41–50 of 104 posts
What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.
Does it really give them good PR though?
What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.
Are efforts to clean up terminology worthwhile? For who?
My 2c, based on my personal feelings and hope... no evidence. This is low hanging fruit. Get people involved and thinking about current issues. Their employees, customers, and stakeholders might grumble or question the value of this work, but it does start conversations (like this one) and that seems good.
We think and speak in the words we know and see. This individual change is not going to end racism across the world but I believe in aggregate, enough small changes over a long enough timeline, these things can matter.
I think instead of criticizing changes like this we should appreciate that they are doing something. I mean, it is capitalism and at the end of the day they are making a choice that this is a better 'look' than to do nothing. A choice more and more capitalist enterprises have made in recent months. To me, this speaks to the continued change in our culture.
On the other hand it does seem to bring about a strong reaction from some counter culture (? idk what to call it). Maybe this sort of thing makes folks dig in their heels more than it helps?
Idk. I think it helps. But maybe not today.
I feel like I'm in the minority that thinks this is a good idea. I can easily see how some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording, but more importantly, I can see no downside to changing it. It will be a very small amount of work for a very small amount of time and then everything will carry on as normal. If this helps make programming more inclusive, even in a small way, then I'm all for it.
Never in my life even for a second I had any connotation between words master and slave used in IT and any derogatory meaning for anybody. I don't remember a single instance in the past 20 years when I could possibly link any utterance of these words in IT setting to any kind of discrimination, derogatory meaning.
These words are just statement of facts, describing relationship. If not these, there will be other words to state exact same relationship with exact same meaning. Contrast this with the N word which is clearly derogatory.
Are we going to be renaming colors, too? Am I going to find a new name for the color of my car?
If you care for black lives, cooperating to find and work on an actual solution seems to me much more worth your while and shooting in everything that moves is wasting time at a critical point when time is of the essence.
These kinds of moves are only going to entrench the opposition, giving more arguments against and achieve nothing.
We live in the dumbest time-line.
In discussions about this on social media, there's significant push back from those who are actually affected by the issues BLM is fighting for, who feel moves like this are more white guilt with no real change for what really matters. I'm sure an at-risk youth, when pulled over by two white police officers, is grateful that a bunch of highly paid programmers aren't subjected to politically incorrect variable names.…
Please provide a link to support your assertion that "the BLM core" is giving "significant push back".
What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.
Also, this isn't a "New" issue/ BLM issue, while it's been sped up by BLM, companies have been moving this way for some time. Python dropped Master/ Slave 2 years ago, before it was trendy.
When these phrases are being replaced, their replacements are almost always more descriptive terms for that specific project, and the way those servers interact.
For example- In Jenkins you run a "master" which schedules jobs, and "slaves" which run the jobs. After they updated their terminology, they referred to the job-runner as a "Agents."
This makes it much clearer what the relationship is between them, and clarifies that the "Slave" servers aren't some sort of failover server, which is how a DB might use the same terms.
I've seem other projects use primary/replica, and several other variations, but they almost always seem to be much better fits for what the software is actually doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would anyone waste time complaining about this, especially BLM organizers?
I would be surprised, but I am giving the OP the chance to show they are not full of shit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right, nothing wrong with it. No more than changing the name of all the nonsense gems and npm modules to something more semantic. However, I think the pushback is that this is the response to becoming "woke", and for those struggling with the issues facing PoCs, it feels like more corporate shallowness.
If the pushback were against corporate shallowness, you'd expect at least one comment would include a suggestion of what they could do instead. But the comments here so far don't seem to do that, they seem to just be against this, with no alternative.
Top comment from an earlier discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23501861
I feel like I'm in the minority that thinks this is a good idea. I can easily see how some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording, but more importantly, I can see no downside to changing it. It will be a very small amount of work for a very small amount of time and then everything will carry on as normal. If this helps make programming more inclusive, even in a small way, then I'm all for it.