Are you ready to loose the black and red in red black tree? Because that’s skin color right there... Are you willing to rename all your code variables when you used « whitelist » or « blacklist »?

This has to stop. Slavery was long gone and finished when master/slave began being used in computer science. They were not used as a meaning to reproduce and glorify the past, they are simple words that explain how the protocol works. Would you rather « master » and « servant »? King and serf? Bully and victim?

This is to me just as irrelevant as continuing the superstitions about 13 and 666: a reactionnary behavior that people should tame and focus on something more important, like actual code correctness, fuzzing or something actually useful.

>"This has to stop. Slavery was long gone and finished [bla bla bla]..."

Funny how you're much more hysterical about how renaming things has to stop, than you are concerned about how slavery has to stop, when you directly deny the harsh objective reality that there are actually many more slaves today than ever before in history.

Get your priorities right. Renaming things isn't taking away your freedom or cramping your lifestyle.

https://www.abc.net.au/radio/perth/programs/focus/modern-sla...

>There are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history. Its estimated that there are 40.3 million slaves throughout the world today, more than at any other time in human history.

https://bis.lexisnexis.co.uk/blog/categories/governance-risk...

>There are more slaves today than EVER before in the history of the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-...

>One in 200 people is a slave. Why? Slavery affects more than 40 million people worldwide – more than at any other time in history.

> hysterical

That's not called for.

As for the rest, it seems to me that it's slavery based on race that is the biggest motivator to changing the term. Obviously all slavery is a horrible problem, but other kinds of slavery are much less relevant to the terminology debate.

It seemed to be a totally factual description of the poster. Wrapping your comment up in a "that's not called for" false-call for civility while ignoring the reality on the ground that our friends, our fellow citizens may be affected by this kind of ongoing language, yet people REFUSE to help, because of... why?

Leon, why did you flip the tortoise on its back? You aren't helping it, why is that?

This doesn't meaningfully help the people on the ground. Even for a positive change, the worst possible outcome of this is people feeling like they've done their part and then putting less effort into changing things like discriminatory social policies.

And I'm still not seeing which part was "hysterical".

No, it's an insult, and any sentiment expressed in using it is entirely subjective opinion, not "fact".

> false-call for civility

Is this another "fact"? Got the proof that the call for civility is false? Otherwise this is bad-faith.

> ignoring the reality

The "reality" you describe is disputed.

> people REFUSE to help

they refuse to participate in a bad-faith, antagonistic discourse. There is no attempt at "help" here, just demanding your perspective be accepted as fact, and insulting all who do not obey.

Sure it's called for, and you're being irrational and hysterical, too.

Exactly who besides you says "slavery based on race that is the biggest motivator to changing the term" and why? Give me some evidence, or retract what you said, because it's outrageously wrong. And where did you get that ridiculous unfounded belief? And what motivates you to propagate it, despite it being false? Just because it "seems to you" doesn't mean there's any truth to it.

It seems to the person who I was replying to, and many other people in this thread, that slavery no longer happens, and they're terribly wrong. Do you also falsely believe there is no more slavery, too? (Yes you do, I see from your other comment: "Nobody is enslaving anyone" -Dylan16807) Is that the basis of your false belief that "it seems to me that it's slavery based on race that is the biggest motivator to changing the term"?

It really puzzles me what motivates people like you to make such unsubstantiated statements whitewashing slavery, and then feign outrage at having your feelings hurt, while so many human beings are currently suffering from slavery every day, more than at any time in history, that you refuse to acknowledge. Can you explain why?

Renaming things does nothing to help anyone. Just further reinforces the idea that we need to tiptoe around certain demographics, propagating an isolating us-and-them mentality.

I think/hope you wrote "tiptoe around" when you meant "respecting the opinions".

The problem is the us and them mentality exists, is very prevalent but basically invisible to or ignored by those on one side of the divide. Addressing issue already present isn't significantly furthering the divide, it's making people aware of what's already there. All the people saying "look how divided we are now!" fail to realise this has always been the way.

Sorry, how is NOT using the terms master and slave helping actual slaves? I used to be bullied in school when I was young. I'm sure if people removed the term nerd and bully from some software projects I'd be much better off. Thank god for the word police.

In what context can we use the terms master and slave?

The term slave means to be controlled by another entity in its most basic definition. Just because there are loads of people who are slaves in the world doesn't make that term less accurate for its other uses.

I’ve never seen the words nerd or bully in code or software architecture, so that seems to be a spurious example.

Businesses already tend not to use sensitive words, especially publicly. This is just adding to that list. For example, whilst you can kill a process we don’t use the word murder. Same for lots of other negatively emotional words.

People do get hung up on naming & terminology. But as has been mentioned elsewhere, master/slave is often chosen through convention when other names would be clearer. We have a whitelist application at work that is actually an event routing gateway. If we renamed it it’d be easier to explain.

To me it seems an easy task to not use master/slave and white/black when I’m naming things, not something worth arguing about, especially if there’s a chance it removes some negativity for some people. I’m happy to spend a few minutes helping someone with a chore and I see this as the same low level of effort and impact.

I understand the need to change the words if a different word is clearer. But the intent behind this particular case is more of a matter of bowing to the outrage culture rather than for usefulness purposes.

It's not "outrage culture", it's being considerate and thoughtful, which is something most of us practice every day.

You can frame it as "bowing down" either way. The other option is to "bow down" to those who do no want to change but have no good reasons beyond that it's what they are used to and, typically, negative partisanship (that on principle they object to anything promoted by the other side of the political divide, simply because). People need to find better arguments than emotionally & illogically driven defensiveness.

I think the same argument can be had about the other side. People who push for changing words like this need to find better arguments that emotionally driven ones.

The other option is to have a nuanced debate from both sides where one side isn't thought of as hateful and evil. One side is saying "hey this is a slippery slope" the other side is saying "no you're wrong and you're what's wrong with the world today".

Also, where has my defensiveness been at all illogical or emotional? The arguments presented against doing this seem pretty sound from the people who can explain their reasons.

It is outrage culture. It wasn't a problem for decades and all of a sudden it is.

If language is so unimportant, then it doesn't matter if things are renamed, right?

But language DOES matter, and it DOES help people. It's a bit more abstract and decoupled, but shit, you're supposed to be a coder (you ARE on a programming forum), so I'm sure you can handle adding 1 and 1 and getting to 2.

I don't think anything you've said addresses anything I've said...

You can lead a horse to water ...

Then address what I said: Do you deny the evidence I just posted about there being more slavery today than ever before in history? What is your evidence that "Slavery was long gone and finished when master/slave began being used in computer science"?

So you're against renaming the Redskins? Explain why. Exactly how does that take away your freedom and cramp your lifestyle?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_contr...

https://www.mediaite.com/sports/breaking-washington-redskins...

>BREAKING: Washington Redskins Expected to Announce Retirement of Team Name on Monday

You are talking as if changing the name of a variable in your computer program will actually do something to help those affected by slavery. I hope you don't actually belive that.

Have we actually asked the demographics these changes are supposed to empower? We definitely have black engineering organizations. What does the National Society of Black Engineers say about this? What does Black In Tech say about this?

Before we assume that such things are stupid superstitions or applying race on a term (or choosing not to apply terms in race context) we should listen to the other side of the plate.

I find the terminology uncomfortable. I dislike it. Keeping those names is lazy naming, and we can do a hell of a lot better. The words have a ton of emotional imagery tied up, and no need to invoke it just when we are talking about IDE disk protocols.

We don't have to rename it all immediately, but let's start with the easy stuff and ripple it thru. How hard can it be?

In any case, blocklist, allowlist is way more descriptive than blacklist and whitelist. It describes WHAT the thing does, whereas the black/white relies on a cultural mnemonic that black is bad and white is good. Just name things for what they do, how hard is that?

I can get behind your first and second paragraph. I understand the idea that we can do better, and there's no bad in doing this.. but the last is just too much.

Why not use pastel colors for chess and checkers because colors black and white are so effing bad?

Should we review the Yin and Yang color semantics too ? Am I offending people when I print my financial statement on WHITE paper? With BLACK ink?

Will there be forbidden words everywhere soon? Should I be able to pronounce the word "slave" in public or will I get stoned for it? Is there going to be a police dedicated to monitor people's use of "disturbing words" that we collectively decided would hurt the sensibility of communities, and started enforcing?

Am I going to loose my job if I commit a diff with forbidden words by the Great List Of Acceptable Words That Don't Discriminate Any Minority In The World? Will my commits to the linux kernel be refused if I chose one word badly, regardless of the actual VALUE of my code? Are we going to cleanse the Kernel from words like fuck or shit or arab? Will there be a PG rating when opening github's project pages so that we don't expose our children to these subversive tractations?

People are starting to confuse their own sensibilities and the greater good. When people start banning words and ideas, they slowly start communitarism and self-isolating rhetorics. They restric their views by hiding the rest of the things they don't like. This just looks like another puritan American move, and it's spreading like karens around the developer community.

This is just like the fake inclusivity where devs are starting to put in their repos what they call "Code of Conduct" where you are now asked to think about the cultural impact of your "Typo FIX" commit over the N communities that would prefer that you call your global variable "allowedList" rather than "whiteList". Oh my.. I don't care. I want my code to be functionally correct, not make BHL happy. Shit, I'm not writing to make a political statement, I'm fixing my SCSI driver implementation.

Sounds like more work to me, than just accepting that PR

If we follow that line of argument to its conclusion, declining the PR is the least work of all.

Slavery wasn't and still isn't that long gone.

The reductio ad absurdum where any mention of a color is considered harmful is based in the assumption that the issue is with mentioning color. It might be useful to distinguish when a color is just a color (e.g. red/black trees), and when a metaphor is borrowed from an actual crime against humanity (e.g. master/slave).

> Slavery was long gone and finished when master/slave began being used in computer science.

I don't disagree with your conclusion, but this is such an America-centric statement. Slavery is alive and well today. There are more slaves now than at any past time.

Well, $white_list and $black_list was easy for me to change to $pass_list and $fail_list. Saves one char and is more explicit about the code intent.

I've never like colour based names anyway too ambiguous.

I would have guessed that fail_list is a list of items that have failed.

That's the problem with replacing an actual word with a new term. You get something that would be equivalent, but it doesn't have that innate understanding.

It's not a big sacrifice, but it's less immediately clear.

Also it depends on the cultural understanding that white is good and black is bad. Ditto white-hat hacker vs black-hat hackers.

If you really want to build something for all times, don't load it up with cultural baggage that will go obsolete.

Instead of actually helping these people we coddle them further by changing words? That's equivalent to defunding the police, a simple shallow action, but doesn't actually address the actual racism and lack of accountability (that affects all races) of police actions. It's coddling and it's lazy - and the mob will start calling people, if they haven't already started, people and organizations who don't change the language as racists - a false accusation but it rallies the mob and doesn't lead to critical thinking.

False dichotomy. Progress can be made along multiple fronts simultaneously. 'Defunding police' isn't a single action so can hardly be labeled 'shallow' but it's definitely a step towards addressing racism since it's quite clear to anyone who's been paying attention that ridiculous levels of over-policing in America is a major propagator of racial inequality. All of this stuff is related. Nobody is wrong for focusing more or less on one battle than another...

Reducing funding of police is almost entirely orthogonal to action against racism. It can reduce the harm caused but it's not going to reduce racism.

I can't see how you can demilitarise police in USA without restricting access to deadly weapons across the board. Who's going to enforce the law if the citizenry have access to disproportionately greater force than the police do.

USA needs to start with rule of law, as the current administration, at least, has subverted that you've no chance to move forward IMO.

Although access to force is important in some cases, it's not the most important issue here and not the most important effect that would come from defunding the police.

One more important issue here is that police have been trained only to use force to execute their duties. An alternative would be for cops to focus on de-escalating conflict.

Another more important issue here is that police forces are used to handle problems that are better served by smaller, more specialized agencies. Psychologists and Psychiatrists for mentally ill people. Social workers for the homeless.

A third issue here that is more important than access to excessive force is the rampant and catastrophic lack of oversight for cops. Protests went on for days before George Floyd's murderer was arrested. If video hadn't made the news that man would still be policing today. George Floyd's death didn't involve a gun, it involved a cop who didn't expect consequences.

Beyond all that, police agencies have empirically demonstrated that they have significant and deep seated racial bias across the board. Even if that can be fixed the simplest way to stop the bleeding is to reduce the funding and therefore power of the police. Once they show they can uphold the law without a tax of innocent lives they can have their funding back, but TBH at that point I doubt they'll need it.

The rule of law doesn't need an arms race to enforce it. If anything that's an unwinnable war. Police typically enforce the law after it has been broken. It appears that in the US there many low impact changes to society and communities which would significantly reduce the crime from happening in the first place.

Are you saying we should coddle people as an option? I wasn't arguing an either/or, we can and should look at all options - I was highlighting the shallow nature of both actions vs. actually changing systems - and arguably defunding the police is the wrong mantra, inaccurate; demilitarize the police, yes. That doesn't mean we should give into unreasonable options.

Is there a net benefit of coddling unreasonable people to such a degree that we're no longer allowing words to have different meanings, and holding integrity through requiring critical thinking to understand language properly? Organizations playing into this are either pandering to the mob and/or aren't grounded in reason. Let's be strong for our brothers and sisters, even if discomfort increases temporarily due to a mob.

Edit to add: it's interesting my top comment was quickly downvoted 3 times right around the time of the above reply, and then my reply here got 3 downvotes quickly too.

Again, why are you framing this as coddling?

Why is your position the one of critical thinking and "understanding language properly" while the people you disagree with want "unreasonable options?"

As the original article shows, what's being asked for is straightforward and simple to do.

There's no mob. No one is getting canceled. We're just changing some terms we use in a software project to be more appropriate.

The phrase "he doth protest too much" comes to mind every time I see comments like the above.

More appropriate? Don't you think people should be able understand these words have different contexts than race related, instead you want to shelter them in case they haven't developed that capability yet?

You're argument tactic is to just dismiss which at minimum is lacking integrity.

> You're argument tactic is to just dismiss which at minimum is lacking integrity.

Sorry, but your framing of this as "coddling" is itself dismissive. That, combined with complaining about downvotes, might be driving the unpopularity of your comments.

How is this coddling anyone? And why are you viewing "these people" as somehow separate rather than just "us?"

Defunding the police is a simple to understand slogan that covers a lot of possibilities. Plenty of places have abolished their police and rebuilt from the ground up. When people use the slogan that's generally what they mean. Saying they literally expect there to be no police and everything is anarchy is a strawman position no one besides a couple bros in hoodies in seattle actually takes seriously.

Being specially catered for sets you apart from the rest, promoting a damaging us vs them distinction.

Frankly, blacklist/whitelist is actually less clear than blocklist/allowlist in the most strict and rhetorical language. Similarly, master/slave is actually less clear than alternatives, because it implies single points of failure that technology has already resolved.

I don't actually have an opinion on the language change (I'm not black so how could I have an opinion on if it empowers black people?) but strictly speaking the rationale based on clarity isn't true.

I don't really think framing one side of the discussion as "the mob" particularly encourages critical thinking.