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GitHub, fuck your name change

mooseyanon.medium.com

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Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#291

Post by stunt »

These ideas about inclusion and language aren’t actually new. They just got more attention recently.

While I agree that we should start fixing bigger and more perceptible issues about racism (e.g., hiring biases), but let's not mix these things together. I assume people that pushed these changes don't have influence on hiring. So let's celebrate their small but impactful success.

I was personally a bit skeptical about the whole idea of not using “master” or “whitelist & blacklist” because my brain never associated them to race and racism and I assume it’s just the same for everyone. So it seemed like a pointless change at first glance.

But, maybe we should change it. Maybe the whole notion of “black” being used in “bad” and “negative” context has an influence on our perception about other things that we are not aware of.

For comparison, the notion of associating Pink to girls and Blue to boys isn’t something very old at all. It’s a 20th century change and yet it comes so naturally to us that you would be surprised when you learn about its history. Perhaps “black” being the label for unfavorable things has an influence on our subconscious and how we see other things around us.

There are many studies about how language has influence on our culture and the way we think. Actually you can even see it with programming languages. A Scala programmer solves a problem very different than a Python programmer would. Their mental model is very different.

So I personally don’t mind changing them anymore. Why resist the change and insist on something so cheap to change? Let’s try it and perhaps it will take a few generations until it becomes the new normal. Every small progress is still good especially if it has deep cultural impact.

I welcome changes and I admire forward thinking. Don’t fall into the trap of false but appealing and convincing arguments against this and also don't mix it with other issues that we have.

At some companies diversity & inclusion initiatives are just about language and nothing more and we know that’s very wrong. But, progress even in a company like that is still a progress. Let's try to fix other things too while we take some other small steps.

After a few times hearing it, I think I quite like “main” for branch name. I think it even makes more sense to say this is the main branch.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#292

Post by vmception »

Freak_NL wrote: post #155
vmception wrote: post #47

I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote. It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate. For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, wat…

Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates? This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear o…

> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology

I don't have the experience of any other group doing this. I agree that it is not inherently a political ideology.

The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal. I think it is important to say that because I know people in other parts of the country that see these as insults and would be surprised to know that people commonly self-identify as these terms.

I find that this group thinks their behavior is better and more helpful than apathy, "silence", and the idea of rampant exclusionary hate from the right. When its really not better, its different, but its not more helpful. There is absolutely a constant threat from people afraid of bird watchers in a park, people that blend into their ranks and are willing to weaponize their understanding of race, two seconds after donating to the Democratic Party.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#294

Post by jlokier »

Symbiote wrote: post #222

> Out of curiosity I asked my manager, who is like 20 yrs older than me, if he had ever been stopped and searched, he said not once in his life. I had a similar conversation when a black colleague was late for work, having been stopped and searched by the police in London. The other 10 (white) developers were all shocked, but he said it as casually as someone might report they'd missed the train, or had a puncture on…

I've seen similar happen in London - black people stopped and seeming to be harassed by police for no obvious reason.

But the main anecdote for me is when I was crossing the Swiss-French border near Geneva in a car with my girlfriend.

She is black; I am white.

She was told to get out of the car and required to present various paperwork, then they checked up on the paperwork, holding her for maybe 10-20 minutes, making phone calls.

A man with an impressively large gun stood nearby.

She had a decent job at the UN in Geneva nearby, a perfectly good identity card, and it's not at all unusual for black people to cross that border in a car.

I thought they might check my paperwork too, but they were not interested and didn't ask me for anything, not even to get out of the car. It seems I was free to pass, except of course I waited for my temporarily detained girlfriend.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#295

Post by oftenwrong »

jansan wrote: post #103
sunaurus wrote: post #4

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is. I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these t…

GitHubs decision is a form of cultural imperialism. That's what it really is. Only because the US want's to somehow deal with a dark part of it's history, the rest of the world should not be foreced to adapt their views.

The rest of the world is not forced to do business with an American company following American cultural standards.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#296

Post by dgellow »

lionkor wrote: post #210

This is not a GitHub issue - Git itself now asks you if you would like to use the more inclusive `main`. I personally don't care for these changes, I will likely keep using `master` because I "automatically" type it in my workflow, and I find master to be a lot more descriptive. `main` is the name of my main.c, main.go or main.cpp file, the name of the main function, etc. I dont need another "main" to mess up my auto…

> This is not a GitHub issue - Git itself now asks you if you would like to use the more inclusive `main`.

When does git asks this? From what I've seen, they just introduced a new config to change the name of the default branch, which is quite nice in itself (as of Git 2.28, released 27th July 2020).

  $ git config --global init.defaultBranch

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#297

Post by maverwa »

> I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t.

I might have missed the GitHub communication there, but thats not at all what I think when thinking about changing the default branch name for new repos to a name thats, in my perception, at least as good as the old one, maybe better.

If there is window dressing involved around this change, then thats bs and need to be called out, but I nonetheless think that this change itself is not bad. Like many of these terminology changes discussed and implemented in the past, I actually think `main` is a better term for the (default) main branch. Personally I would opt for a branch name that better fits the projects needs, like 'stable' or 'production' or 'less-broken' or whatever you want. But we are talkin about a default here.

> I’m not pissed off because I expected tech companies to do more, no, I didn’t expect them to do anything. I’m pissed off because they pretended to be doing good and wanted me to congratulate them for it.

Yes, I agree with this.

[edit] only syntax fixes, my markdown is lacking

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#298

Post by learnstats2 »

terse_malvolio wrote: post #106
3saryHg6LP2e wrote: post #54

Christ, I agree with this article so much it hurts. I am convinced future people will find this whole saga quite an interesting anecdote of how, for a period of time, _appearing_ to be "anti-racist" was far more important than doing anything positive. As an aside I find it highly amusing watching the proponents of such changes eat themselves (see Twitch: womxn debacle).

It also mislabels racism as something that can be fixed by modulating language, as if it was a character flaw an not a human flaw . An optical illusion isn't fixed just because you cover it from view with a piece of tape.

If you believe, as I do, that racism is a systemic problem, then there is no individual action that can fix racism.

Should we therefore take no individual actions? I think this doesn't logically follow.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#299

Post by akvadrako »

jamil7 wrote: post #31
RawaHorse wrote: post #18

Maybe it's just me but, outside of tech contexts, I associate "master" and "slave" much more with bdsm than I do with actual slave ownership.

Maybe we can start using dom/sub instead of master/slave in tech.

As a bonus it's even shorter than "main" and probably whatever the new terminology is for subservient processes.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#300

Post by gammalost »

This reminds me what Assad said about Trump.

>I tell you, he’s the best American president. Why? Not because his policies are good, but because he’s the most transparent president[1]

The quote being about how Trump didn't pretend to have a humanitarian foreign policy in contrast to past presidents.

It's about two different situations but they are similar. People pretending to care about a cause and through that making it worse than not caring at all. While Assad and Mooseyanon both want people to drop the act to make everything easier

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/01/syria-assad-trump-b...

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