GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

> Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward.

This is an approach that is not productive, but also not applicable here as those types of actions are usually once the rest of the world has moved, and a small minority has not. This is quite early in such a transition and if anything I would expect Github to be praised for it. I certainly appreciate Github starting the process and conversation here.

The only thing I can say then is to look to psych research, implicit bias, and biases in decision making studies. The conclusions there clearly point the opposite direction. I'll drop one such example to start[1]

> I am ready to be called a racist or fascist for this

People walk into these assuming this hostility, but if you want such hostility to change, it's a two way street. It's been well established we are all a little racist, ironically here thanks to ingrained biases such as the one we are discussing. What matters is that you're trying to fight against those tendencies, learning, and correcting where you can. No one is asking for perfection. When people bring in hostility into these conversations though is where that then becomes interpreted as a choice, not just subconscious.

> my grandparents and great-grandparents had several unpleasant interactions with the Italian fascist party

I don't see why we are still trying to use this line of argument. There are plenty of sexist women, racist BIPOC to other races, etc. Being of or having been related to X can help statistically at a macro level, but does not magically stop an individual from developing any of those ideas.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/

My hypothesis there (that most people bothered by this change WOULD be bothered by the spelling mistakes) doesn’t apply to you since you are applying a consistent approach to contextual interpretation. My guess could be quite wrong.

Here’s a question along similar lines: the word “niggardly” is a synonym of “stingy”, but through an etymological accident is almost a homophone of a very charged word. Do you also think that “niggardly” is a word worth keeping around? Would you use it while talking with or referring to a black person? It’s more archaic than “master”, so it’s not an equivalent situation, but the overtones strike me as being similar.

This is a genuine question in the spirit of curiosity. There’s both a logical and emotional/visceral component to many words we use, and the overlap is not usually a problem. I’m trying to better understand how people evaluate a charged word’s usefulness in communication. If “master” is charged—maybe not for you personally, but potentially for people you’re talking with—and “main” serves just as well, what’s the issue with swapping it out?

Do we dumb down our language to appeal to every less capable person's abilities? How large or small of a group size to we appeal to? How do you determine that?

So let me get this straight, you're wanting to switch away from master-slave in the context of programming - and now you're wanting me or "us" to stop using the words coddling, triggering, and anger - arguably because you're creating a strawman argument to defend? Is instead that you're simply just not understanding fully what I am saying, like the people misassociating master-slave to human slavery, and so I need to arguably simplify my arguments simply because it "doesn't sit right" with you? Do you see the slippery slope insanity of your process yet?

What does "not sitting right with some people" mean to you? Are you suggesting that anything that "doesn't sit right with some people" we should just change? When do we stop, who's the arbiter of it - you? Or maybe instead we hold integrity for proper language use, people developing emotion regulation, and helping people heal past and ongoing trauma by fixing the structural-systemic sources of their trauma, fear-anger? Explaining to them "master-slave in programming isn't referring to human slavery, and X, Y, Z is what we're going to do to help fix up this fucked up system."

Do you see logical fallacy and potential irony in your statements? And maybe that "slave" in distributed systems always made you feel a certain way is you in fact not differentiating, wrongly connecting, the term to human slavery - attached to it? There are practices of mindfulness like meditation that can allow you sit with and analyze and differentiate by learning to detach to let those improper associations/attachments and the emotions they stir to settle, to not come up - so you don't react and then you refine and hone your sharpness of associations. Do you or have you ever had a mindfulness practice?

> and now you're wanting me or "us" to stop using the words coddling, triggering, and anger

It's ironic this followed by accusing me of a straw man while doing that quite liberally to what I said. I said nothing of the words, I am referring to your line of argument. Those words are simply the typical ones that are often signifiers of the same argument which people have had to waste time on again and again instead of addressing the actual issue here, which I mentioned at length at this post and the parent but you didn't address at all.