If the name change builds a larger, diverse, empathetic community. What have you or I lost?
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.
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.
IMHO it's definitely not. What I do with my blacklist might have nothing to do with blocking anything.
What about "yeslist" and "nolist"? "Includelist" and "excludelist"?
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.
But you have a point, block is unhelpfully overloaded on the English language.
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.
Do you even realize tech community is bigger than California?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.