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Comment by j4yav | Hacker News Reader

A company I was at renamed master to main to avoid implications of human slavery when committing to source control.

On the flip side, there are also cases where some changes to the language make things more obvious and simple. As a non-native English speaker, allowlist/denylist make more sense to me than whitelist/blacklist, since allow/deny describe the purpose well, as opposed to white/black.

As for having a "main" branch or other things like that, I don't really mind the change much. Admittedly, both the claims about implications surrounding slavery and counter-arguments regarding names like having a "master record" seem overblown to me (on one side, why care about some obscure software term instead of trying to effect actual change? on the other, why push back against a trivial change so much, it's not like using a different term is so hard if it pleases a lot of people?), although perhaps due to me not having the heritage of the people in the US, so I just quiet down and do the sensible thing.

It’s divisive. Almost nobody involved in this kinda stuff is at all curious how actual slaves thought about language.

People just want an in group and an out group. And there’s an endless parade of grifters willing to provide that.

I didn’t push back or complain, but I don’t really get the victory they think they achieved there. Definitely nothing that helped an actual living person improve their life - donating the equivalent in salary spent working on the change to local families would have been more effective at making the world a better place imho. There were no theoretically impacted people championing or asking for the change. It was just some people looking for something to do, and they even had a celebration at the end like they really achieved something.

Because it’s the same group of people who want to, on a whim, decide that “homeless” is now “houseless” and that it’s offensive to homeless people to call them anything else. It’s language authoritarianism used to arbitrarily paint people as bad for utilizing common verbiage and for the dictators to feel they’re some revolutionaries all while never doing anything to actually help the people they claim to be fighting for.

The changing of the word "homeless" isn't to prevent offence, but to make people view them differently, for a time.

I've experienced similar. Sure, words matter. But so does context, at least it should.

And yet I bet those you make the suggestion still say "master bedroom" (which actual is a direct reference to slavery).

American home ownership is so loaded with plantation era subtle subjugation in the form of linguistic convention. If master bedroom were the worst it would get attention.

I switched to originating new repos as main instead of master personally, reinforcing the concept of “commuting to” or code “being committed” to “master”, seems diametrically opposed to progress.

In San Francisco, when I was looking for a new place to rent in 2022, the realtor would use the phrase "primary bedroom" instead, remarking that apparently people in the field are moving away here from "master" because of the connotation.

Personally, my favourite is this Github repo https://github.com/queer/boxxy

The primary branch is called "mistress". haha, that's good

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