All I know is 'main' is fewer characters to type, so I'm glad we changed that one.
I don't know if you ran into this one but I was convinced to use 'allow list' and 'block list' over white/black list purely on the basis that its just a bit more descriptive. I sort of wish we could clean language up like this more regularly, just imagine a world where we didn't maintain the notion of an electrical current that flowed opposite to the flow of electrons. So tidy.
(Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)
That is a good point, but, it would still be really nice if the convention for current just so happened to match the flow of electrons through a wire since it is the common case. At least, I remember that being pretty disorienting for me at times in some electrical engineering classes. Wish I could remember something specific though!
Do appreciate you pointing out some counter examples though, always fun.
Like... You'll get the wrong answer if you think the electrons in a CRT go from the screen to the gun, or if it's positively-charged particles that are causing carbon deposition inside a vacuum tube.
But that actually turns out to be (for most people) a specialized context. I'm startled to discover (because I was in the same camp as you) that the math is so symmetrical that it really almost never matters how the physical charge-carriers are moving, since it's the change in electric field that is causing things to happen.
Why does there have to be a slave just because there's a master? That is just one very specific meaning of the word, out of several dozen, and in the git context it was pretty clear that it wasn't used in that sense, but rather something like "master copy". So the master to main renaming thing was especially silly.
You are unironically doing the thing I was talking about by not noticing that I already said that about git's master branch. Master/slave is also a pretty common phrase in computing when talking about hardware, and its a pretty ugly concept when applied to humans, so I'm also not terribly surprised people chose to change their default branch name even if the association is only tangential. You wouldn't be surprised if the old name was 'ScrapedCornea' and people didn't love it. But again, its bizarre that a shift from 'master' to 'main', which is shorter, provokes this response. Do you feel personally critiqued by it somehow? Genuinely curious.
I personally have much closer ancestors, that were tortured by the communists within living memory. What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me? Or in analogy with the github situation, if I asked people to stop wearing Che t-shirts? Would you say that was reasonable, or a sign of insanity?
As I said, "allow list" is more descriptive if you don't know the word whitelist in the sense that it's easier to guess its meaning the first time you see it. My point is that this is not generally considered important, just look at 100 random words, most of them would be hard to guess the exact meaning of, even if like me you studied classical languages.
Then out of respect I would would attempt to stop using it around you, And if enough people agreed with you we would probably mothball it in favor of something else.