Alfred Pennyworth: Why bats, Main Wayne?
GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
131–140 of 251 posts
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it make more sense? Blacklist is used also as a verb, and I don't think "denylist" could be used as such. You could say "add to the denylist" but I don't think this is sensible.
It only sounds unfamiliar to you because it's unfamiliar to you. You can use any noun as a verb. Google it.
Isn‘t that usually written as “you can verb any noun”?
/gd&r
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#133I'm a very anti-racist and anti-fascist person. I'm in favour of removing slavers and white supremacists statues.
But these silly debates in the tech world makes me cringe a little and I wish our community was different. Isn't it of little importance how a branch is named? Let's focus on politics, on inclusion, on essential debates that our societies need to improve and let's not waste our energies changing stupid little things that have no meaning other than to a minority of rich white males from Silicon Valley, as a method to self-redemption. Like giving some money to charities and be done with it, instead of rolling up our sleeves and do some direct work. Very White, American, Protestant thing to do. And very easy. And it's also free marketing, the cynic in me thinks.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope you give the words of people proposing improvements to language as much consideration. They aren't all mindless screamers on Twitter or people looking to remove all character from communication.
Is it possible that you have trouble with other opinions?
Was the quote supposed to be an opinion? My opinion is that if you share someone else's thoughts in place of your own, then it's not your opinion. And Orwell is dead. I can't ask him what he thinks about this.
edit for the non-insulting reply: I only flagged the low-effort non-contribution that started this thread and the insult below. Someone else is responsible for the rest. Your other comments, though not very substantial, are more of a downvote situation--which I can't do on replies--than a flag situation.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#135We could have a bunch of reform: from reducing the police force size and budget, to removing pointless offenses ("no victim no crime"), to reduce interaction with police, to eliminating all government programs so to eliminate financial dependency on the government (create a toehold for systemic racism)... Yet, we're renaming git master to git main. The profound and widespread impact of this will surely sweep the nati…
How we use our everyday language is incredibly important to fighting systemic racism. The words we use influence how we think. To use an extreme example, I've worked with and along side people who were in and around human trafficking, and I know that little things can have a very big impact.
To put it another way, for a very long time we celebrated Christopher Columbus as an American hero. How do American Indian peoples feel about the celebration of a genocide of their ancestors?
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes sense, better wording and less racist.
Nothing about those terms are racist. What’s next, renaming the color “black”?
That's actually been done, although it was more a case of someone not putting enough thought into their assignment than actually trying to rename a color.
Target once sold a children's desk that was available in white or black. One day, that changed to being available in white or African-American.
Target was made fun of for a few days on the internet over that, and presumably some employee learned that when a word has multiple meanings and you are only trying to replace one of those meanings, s/word/replacement/g is not the right approach.
I'd expect that employee also got kidded about it for years afterwards, like if he's going to play a game of chess with a co-worker on their lunch break getting asked if he wants to play white or African-American, or if he shows up at a Halloween costume party as a pirate getting asked if he's African-American Beard.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#137I'm a very anti-racist and anti-fascist person. I'm in favour of removing slavers and white supremacists statues. But these silly debates in the tech world makes me cringe a little and I wish our community was different. Isn't it of little importance how a branch is named? Let's focus on politics, on inclusion, on essential debates that our societies need to improve and let's not waste our energies changing stupid li…
That's a false dichotomy. You can worry about politics and other "essential" debates, and still worry about language and better defaults. It's low-gain/low-effort, but that's not really a reason to object.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#138Flagged?
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it possible that you have trouble with other opinions?
Was the quote supposed to be an opinion? My opinion is that if you share someone else's thoughts in place of your own, then it's not your opinion. And Orwell is dead. I can't ask him what he thinks about this. edit for the non-insulting reply: I only flagged the low-effort non-contribution that started this thread and the insult below. Someone else is responsible for the rest. Your other comments, though not very sub…
At least you have heard of him, and obviously you know how to operate the "flagged" button. A nice toy for everyone who wants to play thought police.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without the racist background, how does one know which list does which? The new names actually describe what they do. The reason it may seem ridiculous is that racism is very, very deep in American culture. The country's culture goes back hundreds of years and is still slowly working on being less so. Here's an example: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/11/310708342...
> Without the racist background, how does one know which list does which? By basic knowledge of the English language. Terms like "black market", "black death", "black tuesday", etc. etc. By the expressions like "looking at things in black and white". It is a part of language, it has nothing to do with race. These colors are used in the same way in other languages of other countries that don't even have racial slavery…
It sure was convenient that both "black" in English and "niger" in Latin meant "evil" during times of dehumanizing and enslaving others based on the color of their skin.
Basic knowledge of the English language also shows us that the word black does have to do with race. It means something for sure to black people.
The word black is both a personal identity around race, and it is often used to mean "evil" or "bad" in the modern workplace. While "white" is used to mean "good" in the workplace: whitelist. And white is also a race. I would hope that just about anyone can see why moving away from using black to mean "evil" in the workplace and moving to using more accurate words like denylist is not just easy, it would also make the workplace feel intentionally more welcoming to our black colleagues.