31–40 of 94 posts
I feel like this will break a very significant amount of tooling
Then that tooling was broken to begin with.
At the speed this is going, I'm beginning to worry about my master's degree, male/female connectors, and color coding in electrical code.
Git init defaults to master, i don't care what it's called but why are they diverging from git defaults? This will just add yet another inconsistency to confuse newbies as they transition from using github directly to plain git cli... The more cynical side of me would think that may even be intentional.
If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch. (I know bitkeeper used master/slave terminology for repositories; that is completely irrelevant to git).
I'm all for improving the rights of minorities, but this behavior of eradicating all trace of references to anything tentatively related to historical racism seems like useless noise at best and dangerously naive at worst...
If our society becomes so sensitive that we cannot even utter a word that implies another word which when placed in an entirely different context and the assumption of malicious intent becomes racist then we are doomed to repeat history as a species - i.e unchecked, this pattern of behavior can only evolve into censorship which is itself detrimental to future generations understanding racism in our history.
Awesome. Let's do this industry wide and never talk about it again.
better yet, why don't we just strike the word "master" from the English language, that way no mortal will make the mistake ever again?
If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch. (I know bitkeeper used master/slave terminology for repositories; that is completely irrelevant to git).
To me when people are so angered that they can't separate contexts of language use, it's a signal or canary that things are out of control. And then reasonable people fold to requested or demanded change, like giving into a child rewarding them for something not reasonable, re-enforcing the illogical thought behaviour - doing it because it's easier to make satisfy a few angry, unreasonable people (perhaps a mob) who…
As a white person, the term "slave" in distributed systems always made me feel that way. Not as much for master and whitelist/blacklist personally, but I see no harm in transitioning our terminology away from these types of terms. It's simply a subconscious effect that helps engrain bad defaults we shouldn't be teaching people like "white good, black bad". Study after study has shown that has bigger psychological effects. None of that has to do with anger.
Can we please get rid of this narrative about "coddling" and "triggering" and "anger" when the reasoning for changing terminology has nothing to do with it?
If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch. (I know bitkeeper used master/slave terminology for repositories; that is completely irrelevant to git).
Given how even distributed systems used to use master/slave frequently, and some still do, and that people don't say "master branch" and typically just say "master", I think it would be surprising for someone to avoid that association if they are educated in computer sincere using those terms (which again many places do). Also, it's not reading comprehension, it's subconscious level associations that people basically…
I am not a native speaker so my brain might work differently but I don't believe the theory on associations. We're even talking of a noun vs an adjective. Do people make the same associations also when you hear about a Masters degree? Or when you hear about Slavic people, do you feel for the times when they were enslaved?
I have no problem with replacing master/slave, there are usually clearer names since that pair has been overloaded (though changing master/slave to master/replica should be just as acceptable as e.g. primary/replica or active/backup, for the same reason!). Even outside distributed systems other names are clearer (controller/device for example).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how even distributed systems used to use master/slave frequently, and some still do, and that people don't say "master branch" and typically just say "master", I think it would be surprising for someone to avoid that association if they are educated in computer sincere using those terms (which again many places do). Also, it's not reading comprehension, it's subconscious level associations that people basically…
If it's triggering underlying emotional trauma, then there's still unhealed/unprocessed trauma; rightfully so, though "actions speak louder than words" seems oddly fitting here.
1. Where did I say anything about emotional trauma?
2. Even if that was the case (for most it is not as far as I can tell), I am surprised to hear an argument for "ah yes, let's not decrease emotional trauma if we can for low/no cost".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then that tooling was broken to begin with.
Newsflash: most software makes assumptions that it shouldn't. Doesn't mean it's acceptable for something like Github to break it just because "well, you shouldn't have done that".