But the ant colony thing in the SA piece sounds a bit like saying software engineering is a "problematic" field that should be critiqued because it often uses a VCS that at some point in the past opted for a very common set of terms that some may now consider offensive.
I could try to rack my brain for all the more or less charitable interpretations of what she is actually trying to get at with that sentence, but viewing it in the context of the whole piece, I think there's not much of a there, there.
You have to say “no”.
Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed.
If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying
Why should I spend energy to try to gauge their motivations? And why should I care if I don't like the outcome of that estimation? I feel your criticism is refusing to admit a (low-priority, highly cosmetic) bugfix into an open source project because you don't like the political views of the committer.
To me, it's a pure calculation:
* To me, the words "master" and "main" equally well describe the most-important branch of my git repository.
* To some people, "master" is offensive. I don't understand this at all, but to these people, "main" is better.
* Someone else is offering to do the work.
So letting them is a net change for some people, and neutral for me. So why not?
> Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed.
Also by ignoring non-negative contributions from such people?
> If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying
That's the pointing: I'm arguing it has non-negative technical merits. So why care?
I'd be all on your side if "main" wasn't actually an equally good word! In fact, I think I'm driving people a little bit nuts by opposing things that have small negative impact all the time. I try not to compromise in that department. But I'm simply arguing that changing "master" to "main" here has no negative impact.
I'll admit that "master vs slave" might perhaps be in bad taste (but not "master" on its own). But cancelling "blacklist", "colony" and "supremacy" is pretty incredible.
EDIT: the replies I received to this comment are pretty shocking to me. I'm not arguing for the removal of anything, I am only listing one issue with blacklist that deny-list doesn't have. Anything you're reading into my comment beyond that is your tribal identity projecting its insecurity.
2. The usual reason given for not saying "blacklist" is because of supposed racism. Your argument is a new one, and seems to have been produced post-facto. Your comment is sophistry.
[edit] Removed some scathing remarks.
I'm not arguing for the removal of the word, I don't know why you think I am.
you mean you white-washed some remarks?
aha!
;)
Even forgetting that many languages have exactly the same construction ("black list") with the same meaning, the thing you do as a non-native speaker with an unfamiliar word is to look it up in a dictionary, or guess its meaning from the context, not try and run some inverse etimology on it.
I mean, for years I understood what "paste" meant (as in "copy and paste") and used that word without having any idea about "paste" being some sort of glue. I still have no idea where the word "parkway" comes from, but understand the word and use it. (If I were to guess from its parts I would arrive to something like a "garden path":))
German is pretty close to English though, so I guess your argument could still hold for other non-related languages.
blacklist = bad, forbidden things
=>
white = good
black = bad
Associating something being black with it being bad/lesser/evil is problematic if you're trying to get rid of racism toward black people.
The fact that people's skin colour is sometimes described as white or black is a coincidence that doesn't relate to the origin of the word blacklist.
If people are offended by coincidences like this, it means that we won't be able to speak Spanish, Russian or Chinese. The Russian word for black (as in a black person) is negr; but note that this is not considered offensive in Russian.
In a post about a world flag someone mentioned that, for the Chinese, white is associated with death.
It has never had anything to do with race.
If we can't say certain words because of linguistic coincidences, then we won't be able to speak Spanish.
In all your responses to me, you have been arguing for the sake of arguing.
How about we look at the word mansplaining? I think it's unfairly promoting sexism and gender stereotypes about my gender.
I also find mention of "cis" very offensive. Likewise the term cis white male too.
You game?
whitewashing
white collar crime (why not “black suit crime”?)
You’re hallucinating an issue that doesn’t actually exist.
Black and Tan
Plenty of “black” compound words that are neutral to positive.
It’s not about the words, it’s about power. They want to force you to do what they say.. Even for something trivial like this, if they can force you to do use their language, they make a small win.
A few hundred wins later and they dictate what is acceptable language.
To clarify my view on master/slave terminology, I do understand how an overt analogy to slavery could be offensive. But the word "master" doesn't usually imply that there's a slave.
> however, the term came to denote the highest status of a Roman city.
This isn't out of wokeness; quoting the previous version of the I²C specification:
"Some devices are masters – they generate bus clock and initiate communication on the bus, other devices are slaves and respond to the commands on the bus."
... if you're going to have to define what your terms mean in other terms because your original terms are unclear, why not just use the other terms directly? Initiator/responder would've been perfectly appropriate here (that terminology is used by IPSec, FWIW). Initiator/target would've also worked (iSCSI calls them that).
Interestingly, just a couple months ago the spec was updated to replace the terms with "controller/target" instead, which is actually worse; "controller" is already a widely used term to mean the hardware that implements I²C inside any given chip, and which can work in either "controller" or "target" mode, which is very confusing.
So yeah, I'm all for replacing master/slave since it's terribly ambiguous, just please pick something that doesn't make things worse.
As for git master vs main, that has less of a technical argument to it... but it doesn't hurt anyone, it's easy to change the default branch name, "main" is just as descriptive as "master", and "main" is shorter anyway, so "main" it is. There's absolutely no reason to die on that hill even if you reject the (tenuous) argument of a master -> master/slave -> slavery association (in my mind "master" here is in the sense of "master record" or "master bus" and there is no "slave" counterpart, so I never had a problem with this one, but I still find "main" perfectly fine and it saves typing).
This thing about ant colonies... yeah, that's pretty different and clearly utterly illogical.
It’s not about this or that word. It’s about controlling language and letting you discuss it seriously is still them winning.
If it “doesn’t work”, they’ll find a new word that is racist or sexist or whatever, and they’ll want you to discuss that one too.
The only way to win (for everyone) is to not play the game. Mock, belittle, double down before you take it seriously.