LLVM Developers Plotting Path Forward For Moving To A New Git Branch Name

[Volta]

They should name it: MORONS.

[ssokolow]

...as for the blacklist/whitelist thing, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it gets. Should we scrub piracy from history because "the black flag" gives black people a bad name?

Should white people get upset because the mark of a novice in martial arts is a "white belt" and the mark of a master... I'm sorry, fully trained expert... is a "black belt"? (And doesn't it sound silly to talk about a kung fu expert?)

How should we think about a "black budget"? Should we rage against calling the gnats that are the scourge of certain areas "black flies"? I didn't know any of those other names for them until I looked them up on Wikipedia. What about cultural heritage like Wade Hemsworth's Blackfly Song?

Should we break the elegant double meaning in Gordon Lightfoot's Black Day in July to protect against "black day" having a bad meaning? (A classic song about the 1967 Chicago race riots that is only usually known by Americans who lived within listening distance of a Canadian radio station.)

[reavertm]

Shh, don't let them know about kioslaves.

[Aryma]

I'm racist and this is not racism please keep the normal name this name is already a standard by now

[curfew]

On the contrary, whitelist/blacklist terms seem to have everything to do with racism: http://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/490
Good initiative from LLVM community

The authors are presenting random "evidence" that has nothing to do with racial discrimination, but then conclude that these pieces somehow prove the racist motive. Completely bonkers. Their primary piece of proof seems to be a mere anecdote about the term being coined during the era of "European colonialism", which basically covers the time from Europeans inventing ocean-proof sail ships all through the end of the 19th century. So that alone is completely meaningless. The concept of black and white has been around thousands of years before that and "black list" is merely one addition to the vocabulary of terms derived from the same mythos.

[skeevy420]

This could make sense to me, assuming that there actually are non Euro-American developers confused by the terminology and not willing to learn it. So far they have learnt at least a bit of English, so I think this is a smaller challenge in comparison.

The next step in that direction would be to make localizable programming language keywords, such as "if", "while", "for"... Just because they are in English and discriminate non-English speakers. This happens in Excel formulas, by the way. Variables should be allowed to contain any Unicode character, as happens in python3 if I remember correctly.

Try programming using French, Spanish or any second language you have a basic knowledge of, and you will feel how many non-native English speakers feel when they start to program.

International communication would be much harder. Code would be harder to share. The cons outweigh the benefits, in my opinion. And then, since we are choosing to stick to English, I don't think it makes sense to drop white-light-good black-dark-bad semantics because they are Euro-American, it's just a detail, and very minor in comparison to learning the basics of a whole language.

To me, you're pointing out that programming languages need better internationalization support more than you are swaying my thoughts on terminology changes based on generic, culture-less terms.

Since most modern (text) editors and libraries should be able to convert language keywords on-the-fly, English-only programming should be a problem of the 90s that we (y'all if we're being honest) should be able to solve today if we really wanted to. Comments would be difficult, as is any actual translation, but swapping a keyword's language should be pretty straight forward. I see more difficulties in going from left-to-right to right-to-left languages and all the reformatting possibly involved with that than I do keyword swaps. User-named variables would be an issue, too, but there are multiple ways to deal with that (don't translate, user set translation lists, various auto-YMMV translation methods).

That said, while the whole black/white, good/bad thing is damn-near a universally held thing across a bunch of cultures, to want to change it now because of woke culture and nothing but woke culture is fucking retarded. To want to change it because you reckon a random person from who knows where might not grasp the words black and white as synonyms to good or bad or allow/deny like a French or American person would is just being courteous. There's also usually some form of master, meaning leader, primary, etc, in most all cultures, too. It's really only a bad word when paired with slave. Master is like the word gay. If you think gay is a bad word that says more about you than it does anything else.

[cesarcafe]

Incredible. I prefer it over GCC, but seeing how clueless they are makes me feel embarrassed for them.

[kescherPh]

To amend my inital comment: I'd be fine with such a change if it had better reasoning behind it. For instance, I can think of other reasons to change "master" to something else. Maybe another term could be more clear, such as "main".

[geearf]

Instead of worrying about the use of colors in good or bad terms, wouldn't it be better to stop alluding to people by the color of their skin instead? Why do people need to express what their color is (even more when it's usually wrong, for instance even Albinos are not white...)? Don't we already have enough differences that we need to emphasize color and divide us even more?

As for master/slave, yeah I'm not against changing that, maybe it'd be nice and more correct, but I'm sure there are far more pressing issues than how these 2 words are used in unrelated fields.

[drjohnnyfever]

Well that's interesting. It never would have occured to me that the LLVM project were a bunch of fascists until now.

But seriously. Hiding away from specific words that have meanings beyond enslaving human beings I think inadvertently continues to legitimize their use in that context. Soon "master" will only have one meaning and we'll go around trying to invent new words to replace it and eventually those will be dropped too for being a "substitute for a racist word" which is also bad.