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

[zxy_thf]

The new naming scheme is DOUBLE PLUS GOOD!

[Teggs]

'Main' is already in use, it's unambiguous, and it's fine. Still no change should be made, because Master in this case has nothing to do with slavery or racism. The people pushing this are either extremely ignorant about the subject they are attempting to teach, or they know very well there is no relation and are evil minded. Projects should push back against this attempt to control the very words coming out of people's mouths, when there is no reason. There is no good ending for that.

Allowlist is cumbersome, but descriptive, I guess. Denylist is terrible. It sounds like 'Denialist', which describes a person in denial about something, or who has a personality that tends to reject new thoughts in general.

I was just thinking recently that social justice warriors must be annoyed there is no attention on them for months due to various issues of disease and actual justice around the world. Here we see them trying again to coopt a real issue for false purposes. It's disgusting to push their dishonest agenda under the mantle of a real problem, but apparently they care more about being noticed and feeling 'powerful' than the damage they do to their supposed goal of combating racism.

This proposal is garbage and should have been shunned as such, not front page news. The LLVM project should treat themselves better than this.

[Duff~]

The floor is racism.

[curfew]

Is there any references to 'slave' in git terminology? (I honestly don't know). If there is, then I think it reasonable to consider 'master' a problematic (even if not necessarily racist) term.

And I think it is not reasonable. People who fail to understand that words can have multiple meanings are essentially illiterate. This kind of people should never be allowed to make decisions for others. ut of course in this case, it was claimed, there is a majority support for the change, so there is no need to argue about the terminology any further, really, as it is seems a done deal.

The whole Master-Slave=Racism thing is rather ex-colonial-centric, too, but since we are predominately talking about it in the context of ex-colonial languages like English, that doesn't necessarily invalidate the pro-change argument.

I feel sincere pity towards people who think this kind of nonsensical jargon, verbal diarrhea, is somehow valid argumentation.

OTOH, irrespective of etymology, I like allow/deny-list over black/white-list simply on the grounds of clar[ity of meaning sans cultural context.

How is choosing who to allow or deny basic rights from going to be any more neutral regardless of the terminology? It is still a racist concept, bigotry. The concept of privileged users should be banned altogether. Arguing about which words to use seems retarded to me.

Besides the actual cultural context is different from what you assume. Hint: not in any way related to what color people are.

[zeehio]

Your last sentence is basically my stance on the matter. Master, blacklist, and whitelist are all Euro-American terms, regardless of which part of the culture and history we're trying to attribute the meaning towards, so changing Master to Main, blacklist to denylist, and whitelist to allowlist makes sense in regards to clarity and meaning since we'd be replacing cultural terms with actual descriptive terms. I doubt very many of us would disagree to terminology changes based on that line of thinking.

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.

[skeevy420]

Is there any references to 'slave' in git terminology? (I honestly don't know). If there is, then I think it reasonable to consider 'master' a problematic (even if not necessarily racist) term. If not, than I can't in any good faith have an issue with its usage in the context. (Just as, to use an example above, "Dungeon Master" could really only be an issue if the players are called "Dungeon Slaves", which they aren't!).

The whole Master-Slave=Racism thing is rather ex-colonial-centric, too, but since we are predominately talking about it in the context of ex-colonial languages like English, that doesn't necessarily invalidate the pro-change argument.

OTOH, irrespective of etymology, I like allow/deny-list over black/white-list simply on the grounds of clarity of meaning sans cultural context.

Your last sentence is basically my stance on the matter. Master, blacklist, and whitelist are all Euro-American terms, regardless of which part of the culture and history we're trying to attribute the meaning towards, so changing Master to Main, blacklist to denylist, and whitelist to allowlist makes sense in regards to clarity and meaning since we'd be replacing cultural terms with actual descriptive terms. I doubt very many of us would disagree to terminology changes based on that line of thinking.

You've been playing it wrong if you don't have a safe word and Dungeon Slaves

[tildearrow]

I was sure this would upset some incels, and I can see reading over comments that I was not wrong. Change must be so hard ...

Pointless change is hard to accept.

[nadro]

LLVM developers really don't have more important problems to solve than a branch name, because some idiot said that this name is related to racism? It's just a word, without a context there is nothing wrong with any word and in this case we don't have any context related to racism, so what a problem? In near future some color names will be banned because they describe our skin color... What a world...

[illwieckz]

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

I had a look, let's take this sentence, for example:

Such terminology not only reflects racist culture, but also serves to reinforce, legitimize, and perpetuate it. On this issue, it instructive to read comments by Ossie Davis on the use of English as a racial affront:[…]

Good, you found people who use existing words to justify their “racial affront”, then, when you ban those existing words that preexisted and were unrelated, the bad guy would just use another existing word that preexisted and was unrelated to justify its bad acting. That's not only stupid, that even does not look like an logic acceptable for a paper. Also the sentence said the English language is used by this guy as a racial affront, so the next step is to ban the entirety of the English language (note: English is not my native language so caring or not about this language does not count: it's just stupid).

And wait… how this have to do in a medical library? This has all the aspects of a scam, the recent The Lancet fiasco must have warned you…

[Viki Ai]

Is there any references to 'slave' in git terminology? (I honestly don't know). If there is, then I think it reasonable to consider 'master' a problematic (even if not necessarily racist) term. If not, than I can't in any good faith have an issue with its usage in the context. (Just as, to use an example above, "Dungeon Master" could really only be an issue if the players are called "Dungeon Slaves", which they aren't!).

The whole Master-Slave=Racism thing is rather ex-colonial-centric, too, but since we are predominately talking about it in the context of ex-colonial languages like English, that doesn't necessarily invalidate the pro-change argument.

OTOH, irrespective of etymology, I like allow/deny-list over black/white-list simply on the grounds of clarity of meaning sans cultural context.