GitHub is working on renaming default branch from “master”

To address systemic racism, we need to change people's preconceptions and prejudices. These are things that are picked up and learned from other people in one's environment. Removing these words makes them even more intangible than they already are.

Creating prejudice is easy to communicate. Removing it, on the other hand, is an "absence" of something, which is much harder to get across linguistically, semantically and emotionally.

And in fact, at work, we use both git and mercurial, and they have slightly different terminologies. In particular, git's "master" is mercurial's "default". The result is that we are sometimes mixing the two. And we naturally ended up calling the master/default branch the "main branch" with the understanding that it is "master" in git and "default" in mercurial.

That we naturally came up with this name means it is a good name. And because it is the shortest, it has my vote.

That you are all used to "master" is no excuse either. There are other version control systems than git, and "master" is not a universal convention. In mercurial, it is "default", and in SVN, it is "trunk". If you are a professional developer, you are probably going to use several different VCS during your career, and it is not a good thing getting too attached to "master".

The main problem I see with the change is that if you are just getting started with git, most training material will refer to "master", and having different conventions can make things confusing at first. Of course, experts know that there is nothing special about "master" and can adapt to any situation, but beginners need guidelines, and we might as well make them consistent.