videos during the 90's? Sure as hell not very exclusive or nice language, should we go start changing the culture of words too? Looks like you've become a full circle but it takes time to become self aware.

> Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others?

I'm saying that if someone finds the word "master" offensive in this context, they want to be offended.

If someone wants to be offended, they will find something that offends them.

Nothing you do will ever make such people stop being offended.

Next they'll be insisting that "bit" and "binary" need to be changed, because those words trigger people of non-binary gender, or something.

All of this is just making extra work. Repos and scripts have to be updated with the new branch name. The default behavior of Git is changing in a way that's not completely backward compatible, which means things that rely on it might break.

There's a definite cost to changing technical language, especially in the context of names in computer software that are part of the software's interface and might be relied on by other software that interfaces with it.

Changing perfectly passable names unnecessarily is just creating work for no purpose.

> I'm saying that if someone finds the word "master" offensive in this context, they want to be offended.

Inverting this, it reads as:

> No one could possibly be genuinely offended by the word "master" in this context.

You are incorrect. Many are genuinely offended. Some of them are commenting here on HN.

I think, of all the things to come out of BLM, this is one of the easiest to chalk up to “woke culture”.

BUT I still support it 100%.

What if you had to deal with the worst thing that’s ever happened to your people every time you want to push code at work? No, I don’t think anyone’s out there getting upset every commit, any more than they do walking into Thomas Jefferson High School or seeing a confederate flag on a bumper sticker. Rather, it’s just a constant subtle reminder of how ingrained in society racial inequality is, and it must be exhausting.

I think an incredibly minor inconvenience (which can be changed back) is a very fair trade off.

People campaigned to replace master and slave in technology long before BLM.

I know, however the change (in Git/GitHub, at least) was never made until now.

This is not master and slave. There are no slave branches. This is just seeing slavery everywhere. It's offensive to drag an innocuous homomym term (master/apprentice, master record) into the slavery lexical field.

I'm of the perspective that people arguing against these changes are bullying. The changes are easy to make, represent goodwill and inclusivity, and yet people with nothing to gain or lose are saying no. That's bullying.

Will there be a warning if you try to use 'master' as a refname if it doesn't exist but 'main' does? I assume beginners using educational resources that aren't up to date with this change will be really confused.

This was my concern as well.

Millions of pieces of literature are going to be immediately obsoleted. Books, articles, whole interactive tutorials, everything.

What about tools that create the `master` branch locally then try to sync it from the remote? Sure it's not a great assumption anyway but those tools originally acting in good-faith will now break and the user will be left up to figure out why.

All because a few people who find offense in everything were super duper loud. Awesome precedent.

Looking forward to all the bugs and problems this will cause. At least some over-sensitive ppl (or trolls?) will be happy. One more to add to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_name_changes_due_to_...

They will not be happy. That is not in their nature.

Non-issue. I've run the following because I'm used to it:

    git config --global init.defaultBranch master

This default doesn't matter to me.

This is my favourite comment in this thread. Everyone is losing their minds and you just changed your config and carried on with you day.

Don't exaggerate. People are (rightly) concerned over the precedent this sets and the issue to tooling and other parts of the development workflow.

Of course this doesn't affect everyone the same way. Don't demonize people for raising concerns.

All of this arguing is political, not technical. This technical solution does nothing for the political disagreement.

In my professional experience as a teacher of high school children the following terms consistently cause problems in class:

- git: literally a pejorative

- any website name ending in -hub, cf websites of interest to teenage boys

Imagine a software project called catshit made popular by a related website called catshitpiss where their great pearl-clutching debate is about how it potentially alienates people with cat fur allergies.

> - git: literally a pejorative

And very deliberately so.

>- any website name ending in -hub, cf websites of interest to teenage boys

Does -hub have a general negative connotation in your language? In English it just refers to a centre of something, in physical objects usually something with a radial topology.

If the existence of pornhub.com is enough to make the use of the pattern *hub problematical generally then I'm going to create pornbread.com and force everyone to eat untoast & butter.

My native language, despite what people think of my ability to write, is English.

Bread is too quotidian for your example, I think. Try subverting something more closely related to computers. Perhaps launching pornhaskell.co.ck would be a better attempt?

It’s more likely to generate embarrassment in class if you ask the boys if they’ve been up all night with sticky Haskell problems.

Good luck!

Except "porn" is by definition related to porn, whereas "hub" is completely generic? Why would a word cease to be OK because a porn website has been using it?

The change doesn't make my life worse in the slightest, and may improve someone else's mental health. No reason for me to be against it at all.

If the name change builds a larger, diverse, empathetic community. What have you or I lost?

IMO, it does exactly the opposite.

how so?

Enduring a breaking change for something that will have absolutely 0 impact on the diversity, size or empathy of the software dev community.

We haven't lost anything, but we've gained the expectation that we should be accommodating a tiny minority of people being offended for no reason. Sure it's not much work to switch "master" to "main" (although in aggregate it's probably a tonne of person hours), but what happens when the next trend is to be offended at "blacklist", or "sanity check", or any of the other thousands of words that someone is inevitably going to be offended by.

And once the expectation is that you change your language based on the irrationally offended minority, if you refuse to do so because it is a lot of work and makes no sense you become deamonized as some kind of sexist/racist/*ist.

I've seen lots of people claim that if you aren't a part of the minority in question you have no right to say what is or isn't offensive. I strongly disagree, some people are offended for stupid reasons, and we shouldn't feel obligated to accommodate them. Now if a significant portion are offended then there is probably some legitimate reason behind it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

> "blacklist"

That has already happened in some places, though blacklist/whitelist are still the most common naming convention for that sort of thing.

Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change. I don't have any examples I remember of what people might use instead of whitelist though, allowlist doesn't particularly trip of the tongue IMO.

Grandfathering is another common word that I've seen argued against because of its history.

> Blocklist

IMHO it's definitely not. What I do with my blacklist might have nothing to do with blocking anything.

It doesn't have anything with the color black either.

What about "yeslist" and "nolist"? "Includelist" and "excludelist"?

> Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change.

You should try to avoid using "Blocklist" in most code IMO, it's ambiguous in a number of contexts as the word block itself is ambiguous and can mean very multiple different things such as blockchain blocks or data/filesystem blocks which would be something very different from the intended definition of a disallow rule.

I would assume in most cases context would differentiate the meanings adequately unambiguously, especially in userland rather than when coding.

But you have a point, block is unhelpfully overloaded on the English language.

You mean just like how the context will disambiguate the meaning of "master"?

You're pushing all the "angry minority" stereotype in your language in your comment.

Like, if I as a brown person am uncomfortable something it's me being an irrationally offended minority.

If it's a white person it's just Mike having a bad day.

I'm glad you're not my coworker.

I believe it's called white fragility nowadays bt insane Americans. Also, someone who is from Eastern Europe and white, I'm grossly offended by people using my skin color everywhere, I have nothing to do with your history.

Do you even realize tech community is bigger than California?

When I say "irrationally offended minority", I mean "minority" as in a small number of people, not "minority" as in racial minority, although I see why they isn't clear given that I use the word in two different ways in my comment. Most of the people I've seen get offended for trivial reasons are actually not a racial minority at all.

As I said, if a significant number of people are offended (or if a small number are offended for a good reason), we should probably change our language. But if it is a small number of people getting offended at a word used in a context where it has never been offensive, I don't think we should accomodate them.

A lot of work fixing code that depended on the old behavior, having to guess if a repo uses the old or new style and probably implementing workarounds for both cases.

At the foggy promise of recruiting people that cannot be in the same room as anyone holding a masters degree without suffering from mass hysteria.

I now have to go to extra effort to get my default branch to be called `master`. Plus I can no longer assume that the default branch is `master`. I have to check for every project whether they are using `main` or `master`.

Maybe not a lot more effort, but it definitely is more effort, and for basically no gain. Let's not kid ourselves that black people being targeted by the police care about Git branch names. Hell apparently nobody even cares that Git is called Git, which is definitely a ruder word than "master".

You couldn't assume that before.

Some black people don't care about this kind of thing. Some do.

Git is a generic insult and doesn't have historical baggage. Nobody identifies as a git or the descendant of gits.

> Nobody identifies as a git or the descendant of gits.

I see you've never been to Finland.[0] (Perhaps Linus comes from a long proud line of gits ;) )

[0] I briefly considered saying Switzerland, after a Stan Freberg skit where he speaks in an outrageous accent and claims to be from Switzerland "that way, nobody gets offended". Crockford's page with various types of JavaScript inheritance (including Swiss inheritance) unfortunately now has a broken link to the Fredberg skit.

And if it doesn't?

I'm not entirely convinced convinced it will make for a larger nor a more empathetic community.

I think these kinds of changes only makes it harder to enter the community, by adding more landmines to discourse and saying that there is a right and wrong way to talk regardless of intent and context that you need to know regardless of if you come from a background where these words are as heavily loaded as other places.

It also creates a community which seemingly supports and defends personal attacks against people whenever the mob finds something new to hate on. For example in the case of Rubocop, when all of the sudden cop was a loaded word. The developer seemingly got harassed when he didn't want to change the name.

I think we are losing more than we are gaining by going through with this. Not because of master or main but because we are seemingly not assuming best intentions when communicating anymore.

Given the motivation for this change -- will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration? Seems a touch over-sensitive in my book.

'main' is a better choice because it's shorter -- it's also a keyword in many C based programming languages that programmers are inherently slow to write/override. They should have been the stated reasons.

To answer your question - yes.

And use of the acronymn RAID should be phased out as it is insensitive towards nordic people, the ancestors of whom spent centuries raiding European coastal towns. A bloody history they would rather move on from.

I think in that context "slave/master" is much worse than just "master node", as it's explicitly that relationship. In the ATA spec for example, the master/slave terminology no longer appears:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#Master_and_slave_...

Similarly, Jenkins started moving from "slave" to "agent" in 2016, and is now working on other terms such as master, whitelist/blacklist, etc:

https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2020/06/18/terminology-update/

In RAID, unlike in git, the word "slave" is also used in conjunction with "master".

That seems to inherently raise some negative associations... and it's not like "primary / secondary" aren't easily available substitutes.

You've haven't solved the problem though -- just kicked the can down the road -- somebody could come along explain that their offended by the terms "primary" and "secondary" as it implies one is above the other when they prefer to see equality and no offence caused.

When that happens you'll find yourself in the same position as us now who are saying the term "master" when discussing source control or HDD configuration is appropriate. Perhaps the answer is to understand that not everything is offensive even if interpreted initially that way. Nor does someone who claim to be offended actually have more skin in the game or more to their argument.

Sure, but I don't think the prevailing argument here is that any offense no matter how small should be catered to.

To produce a silly hypothetical, how about if anti-vaxxers got really upset about the phrase "code injection"? Even though anti-vaxxers are a worryingly large subgroup who've managed to return us to the days when measles is a thing to worry about, I still think that general cultural perception is such that everyone would roll their eyes at this complaint.

Rather, for "master" and "slave" and "blacklist" and whatnot, it's that enough of a groundswell of awareness occurred in general society that a lot of people started to feel awkward about the use of a term. It's akin to how "negro" used to be a perfectly acceptable descriptive word, but if you used it in casual conversation now you'd get a negative reaction even though it's not the bad "n-word".

We can't separate the current drive to replace slavery-related terms from the last few years of events in America. There's been a lot of events which have driven home to people that, yes, Black people in America are still having a rough time -- and in America, that inexorably ties to the historical reality of slavery.

A lot of these replacements are symbolic, driven more by a desire to say "hey, we accept you! you are welcome in our community" than any severe offense at any particular term. But symbolic things matter in aggregate.

> will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration?

Are drives commonly referred to as master/slave in that context? With the exception of when hot spares are present the drives in each array are considered equal (unless perhaps you have some arrangement where all parity information is on a subset of the drives). Maybe during the initial build process if you are converting a single drive to an array (for instance by adding a mirror to convert to RAID1) you might call the original drive the master, but this is in the context of a master tape rather than a master/slave allusion and even then I think I would have naturally called it the "source" drive instead.

The last time I remember referring to a drive as "master" was back when pre-SATA drive interfaces where dominant and you had up to two drives per interface cable.

I don't really mind this change. But selective outrage like this is really strange. Some people on Twitter decide a word is offensive and the next day I am just expected to just stop using them. It's hard enough to learn English without these new laws all the time. I don't think this happens to any other language.

They got a taste of power, and so the demands will continue. The tyranny of the least tolerant strikes again.

It's nothing new. I'm in my late twenties, and I can name a few words we stopped using in my lifetime.

Any one to post on twitter that 'scrum master' is offensive? Especially when there are people of minorities in scrum?

So that I can grab some popcorn and have fun watching the world going full speed to Idiocracy world!

Now I am tempted to set the default branch to "offensive" or "inappropriate" :D

On a more serious note, I can agree that the master/slave terminology is not the best choice of words, but how is the usage of the word "master" in git deemed offensive?

It wasn't necessarily deemed "offensive", simply that its roots in master/slave terminology (indirectly [0] in predecessor VCS Bitkeeper which did have a concept of "slave repositories" that git fortunately does not share) was not the best choice of words and given they have the option to somewhat easily change the default, because it was already a config flag, they could just easily change the default (as this changeset does).

[0] The developer that chose git's default did not intentionally choose the default because it was Bitkeeper's default/terminology, but the developer was a Bitkeeper user at that time and its subconscious influence in reusing terminology would have been strong.

As a Slav I feel offended by changes like this, mainly because it means that someone saw a word that - in a totally different context - and thought of the bad meaning. What next? s/killall/pleaseturnoff?

I also have a bad feeling about Parus major (the bird).

This is ethics grandstanding without putting in any of the work and does more to divide us human beings than it does to heal.

Class politics not identity politics. All of us are workers in the service of the true masters holding the leash to capital emancipation. This is how I know you black brother, this is how I know you Asian sister, my fellow workers. It's the cause worth fighting for, not helpless endless division built on a bedrock I can never be: the color of your skin or the shape of your brow.

I think there is more to this than people usually see. While I agree to those who say that people are being irrationally offended, I see banning of word master as exactly what would a master do.

Not only methods are silly, because it seems a paradox to me that enforcing unfair policies makes happier those who were victims of unfair policy enforcement. (Oh, wait, no paradox here, just human nature), but what concerns me much more is enforcing of US culture. Companies eliminate words master, black, and others like offensive ones, but they may not be offensive in other cultures. Even more, replacements may be even more offensive. Why questionable fear of offending some of 40 million black U.S. people by just using a word, without any intent to offend anyone is enough to enforce some country-specific culture based policy on 7 billion people?

All political correctness talk aside, "main" is a much better name for the main branch.

There was a similar debate about blacklist and whitelist, and I much prefer the recommended alternative: blocklist and allowlist.

The meanings if those new terms are self-evident.

Political correctness run amok.

It's dumb that people find this offensive.

It's dumber that people are renaming their branches.

It's dumbest that Git itself has been consumed by this madness.

Political issues aside, it seems that 'master' was hardcoded in several places on the code

I'd have imagined that it was more of a config issue than code, but apparently not.

This will have broken tens of thousands of beginner programming tutorials. Very unfortunate.

Teaches the beginners a valuable lesson about relying on defaults I suppose...

Hopefully many of these tutorials will be updated or replaced by other resources over time.

It would be helpful if git threw a descriptive error when trying to check out 'master' if it doesn't exist, and is not set to the default branch.

I've long felt that "trunk" is a much better name than "master" or "main".

I dunno, I associate "trunk" very strongly with svn.

My company's internal repos usually use "devel" as our default branch, but that's partly a convention inherited from the ROS ecosystem where the different main releases have a codename and fixes get patched between branches with names like jade-devel, kinetic-devel, lunar-devel, etc.

I hear trunk and think telephony. SVN was always odd in going with the tree metaphor, as trees never really grow back into themselves normally.

To be fair, branching in svn is kind of a one-way street. A functional merge and conflict resolution workflow was part of what won over a lot of us to git from it.

I don't like devel, because its usually coupled with git flow and stale release branches.

What exactly is the rationale behind changing the default branch name? It seems like significant effort is being devoted to this (code changes, fixing broken CI, etc.) but I don't understand why any of it is necessary.

I found this to be a good write up:

https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminolo...

Personally, I love this change. "main" takes less time to type than "master".

“of or relating to a master from which copies are made: master film; master matrix; master record; master tape.”

I'm fine with this. It costs me almost nothing, but it means something to some people and I see no reason to block them from getting it.

And its gonna be juuuust a bit easier to explain git to non native speakers who understand 'main' and not 'master'. A bit. Tiny bit.

When this came up initially I asked some of our PoC employees for their thoughts on it down the pub. One didn't care, and the other thought it was stupid.

We did change to exclusion/inclusion lists though, as that terminology is used when communicating with customers.

There's a saying in my language that translated goes something like: "Words are taken by the wind".

There is a scene in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz says: "We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

I find these shananigans very much in the same spirit.

When will they change the name of the software itself? I’m pretty sure “git” is a more offensive term than “master,” as it means an “unpleasant or contemptible person.” The point of the word is to use it when intending to be offensive.

The other day I noticed my freshly created repo on GH was with main, and I took the time to create a master and make it the new default, and then deleting main.

It was my only way to say FU to the word police mafia

Let's create an excuse to be angry and then another excuse to be angry at people who aren't angry.

Whatever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"

Probably people thought about it for 2 seconds and realised it isn't true.

Maybe they should have thought about it some more, like the stoics:

"The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do." - Marcus Aureliu

"When someone is properly grounded in life, they shouldn’t have to look outside themselves for approval." - Epictetus

"Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference." - Marcus Aurelius

An unrealistic goal. No man is an island.

I will NEVER cave to this kind of narrow-minded bigoted thinking. Thank god for open-source.

Revert, revert, revert.

Politics does not belong in tech.

I am still waiting for them to stop using the world ROBOTS. It means slaves.

And I hope very soon we will replace the concept of users from platforms like google and facebook, since we're the one's being used.

git branch -m main master

This will save so many slaves.

The people who believe this is correct are the racists. The pen is truly mightier than the sword, unfortunately for you, it's run out of ink.

Meh. I'll change it back. I'm not "dying on a hill" either when I do this because nobody will care. Nobody that I work with will care and nobody that looks at my source code online will care.

If and when someone does care about what I name my branch, it will be an easy way for me to identify a person that I would rather avoid working with.

The reason I care enough to even change it back is because I think the whole idea is driven by stupidity and it's my personal policy to not give into stupid demands. I simply don't do political correctness. If people don't like it, they can just fuck right off.

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