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Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

This is a well-established phrase in computer science and programming languages, and it’s likely that its use here is meant to be evocative of those principles rather than of an anthropomorphic sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen

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Well let's not use it anymore if I agree on principle, computer science itself is a new field, so not sure how deeply entrenched it really is.

Can you give an example or two of the type of terminology you have in mind? Something like first tier, or high level, or primary, or what? Almost any term that I could think of still carries with it a sense of politics. Perhaps someone from the first class citizen language, like English or French doesn’t really notice this dynamic, but someone who uses these other languages sure notice the lack of importance, or urgency, when they can’t live digitally with their own language. Whether or not they use the term,” political”, it’s still there. But I’m curious to see what your suggestions might include.

Integral

Compatible

Mainstream

It is very well-established and commonly used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22first-class+citizen%22+si...

People don’t perceive it as a political term.

I suspected what I was pointing out a tad too nuanced for hn, nevertheless, the word citizen very much has a political implication although not entirely, it can certainly stir up thoughts of being a citizen of a given country or not. First-class citizen has even more charged political implication, the image of people living in a ghetto v lush suburbs immediately comes to mind. After all you guys pushed to change master to main, but no way there is anything remotely true about using literal words that since the ancient Greek times have been used to mean a very specific thing and only that thing.

Changing “master” to “main” is similarly ridiculous as seeing “first-class citizen” as a problematic term, if you ask me.

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