Perhaps the tech community should grow a spine and stand up to the minority that demands these sort of changes. That is: if the tech community /really/ doesn't want them, which (to me) is unclear.
[1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Will I lose any sleep over it? Probably not, because this changes absolutely nothing in the racism landscape. It just confuses some, maybe outrages others. They've made something that was never racist into something racist (at least in their heads).
Sidenote: I do wonder if the person who proposed the change wrote it up from their master bedroom.
... and deliberately named it using a word that's offensive in British English.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Git
If you said 'git' to someone in an English pub you'd be looking for a punch.
For USians it's roughly comparable to 'asshole' on the spectrum of offensiveness.
No this doesn't do anything, but it significantly reduces the amount of time I have to say master in discussions related to code. Something I personally don't feel comfortable saying.
No this isn't going to fix systemic racism, but it is setting the precedent that our standards can and should evolve with culture and people.
Master has cognates in romance languages to mean school professor or music lead. Removing a entire cognate root from discourse because of one of its realization makes the language poorer inmho.
I'm genuinely worried that all of this talk and social shaming related to "systemic racism" is actually going to create more of the monster it purports to try to defeat.
I mean, seriously. How do you think right wing people feel when they see left wing people on TV chanting that we should abolish the police? They clutch their guns even harder, that's what happens. By making an immense deal out of race issues, I think we might be making the problem worse.
In the 1990s, people generally had an attitude of "race doesn't matter", and now, it's become the opposite, "race is the only thing that matters". It's splitting us into factions and helping nobody.
Police in basically everywhere of the world was made by the ruling class to keep people in order. This matter is even worse in the US that a LOT of police departments were literally made after the emancipation proclamation (or somewhat before), to capture runaway slaves. This is the history of policing in the US.
I think what it generally comes down to is a LOT of Americans, and a lot of people in the world haven't learned the history of their own country. People probably know more about WW2 than they do about the history of abuse in their own country. I unfortunately was one of these people and until I decided to listen to people and start studying the history of America I understood a lot of the things I stood for were based on essentially lies.
I do think saying "lets abolish police" without the context of "why", or "wait what about the murderers?" is harmful. I think people on the left generally assumes too much of people, and assumes that they've also spent many hours reading and understanding and discussing history.
I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask "what about the murderers, thiefs, rapists and criminal gangs? The obvious answer is that you need a police force. You can call it the flower-and-peace-corps if you want, but you need both enforcers and detectives to protect the population.
If what you mean is "reform the police", then don't call to "abolish the police".
> The obvious answer is that you need a police force
Yes, you've been conditioned by society to assume that's the only answer to this. Again this is what I mean by people are uneducated about policing and state power.
It strikes me as odd that someone as familiar with history as yourself would single out the US and the practice of slavery whereas slavery has existed almost everywhere in the world, including here in Europe. Yet nobody in Europe thinks that the formerly enslaved peasants' much temporally disconnected descendants are substantially worse off because of that or that this would somehow translate into today's policing.
In conclusion, abolishing the police is a completely stupid idea that the American people in general do not even support [1] that hurts not the tech elites of Silicon valley, but normal people living in high-crime areas.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dcBdhE...
This is going to need a citation. Cursory searching leads me to Sheriffs being elected in the early 1800s in Ohio. Ohio was also a free state in 1803 when it joined the Union.
These early slave patrols / night watches then fairly organically became the "police department" when that concept became widespread in the mid-1800s. I don't think it looks like said spread is really linked to emancipation, but rather (as with the creation of Peel's Metropolitan Police in London in 1829) in response to increasing urbanization / industrialization. Given that the industrial revolution also fairly-strongly caused the US civil war and thus emancipation, we could say it's more a parallel trend than the implied causation.
The cities going "well, we have a somewhat organized group of people whose job is to enforce some laws... why don't we wedge them into this new trend and have them enforce more laws?" gets us that link.
This summary seems reasonable, though I feel it elides the Peelite influence: https://law.jrank.org/pages/1640/Police-History-Early-polici...
You say bullied into compliance but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive.
It may not be that big of a deal for you but it is a big deal for those who don’t share the same worldview as you. Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others?
What do you think about people who curse like a sailors in their personal life but wouldn’t utter an F in office/professional settings - do they have no principals?
In my opinion, agitating for these types of changes makes tech communities more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized.
It's not clear to me how changing the default branch name in a version control system and similar "inclusivity changes" makes the tech communities more inclusive, but I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc).
And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that).
I think a better, more compromising change would have been to leave default as master, but fix up the code base (remove hard-coded instances of "master") so that you can choose a different default branch name more easily (i.e. with `git init <default name>`. It's forcing the default name change upon everyone that people find unpalatable.
> And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that).
One measure of inclusivity might be hiring, retention, and promotion within the tech industry (and the developer subset of that) relative to the general population. Looking at the Stack Overflow 2020 survey results as one (admittedly biased) indicator, it's pretty clear that the tech industry does abysmally. As two quick examples: <5% of developers surveyed were Black, and <12% were women and non-binary. Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro...
Speaking from personal experience as one of those minorities, I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome.
Something like changing language that is rooted in ownership of people is not a huge change, admittedly, but the fact that so many people within the industry complain and fight it definitely serves as a reminder to me that I'm tolerated more than welcomed here.
Edit: Added some clarifying language
IMHO (and I didn't downvote you, btw), I believe you (and other minorities) are choosing to interpret things like complaining about political changes to code and projects as persecution. That is a choice you are making. You could also choose to see it for what it really is - people disagreeing about politics. Interpreting a political stance as a personal insult or persecution is not the right way to go, IMO. Assume good faith; give the benefit of the doubt.
If a project maintainer pushes back and complains when internet mobs try to force him to remove the word "red" from his codebase because it triggers soviet refugees... that doesn't mean the project maintainer is persecuting soviet refugees or that soviet refugees are "unwelcome" to contribute. Soviet refugees may choose to interpret the project maintainer's actions as such, but that doesn't make it so. In reality the project maintainer disagrees with the politics on the issue of removing the word "red" from his code and is pushing back.
The beauty of GitHub, HackerNews, and internet fora in general is that nobody really knows your race or gender or really anything about you (unless you make it known). From my experience, people on the internet are just usernames with personality, judged on the merits of their insights and contributions. I've worked with some great people online in the past on different projects, and to this day I have no idea if they were male or female or non-binary or black or white or asian or blind or deaf.
The idea of places like HN being meritocratic tech utopias where race and gender are irrelevant and everyone's just a username with some neat ideas is really compelling. I can only offer that in my experience it's common knowledge among woman developers that if you want to have a good day, it's best not to read the comments here. It seems I've forgotten that myself!
Sure, your perspective is valid too, I just tend to lean the other way. I tend to believe that it is impossible to please everyone and that we should not strive to unless it has clear, demonstrable value.
> we can't even get low-effort token gestures like that to happen without a lot of outcry I'm not optimistic about any kind of substantive change.
Well, I think part of the reason for outcry in this particular case is that it is (again, IMHO) not a "low-effort token gesture". I mean, if you look at the patch being submitted in the email linked at the top of the thread to make main the new default:
> 351 files changed, 3903 insertions(+), 3890 deletions(-)
and for me personally it means that all my future git repos are going to have a different default branch than my past repos which breaks some of my utility scripts. And if I configure the default branch of my future repos to remain "master" to avoid this then some people might take offense and see it as a dogwhistle.
So to me this whole thing seems like a big charade, but maybe the silver lining is that Git really should have been designed from the start to easily take arbitrary default branch names, and this patch will enable that.
I am just speculating of course and maybe they were very unhappy to have to do this.
I mean, how many people are __actually__ offended by master/slave terminology? 1%? 2%?
Now how many people are offended by this change, how many think that this is useless waste of time, how many think that this is tech industry being once again bullied into compliance over nonsense and it's all one sneaky slippery slope? I don't know, but it seems like a half or at least a third.
These changes with this reasoning are not making it more inclusive, they make it more exclusive.
You're saying master isn't a big deal, well, neither is main. Would've you cared if git updates this without the discourse of "let's remove master from our everyday conversations."
I'm saying that if someone finds the word "master" offensive in this context, they want to be offended.
If someone wants to be offended, they will find something that offends them.
Nothing you do will ever make such people stop being offended.
Next they'll be insisting that "bit" and "binary" need to be changed, because those words trigger people of non-binary gender, or something.
All of this is just making extra work. Repos and scripts have to be updated with the new branch name. The default behavior of Git is changing in a way that's not completely backward compatible, which means things that rely on it might break.
There's a definite cost to changing technical language, especially in the context of names in computer software that are part of the software's interface and might be relied on by other software that interfaces with it.
Changing perfectly passable names unnecessarily is just creating work for no purpose.
Inverting this, it reads as:
> No one could possibly be genuinely offended by the word "master" in this context.
You are incorrect. Many are genuinely offended. Some of them are commenting here on HN.
Instead of removing a word and all it's homonyms from discourse we should embrace polysemy. Master key, master record, music maestro, master git branch...
How is this going to impact your day to day work flow?
Of course not. It's just extremely immature when there are direct ways via work and effort (forking or contributing) to gain social capital in the community to influence change and direction.
You didn't respond to this in any way.
BUT I still support it 100%.
What if you had to deal with the worst thing that’s ever happened to your people every time you want to push code at work? No, I don’t think anyone’s out there getting upset every commit, any more than they do walking into Thomas Jefferson High School or seeing a confederate flag on a bumper sticker. Rather, it’s just a constant subtle reminder of how ingrained in society racial inequality is, and it must be exhausting.
I think an incredibly minor inconvenience (which can be changed back) is a very fair trade off.
It's not really that big of a deal (and in some ways "main" is better anyway because it's 2 characters shorter), it's just the principle of the thing that bothers me. I would rather see projects and people stand their ground instead of caving to pressure anytime a twitter mob comes along.