IMO if you take your own argument to its logical conclusion, you can see that it falls apart easily. If someone launched a project in 2020 where you “lynch” a process to remove it and engage in “gassing” a connection pool to close all connections, then it’s blatantly obvious why such terms are problematic, despite the terms only being slightly removed from master/slave.
Sure but there isn’t a growing population of people who actively support randomly killing children in the same way that hateful/racist movements are growing in the US and elsewhere. That context matters.
I've seen very few people of color expressing their offense at the terms master/slave as used in technology in these threads here at HN, Reddit and on Twitter.
Many more people of color have said that they're not offended by the terms and that this is an empty-headed change.
So, what we have is a group of people who mostly aren't black, who are mobbing up to demand this change. Does that sound accurate to you?
Do you think setting a precedent of giving into these peoples demands is a good idea?
Context does matter. A good portion of the U.S. believes that abortion is the same as killing children, but we aren’t changing tech companies, implementing codes of conduct, or devising newspeak to suit _those_ peoples’ political sensibilities, are we?
When the pendulum swings the other way, after we’ve normalized the complete politicization of our day to day institutions, will we all be okay with potentially having an opposing political belief system forced upon us? Or do we need not think that far ahead?
Luckily we aren't having any political belief system forced upon us. People are independently choosing to remove terms they personally don't want included in their projects. If someone feels the same way about the use of the term "child" in code they can freely update their projects today; they don't have to wait for any pendulum.
Sorry if I'm just missing it, but I'm not sure how this relates.
Something I've noticed in my own writing is that the more I write the less likely it is to be misunderstood or misinterpreted. By that I mean, it would be easier to have a dialogue if I knew what connection you were drawing between people choosing to update their projects and my acceptance of terms of service. I can imagine many connections, but to respond to the connection you're making I'd need to know which one it is.
Sorry for being too ambiguous there. Yes, anyone can choose to remove “master / slave” terminology from their own project. The issue I take is a bit bigger than a matter of individual choice.
I have a problem with companies adopting extremist political policies in an effort to cater to a growing population of hostile young puritans who want to LARP as activists but lack any meaningful civil rights issue to worry about and have thus resolved to make up shitty, fake civil rights battles.
In order to not be considered “problematic” in this modern landscape we’re expected to play along with these shitty, fake civil rights battles. That’s a game I’m personally tired of playing and I think it ends when everyone, including its own vocal proponents, are burned by it.
I didn’t choose to get rid of the “master” repo, but now we’re changing terms. Literally the terms of service have changed.
So my understanding of the legal requirements of terms of service (which are generally not strongly enforced either way) is that if it changes you just have to sign the new one, or decide that you disagree enough with the changes that you won't sign it.
To the "extremist" point, I have to say I really don't see it. Changing "master" to "main" doesn't seem like an extreme political position to me. Extreme would be someone murdering protesters, tweeting someone chanting "white power", or hanging black people from trees in Texas. Those are pretty easy things to not want in your society. The same with people setting businesses on fire or brandishing weapons in public. But I don't see how someone trying to reduce their harm externalities by changing words is particularly extreme.
This may come down to the difference between the ideas and the people holding the ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea. I think we can both agree that we wouldn't want people harassing each other for either making or not making this change, as anyone should be free to make whichever decision they feel is right. To the extent that the "left" is the cause of the harassment, I can agree I'd rather those people deal with this more calmly. But again, they're not the ones murdering people.
And now we’re talking about left vs. right, dragging in unrelated injustices to construct our web of systemic oppression, and posing the false dichotomy. Do I accept the new terms or do I support lynching black people in Texas?
No, what I’m saying is it’s a game, it seems you are trying to play it right now, and I’m saying I reject it.
I was only trying to respond to the political claims you brought up. I'm not sure how you can read what you wrote and not see that you're making claims about political extremists on one side. I'm not the one who brought that up, and in my post I mentioned both the burning business and the harassment that the left is doing that I disagree with. Lastly, it's not a game. People are oppressed. People are dying. The specific problem of wording in git repos may seem unimportant, but the conflation of that with the reality of what "extremist" means is what I take issue with.
I don't really care about what political side you're on (I'm an independent), I don't even really care about the git repo thing (people can choose whatever they want, it doesn't really affect me) but your claim of what is "extreme" is quite frankly not reasonable.
> it’s blatantly obvious why such terms are problematic
To me it's not even clear what "problematic" means. I understand problems, I understand solutions, I can understand explanations of how one relates to another, but problematic... Not obvious at all.
Eh. If I was managing a network with a ton of machines I needed to be able to turn off and on together (not that farfetched from what I'm currently doing), I'd probably label the scripts 'resurrection' and 'genocide'. Apt and descriptive.
I think the difference is you chose words more emotionally charged, which isn't the point here.
Genocide means destroying an ethnic group by killing all of its members - it is in no way generalizable to "kill them all." Surely you can see why that's a poor use of language (even discounting the potential to offend). Save yourself a character and just go with "killall."
The word genocide has a much more sinister import than 'kill all'. It literally means kill all of one race ('geno'). I wouldn't call terminating a child process 'infanticide' either.
I’m curious what you would do if a new hire/junior programmer joined your team and asked you to change the name of the script because their parents were killed in a genocide and they would prefer not to be reminded every time they had to run the script?
Would you be empathetic and spend three seconds renaming it or fight them tooth and nail on principle?
Why would people so strongly resist practicing some pre-emptive effortless empathy toward people who have gone through similar things related to a small handful of specific words?
I'm open to changing any problematic wording if it came from someone that was genuinely offended by it.
However I am opposed to blanket changes like the one in this article not because of the wording itself but because the change is coming from the PR department as opposed to any actual minorities that might be offended by these words.
1. People who speak up are often putting their jobs at stake, especially in the US where people can (and often are) fired for almost anything. We shouldn’t have to ask anyone; it’s so not a big deal to search and replace some text to a more neutral term.
2. I’ve met plenty of people who felt uncomfortable about specific jokes being made, words being used and did not feel comfortable for speaking out for various reasons. In at least one case the person explained that it took years before they were able to make the transition from feeling demeaned by a term and being able to understand and articulate exactly why it was demeaning.
We can be proactive and emphatic. There’s no good reason people have to be so insanely motivated to fight against something that barely has any effect on their life but that might improve things for others.
> asked you to change the name of the script because their parents were killed in a genocide
I'd change it. Why do you ask?
> pre-emptive effortless empathy
Because the world is filled with negativity, and our language changes to refect the world: if we kept dropping every word that gained a negative connotation, within a few generations we'd be left with nothing but a child's vocabulary - if that.
