These changes make sense even outside of any sort of political charge.
"Allow list" is frankly a much more descriptive and easy to understand term than "white list". It's a list of things that are allowed. If you were trying to learn the English language, I'd imagine a self describing term is much easier to understand.
>These changes make sense even outside of any sort of political charge.
They only make sense if you disregard any costs associated with the change. In addition to logistical costs, it's culturally costly to make many people change, and even more costly that people who fail to adapt are demonized. Generations of text was written to use blacklist/whitelist, and people who read them would naturally be more comfortable with those usage, and you're asking them to bend over.
>If you were trying to learn the English language, I'd imagine a self describing term is much easier to understand.
The controversies of blacklist/whitelist are very America-centric and your argument is exemplary of that. Terms like blacklist/white list have already permeated many languages by this time. People who have seen blacklist/whitelist in their own language would have no problem adapting to the English version of it.
Can you help me understand the costs? Because as far as I can tell it is:
1) "We should consider using Allowlist" "ok, but let's be careful with externally facing APIs, in exactly the same way we change all our externally facing APIs?" "Sure!"
2) "I was editing this file, find/replaced a couple cases of whitelist while I was in there" "LGTM"
3) "Oh, hey, noticed we had nearly finished opportunistically replacing whitelist. Does anyone mind if I just finish up?" "Sure, timebox it?"
Like, it's extremely low cost? What costs are you imagining?
I'd like to add a point that I haven't seen discussed regarding the cost of change.
In many languages a lot of computer related terms have no native correspondent, therefore they use the ones borrowed from English. If the English IT community decides en-masse to change those terms, the best result is that these people will have to catch up - with some unknown delay - or that they'll not bother, and there will be a disconnect in the terms. Which one is more likely and what the overall effects will be, I have no idea. But it will be a point of friction.
> "Allow list" is frankly a much more descriptive and easy to understand term than "white list".
Only if you're pretending we were all learned English yesterday. "White list" is an older more established term, and that familiarity makes it easier to understand. Self-describing terms don't aid communication if they're replacing old terms that everybody already understood anyway.
An example, "submarine" and "undersea boat". The latter is self-describing, while the former is vague. A submarine.. what? 'Submarine' alone seems to be an adjective that means 'under the ocean'. But what is under the ocean? A submarine cable? A submarine crab? "Undersea boat" is self-describing; what is underwater? A boat.
So is "undersea boat" a better term? It self-describes well enough that English speakers with no knowledge of German should be able to figure out what it means easily. But does that mean it's actually a better term? No, in the context of English it isn't a better term, because everybody already knows what a 'submarine' is so this term's failure to self-describe is irrelevant. Already knowing what a word means is always easier than being able to puzzle out what a word means by seeing that it describes itself.
Most words don't self-describe anyway, and even when they do, the words they self-describe with aren't self-describing themselves. What is a 'list' anyway? That doesn't self-describe. Should we replace it with "ordered-collection-of-things"? None of those words self-describe either! The adoption of this word isn't really about self-description, self-describing words just isn't something we [english speakers] prioritize. It's political activism based on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Is opposing it political activism based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Yes.
But then, political activism is about the only reason against replacing "whitelist", which unlike "submarine" is neither a technical term, nor common parlance, with the more explicit "allowlist". It's an obscure, relatively modern coinage as an antonym to the word "blacklist" which for most of its existence referred almost exclusively to people and was considered a judgement on their character. I've had to explain to native English speakers what a "whitelist" is intended to do before, never mind the majority of people using internet services who don't speak English as a first language. I suspect they'd have got "allowlist"...
I suspect that in a world where there actually was an issue with people getting upset by casual use of the word "submarine" we probably wouldn't have that much issue getting our heads around "undersea boat" (and that's despite "submarine" being a more universal word and the English language concept of a "boat" being pretty strongly wedded to the idea of small, probably open-topped vessels which sit on top of the water). Of course blacklist/whitelist has no etymological connection with race, but it also has no etymological connection or near-universally understood association with infosec or user preferences
If carbadtraingood was upfront about wanting the change as political activism, I wouldn't have responded to him. I don't think it will ever be an effective way at combating racism, but at least such a position is honest, upfront and respectful to others in the conversation. I have a lot more respect for people who admit they want to ban 'blacklist/whitelist' to effect social change than I do for the people who pretend they want the words stricken for for wholly apolitical reasons; that's simply cowardly and insulting.
I don't know what to tell you, you seem convinced I'm lying on an anonymous web forum. My responses have netted me like 3 karma, so clearly it earns me no clout to hold this opinion. There's no incentive for me to lie here.
Me: My opinion is A
You: No, your opinion is B, and you are cowardly and insulting.
Me: Genuinely, my opinion is A
You: You are pretending. No one believes opinion A.
I'm not sure what's so challenging here. Either I'm not aware of my own opinions or your worldview needs to be updated. I'm happy to discuss further if you'd like to understand the curious specimen I am better.
> Only if you're pretending we were all learned English yesterday.
"White" here is metaphorical. "Allow" is literal. That makes "allow" the easier-to-understand term for those who are learning. Because, yes, English is something that needs to be learned. Not "everybody" already understands everything, unless your definition of "everybody" discounts a whole lot of humans for some reason.
> "White list" is an older more established term, and that familiarity makes it easier to understand.
Only if you already understand it, which is entirely self-referential.
> self-describing words just isn't something we [english speakers] prioritize
I'm going to assume here you mean the difference between metaphors and literals, because otherwise nothing makes sense. And it depends on the audience. If it's technical docs, I sure hope whoever's writing them takes a suitably informed view as to the comprehension level of their readers, because that's the damn job.
> political activism
"We should not make things easier for non-native speakers who don't already have all the implied context of the English language down pat" sounds a lot like a political position to me.
The term "allowlist" isn't motivated by some apolitical desire for literal self-describing terminology. It's political activism; you want to effect change in society by changing language. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. Pretending otherwise is tantamount to gaslighting.
Nobody is agitating for 'string' to be replaced with 'character sequence'. It would be more descriptive, more literal, easier to understand than 'string' which usually means something completely different and not obviously related to character sequences at all. But nobody submitting passive aggressive drive-by PRs to public repos demanding that the word 'string' be stricken because isn't literal or self describing. Because nobody really cares about words being literal and self describing, that's a transparent post-hoc justification for what is fundamentally political activism.
Ok, I'll try again with a less cynical and more engaged response.
> Nobody cares about words being literal and self describing
I care about literal and self describing language, and I believe you are falling prey to the fundamental attribution error -- you believe there is a group of folks driving some agenda.
I look at the suggestion no matter where it comes from and say, "oh hey, yeah, I think that is a good suggestion".
It's not some grand conspiracy to "post hoc justify political activism". Someone just suggested a thing and many of us said, "oh yeah, that makes sense and is easy to change."
I don't use submarine in my daily work. But submarine is also not a metaphorical word, it's a literal one - sub (below) marine (the sea).
One could argue that it's an insufficiently specific literal term, and that the word "vessel" should be added afterwards, I suppose. But it doesn't really matter because it's not the same error of form that Allowlist and whitelist have.
sub in this context means literally, physically below (or "inside" can also could for the sea, given in English this is the idiom) - but it can also mean small, lesser, or diminutive - it is far from unambiguous.
Marine can mean the sea, but also things associated with the sea.
Nearly all words are somewhat metaphorical, idiomatic - we just learn what those idioms are.
"String" is hideously ambiguous and yes, people do want to change it. Does it mean a null-terminated array of bytes? How about length-prefixed? Does it mean a list of code points with some arbitrary storage format the API shields you from? Some combination? If you haven't seen these conversations and want to ascribe some dark motivation you don't agree with to improving the basic operating conditions we're all working in that's not on me.
"Allow list" is frankly a much more descriptive and easy to understand term than "white list". It's a list of things that are allowed. If you were trying to learn the English language, I'd imagine a self describing term is much easier to understand.