"Allow list" is frankly a much more descriptive and easy to understand term than "white list". It's a list of things that are allowed. If you were trying to learn the English language, I'd imagine a self describing term is much easier to understand.
They only make sense if you disregard any costs associated with the change. In addition to logistical costs, it's culturally costly to make many people change, and even more costly that people who fail to adapt are demonized. Generations of text was written to use blacklist/whitelist, and people who read them would naturally be more comfortable with those usage, and you're asking them to bend over.
>If you were trying to learn the English language, I'd imagine a self describing term is much easier to understand.
The controversies of blacklist/whitelist are very America-centric and your argument is exemplary of that. Terms like blacklist/white list have already permeated many languages by this time. People who have seen blacklist/whitelist in their own language would have no problem adapting to the English version of it.
1) "We should consider using Allowlist" "ok, but let's be careful with externally facing APIs, in exactly the same way we change all our externally facing APIs?" "Sure!"
2) "I was editing this file, find/replaced a couple cases of whitelist while I was in there" "LGTM"
3) "Oh, hey, noticed we had nearly finished opportunistically replacing whitelist. Does anyone mind if I just finish up?" "Sure, timebox it?"
Like, it's extremely low cost? What costs are you imagining?
In many languages a lot of computer related terms have no native correspondent, therefore they use the ones borrowed from English. If the English IT community decides en-masse to change those terms, the best result is that these people will have to catch up - with some unknown delay - or that they'll not bother, and there will be a disconnect in the terms. Which one is more likely and what the overall effects will be, I have no idea. But it will be a point of friction.
Only if you're pretending we were all learned English yesterday. "White list" is an older more established term, and that familiarity makes it easier to understand. Self-describing terms don't aid communication if they're replacing old terms that everybody already understood anyway.
An example, "submarine" and "undersea boat". The latter is self-describing, while the former is vague. A submarine.. what? 'Submarine' alone seems to be an adjective that means 'under the ocean'. But what is under the ocean? A submarine cable? A submarine crab? "Undersea boat" is self-describing; what is underwater? A boat.
So is "undersea boat" a better term? It self-describes well enough that English speakers with no knowledge of German should be able to figure out what it means easily. But does that mean it's actually a better term? No, in the context of English it isn't a better term, because everybody already knows what a 'submarine' is so this term's failure to self-describe is irrelevant. Already knowing what a word means is always easier than being able to puzzle out what a word means by seeing that it describes itself.
Most words don't self-describe anyway, and even when they do, the words they self-describe with aren't self-describing themselves. What is a 'list' anyway? That doesn't self-describe. Should we replace it with "ordered-collection-of-things"? None of those words self-describe either! The adoption of this word isn't really about self-description, self-describing words just isn't something we [english speakers] prioritize. It's political activism based on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
"White" here is metaphorical. "Allow" is literal. That makes "allow" the easier-to-understand term for those who are learning. Because, yes, English is something that needs to be learned. Not "everybody" already understands everything, unless your definition of "everybody" discounts a whole lot of humans for some reason.
> "White list" is an older more established term, and that familiarity makes it easier to understand.
Only if you already understand it, which is entirely self-referential.
> self-describing words just isn't something we [english speakers] prioritize
I'm going to assume here you mean the difference between metaphors and literals, because otherwise nothing makes sense. And it depends on the audience. If it's technical docs, I sure hope whoever's writing them takes a suitably informed view as to the comprehension level of their readers, because that's the damn job.
> political activism
"We should not make things easier for non-native speakers who don't already have all the implied context of the English language down pat" sounds a lot like a political position to me.
Nobody is agitating for 'string' to be replaced with 'character sequence'. It would be more descriptive, more literal, easier to understand than 'string' which usually means something completely different and not obviously related to character sequences at all. But nobody submitting passive aggressive drive-by PRs to public repos demanding that the word 'string' be stricken because isn't literal or self describing. Because nobody really cares about words being literal and self describing, that's a transparent post-hoc justification for what is fundamentally political activism.
> Nobody cares about words being literal and self describing
I care about literal and self describing language, and I believe you are falling prey to the fundamental attribution error -- you believe there is a group of folks driving some agenda.
I look at the suggestion no matter where it comes from and say, "oh hey, yeah, I think that is a good suggestion".
It's not some grand conspiracy to "post hoc justify political activism". Someone just suggested a thing and many of us said, "oh yeah, that makes sense and is easy to change."
Do you agree underwater-boat should replace "submarine"?
One could argue that it's an insufficiently specific literal term, and that the word "vessel" should be added afterwards, I suppose. But it doesn't really matter because it's not the same error of form that Allowlist and whitelist have.
Marine can mean the sea, but also things associated with the sea.
Nearly all words are somewhat metaphorical, idiomatic - we just learn what those idioms are.
A significant number of people? Or a small minority that will never gain the traction of "allowlist" advocates?
But then, political activism is about the only reason against replacing "whitelist", which unlike "submarine" is neither a technical term, nor common parlance, with the more explicit "allowlist". It's an obscure, relatively modern coinage as an antonym to the word "blacklist" which for most of its existence referred almost exclusively to people and was considered a judgement on their character. I've had to explain to native English speakers what a "whitelist" is intended to do before, never mind the majority of people using internet services who don't speak English as a first language. I suspect they'd have got "allowlist"...
I suspect that in a world where there actually was an issue with people getting upset by casual use of the word "submarine" we probably wouldn't have that much issue getting our heads around "undersea boat" (and that's despite "submarine" being a more universal word and the English language concept of a "boat" being pretty strongly wedded to the idea of small, probably open-topped vessels which sit on top of the water). Of course blacklist/whitelist has no etymological connection with race, but it also has no etymological connection or near-universally understood association with infosec or user preferences
Me: My opinion is A
You: No, your opinion is B, and you are cowardly and insulting.
Me: Genuinely, my opinion is A
You: You are pretending. No one believes opinion A.
I'm not sure what's so challenging here. Either I'm not aware of my own opinions or your worldview needs to be updated. I'm happy to discuss further if you'd like to understand the curious specimen I am better.
Just, maybe can we do that with fewer insults?
Given there's literally no motivation to lie, Occam's razor would suggest that the belief is genuine.
So what are the motivations to lie in this thread?
you keep referring to upvotes, but hn internet points are pretty meaningless either way - the validation behind them is probably more important.