`main` is better. It's shorter, it's more descriptive, and costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive.
It's pretty much an all around win.
The communication cost of the change is not free. Do you think the internal wiki and new-hire git training materials all updated themselves?
It wasn't a large process change. Most of our git users are competent git users. But I billed hours dealing with it.
I still have people here who haven't touched a repository that uses "main" instead of "master". They have better things to do with their lives than lurk social media focused on programming. They don't know yet. Eventually they'll pull something with "main" instead of "master". Can I get your phone number so you can be the one to explain to them?
But there is a cost. You're losing a battle in the war of free speech vs Orwellian thought control.
The woke (an offshoot of last-wave feminism, currently promoted mainly by the control-left strain of the Democratic party) are lying; they're not actually offended, they're just using that as an excuse (propaganda) and as an emotional appeal, to get you to agree to their arguments, and cede power to them. This is most obvious with "Latinx" which is pushed by white journalists & activists but which isn't even supported by the overwhelming majority of Latinos and Latinas in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
Don't believe me? Listen to what they (the woke) say themselves!
> I wanted to start by focusing on the obvious one, Its harder for them to object to just one to start with, then once they admit the logic, we can expand the list
That phrase is going to die soon and it never picked up in Latin America. Most likely the queer community in Latin America will come up with more effective slang. It took the US queer community decades, a century? To reclaim and come up with effective phrases -- I think the main issue here is lack of patience and a somewhat condescending attitude from American liberals that we, the actual hispanic diaspora, need our hands held.
There is also what I've argued is a hierarchy of needs issue at play with LatinX. The problems facing the queer community in Latin America are more severe than those facing the US community, because it is a younger community in a more conservative atmosphere. Therefore, the effort is better spent advocating for table stakes, like marriage equality in some countries and reduced violence towards queer people -- there is no time to be wasted, right now, on the exact, precise terminology to use. And LatinX is not a way to win hearts and minds in this process.
Edit: this is NOT support for Google's product, which clearly broken and not useful. This is an explanation of why LatinX specifically is not a good counter-example to `main` versus `master`. I hope this pre-empts someone coming in and calling me all 'woke' or whatever is the cool phrase for dismissing people these days.
The fact the term is dying further reinforces my point: it failed. No power gained. Does optionally calling master 'main' give people power? Do you really believe that? As far as I can tell, the 'wokes' you are so afraid of seem to be failing pretty often recently. If I believed in the existence of the 'woke' monster under my bed, and they had this track record, I would simply ignore them.
Did 'wokeism' stop Disney from losing its special tax status in Florida? No.
Did 'wokeism' stop Texas from passing laws restricting transgender students and their families? No.
Did 'wokeism' stop the abortion bounty laws from passing in Texas? No.
Has 'wokeism' prevented the recent book bannings across the US; for example, the recent banning of math books in Florida? No.
Was 'wokeism', the root of this Orwellian system you propose will engulf us, the reason why state government in Florida censored the phrase 'climate change' in state congress? I would be very surprised.
Who exactly is gaining or losing power here? And why are you so adamant that the culture war will somehow involve GitHub?
I simply cannot wrap my head around it all.
"Why does my git say main and not master? Did I break it?"
"Why cant I push to master like the 100x tutorials show? I get errors!"
Don't tell me you're still using bare pointers, `new` and `delete` in your C++ classes instead of using smart_ptr fields, or explicitly declaring local variable types instead of using `auto`...
In reality each change that requires updates to documentation (or code) is of course not actually zero cost.
Adapt or die is the motto out here.
This is pretty much the view of the left now :p
Also if your tutorials are using a base repository to work from, then you can still have the branch "master" it's just not default. So your existing repos should still work. And if you changed your repo then you should be responsible for updating your documentation to reflect that. It's just good practice.
I struggle to come up with any two terms that make this more clear than "master" and "slave". Just because we've abolished chattel slavery, doesn't mean we should avoid the very words themselves when they are appropriate. Destruction of meaning is far worse than some abstract offense that doesn't seem reasonable to take on behalf of a computer process.
But a master copy or version of something like a master recording or gold master for pressing records is different from merely "main".
Applied to software they are similar but not identical concepts, and neither is in any way wrong or harmful to anyone.
It's a small enough issue that it's not worth fighting very hard over, but, the rationale for the change, and especially for anyone trying to tell anyone else they have to do that change, is still invalid and the word master actually applies better if that's how you're using that branch. It has nothing to do with slave bosses.
See how this works? It is also definitely not without cost. It is not free to change all of your documentation and you will inevitably have to be exposed to it anyway because not everyone will have changed it, so it's ultimately not doing anything anyway.
All of these are true! I agree, "main" is a better name.
However, as to the larger point, the individuals and groups advocating for these changes also don't advocate for similar changes (that is, things that have good benefits but come with a very high cost to implement due to breaking backwards compatibility) around technologies/terms that they don't consider to be "problematic".
That strongly suggests that the driver isn't to improve technology, it's to shape language, with occasional incidental technological benefits - and the ignored technological regressions (it's harder to say "allowlist" than "whitelist", for instance, or to write applications that have a field to place in the user's preferred pronouns than just not address the user using pronouns at all).
I actually know a social-justice oriented trans woman online who strongly advocates for the use of Tau instead of Pi because it is simpler and easier to learn. So sample of 1 there.
Tau vs Pi is a perfect microcosm of this debate with the social justice arguments removed. See also metric vs imperial.
The benefits are small but non-zero and localized to a handful of people, the new terminology is substantially simpler and cleaner, and the costs are primarily related to inertia and the comfort of people experienced with The Old Way.
> costs nothing to remove something someone might offensive
It might break scripts, aliases, and any general automation (CI, etc) with a baked in main branch assumption
Since you suggest it “costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive”, I propose it be changed to something else instead of main.
\s
Here you go…
Retarded differential equations (RDEs) are differential equations having retarded arguments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037704270...
And for those who would like to change this, any change to a pilot's routine has a chance of being the thing that pushes an incident over the edge into a crash. Would it be worth it?
I'm not saying this is a large set of people. But it looks like some of them have power at github.
I guess if you're doing software for the airline industry you cannot use github.
Well, honestly I wouldn't use github for anything if money depended on it, because of their record of "firing" customers who don't toe the line on their exact politics.
[1] I'm quoting training material that even passed HR review in corporate education DEI here. It's not hyperbole.
Why? I think that slavery is bad only if the slaves are people. I want machines to be my slaves! (non-sentient machines only, dear future AI overlords!)
Are we going to remove "duplicate" because we can somehow imagine that genetically identical twins are offended by this?
Are we going to remove "admittance" (inverse of impedance) because people will be uncomfortable when reminded that they weren't admitted to their first choice institution?
These are all equally ridiculous to the master/slave debacle.
As far as "uncomfortable connotations", would you agree that that's a subjective claim?
I don't like that forced slavery is a thing, but I'm capable of handling context-specific word meanings, and of not getting emotional due to alternative meanings.
Your use of the word is violence.
/s?