It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology’s problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.
I really hope they adopt this. Not just for tech. To me, the world would become a little bit more interesting with a payment card called a DomCard™ in it.
I personally think the whole backlash against master/slave in the computing world is people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of “a movement”. Even if some mustache twirling racist was the first “computer guy” to come up with the term and meant it to be offensive, that is not how sane people view it today. So some of the advocates for changing it should stop trying to build it up into some Pizzagate-like conspiracy against black/brown people.
Having said that, I also don’t have any strong attachments to the phrasing either. Phase it out in favor of something that makes everyone happy if that keeps the peace. It is just a term that made sense at the time to describe something. There is nothing stopping us from changing it to something else now if we so choose. It is not erasing heritage or some such nonsense. If anything, people having strong hangups about it if there are better or equally as good terms out there that doesn’t make people uncomfortable is far weirder in my opinion.
The only thing I have somewhat strong opinions about is making it some high priority to go back and erase those terms from solutions that already exist. Change them as you update things, sure, but why create extra work to update something old that is currently working if the only change is not functional and just verbiage. Seems like wasted effort that could be better directed and solving functional issues to me.
while in some ways I can see your point, I would just have a hard time saying this in a work meeting here in the deep south with black colleagues present
Whitelist and Blacklist is on that stack as well.
this is actually a terminology that i would be interested on seeing the historical context for actually. My assumption has always been light based “whitelist referring to a well lit room, where as blacklist refers to a completely dark room” making things easy/hard to find as a a result.
It could also literally just be a coincidence and it simply sounded better for the allow list to be whitelisted, and the deny list to be blacklisted, humans have weird connections to words like that.
If I had to guess, it’s just the general “white=good black=bad” which itself is likely related to day/night.
But it’s easy to imagine a bouncer at a club with a list of whites allowed in and blacks that aren’t. I don’t think that’s the etymology, but it’s also important to remember that language is alive and words can take on unintended meaning.
But it’s easy to imagine a bouncer at a club with a list of whites allowed in and blacks that aren’t. I don’t think that’s the etymology, but it’s also important to remember that language is alive and words can take on unintended meaning.
that seems like an oddly specific origination for that specific term, but it’s certainly a possibility. But as with words being alive and taking on unintended meanings, it’s also equally likely that it became skin color agnostic at some point, and the term stuck because it was already being used.
I didn’t mean that it originated with bouncers, I meant I imagined it coming to be associated with race in such a way 😅
yeah no i understand, i’m just saying that’s a potential point where i could’ve originated and then morphed over time. Even if it was founded on race originally, it’s not super likely it would matter today in any broader contexts.
I’ve seen ‘Active / Passive’ used, that seems alright. There’s plenty of alternative terms to use without borrowing terminology from sexual roleplay.
Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that’s actually in control for this kind of thing (otherwise you’d just be in an abusive relationship), so that confuses things when you start trying to applying it elsewhere.
“main” is shorter than “master”. “sub” is shorter than “slave”. Why worry about social issues when you can just type less and move on? :)
Because I don’t want to be forced to adapt by others. Let me adapt by myself. Adding an option for change is fine, but changing the default is fucking annoying. Fuck Github for changing
master.
No it doesn’t sound bad, words don’t need to be thrown away forever just because they’ve been used to describe unfair treatment. I’m so sick of having to relabel so many things that are so far divorced from the social issues they are used to describe. It’s so pointless and has no impact, the code doesn’t care which is master and which is the slave for they are simply descriptive labels.
Are we supposed to never use the words master or slave ever again?? What’s next?
My dev friends, no matter their race, all say the exact same thing. We still use master over main, come at us I guess.
Honestly, while the controversy is incredibly stupid, it’s not something to get worked up about. Not good for your heart 😜
You don’t have to relabel anything, just keep using old names for old stuff and maybe consider switching to main for your next GitHub project? It’s honestly not that big of a deal.
I work for s company that suddenly asked to rename a lot of stuff. This had consequences. It cost time, money, and created a disconnect between internal to the dev vocabulary that couldn’t be changed easily and user facing vocabulary. Also we were lucky but this could gave broken some long used API that we are proud not to version because the policy we have internally is “we will NEVER break the API”. And so far, for 8 years we still haven’t.
That’s why I said to not rename existing stuff, but to consider changing default names for new things. Or don’t. It’s not the end of the world.
I’m a dev, and I’m the opposite. At my work, we use main over master. I thought it was a little silly when we first switched, but now I’m used to it. It’s an arbitrary label anyway – could easily use trunk/branch from SVN or release/develop or any number of other labels to keep track of code.
Hell, we got a new dev on the team a month or two ago, and he tends to name things ‘feat/do-the-thing’ instead of ‘feature/make-it-go’.
It’s not as big a deal as people online make it out to be.
My user name on all my PC’s(non root) is literally Master, my PC’s are all Slave, slave1, slave2. I will fight to keep them that way. I am also extremely anti slavery for sentient creatures. Words matter in the context of their intent. Dumbing down of the language by forcing alternate uses of a word to mean something other than its obvious intended use is evidence of dilusional minds. Pure and simple, they don’t deserve a seat at the table.
