It is so bizarre how many people draw the line at master/slave - it's just another convention, why on earth are they desperate to write these two specific words above all else? Why is "don't use verbs in your REST routes" ok but "don't use master/slave" a cause to get on your soapbox and cry about human rights being impeded?
The reason people draw the line here is because to many people these words CLEARLY have nothing to do with race and "oppression". They never have. And yet now somehow YOU made them "dirty".
It is a common occurrence where a group of activists deem something as forbidden, create a commotion around it that intimidates those who comply solely out of fear, ultimately leading to that something being considered "bad" because only those who don't mind disregarding social norms continue to use it. This is not a natural process but a hostile takeover.
But I agree - you stumbling around in clown shoes, failing to understand the issue you're hopping mad about is a great summary.
This used to be called a "slave mentality". It's a pretty useful expression these days.
Words do matter, which is why my statement above seems so off.
Words convince people to join cults and go to war. Words shape and direct the formation of new ideas.
Words have and help preserve power.
Words do have power, but this sort of thing misunderstands the type of power they have. Words have power when used for persuasion. Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things. It only takes away the power of ordinary people to transmit the truths they see and hear. Stripping language is, in itself, evil; and juxtaposing words like "inferior blacklist" - a phrase that never existed - as if it were a brilliant example proving the racism of the second word in the phrase, shows only a misunderstanding of both the nature of racism and the nature of language.
Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning.
> Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things.
Do you really believe there is no power in words being repeated? Do you not believe that the real racists are bothered by not being able to espouse their usual rhetoric freely?
Much more annoyed than the free- speech advocates in this thread whose group definitely has no overlap with the real racists.
I don't think they're particularly bothered; they espouse their rhetoric either way. And if you take away some words, they quickly find others. I haven't seen the changing of the language in the past 40 years to be particularly effective at stemming their racism or their ability to persuade. If anything, the US has become more racist in my lifetime, despite the many many iterations of politically correct revisionist speech. Again, it's a form of hubris and foolishness to believe that you can change thoughts by changing words.
> Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning.
This is the definition of a racist way of thinking. If you watched Hitler's speeches and heard him say that Jews are dirty enough times, would you believe it? Would you associate "Jew" with "dirt"? Because many people heard those words thousands of times and didn't believe it. If you're afraid you would believe it, then you are the problem, not the word "Jew" or the word "dirt".
No, they are. They complain about censorship all the time.
They made an entire strategy because of their annoyance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
> they espouse their rhetoric either way.
Yes, but then they get fired and complain
> The real problem isn't I called my coworker the N-word, it's that '"Forbidden-Word” Lists Are a Symptom of Administrative Bloat.
Without the list to point to, they may not be fired. Less repercussions to bad actions, mean they feel more free to spew their racist rhetoric.
> I haven't seen the changing of the language in the past 40 years to be particularly effective at stemming their racism or their ability to persuade.
See the usage of "boy" when referring to Black men diminishing over the years because it became less acceptable.
> If you watched Hitler's speeches and heard him say that Jews are dirty enough times
If you are a 12 year old in school learning about the holocaust, the anti-wokeness educators are neutrally presenting hitler, and you don't personally know any Jews... you don't have effective tools in your environment to hedge against making that association.
There's nothing inferior about a blacklist. Often, it's way more useful than a whitelist.
edit: the answer https://superuser.com/a/1572156
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
I often use the push instructions that a new empty github project prompts, and do it frequently enough that I want my system defaults to match those instructions.
Its not important to me to know that my system could overwrite those instructions successfully because "master" or whatever my local branch is called can be written into the command line. Its not important to me that "main" is a contrived replacement for "master".
They took no offense at the term “master,” but were extremely frustrated by how copying and pasting commands from git tutorials would often not work. As a simple example,
$ git clone [email protected]:username/test.git
Cloning into 'test'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done.
$ cd test
$ touch foo
$ git add foo
$ git commit -m "my commit"
[main f00f00d] my commit
1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 foo
$ git push origin master # as a tutorial might advise
error: src refspec master does not match any
error: failed to push some refs to 'github.com:username/test.git'
In 10 years, it’s likely that there will still be some repos with the principal branch called “master” and some with it called “main,” so confusion will still exist. But even if all repos and tutorials were magically switched over to “main” in 10 years’ time, the net result would be several years’ worth of newbie developers experiencing a slew of microannoyances, with zero upside. There is no evidence that a branch called “master” caused widespread harm, but there is plenty of evidence that further complicating an already complex system was harmful to some degree.
You could just as well argue that the changed name of the default branch is one of very many things that make git difficult for beginners to learn and having bumped into it early taught a valuable lesson that branch names in git are arbitrary.
Something that took me a longer than I care to admit to figure out.
Agreed. Seeing this in the tutorial (if it hasn't already been updated as such) would be great:
> Branch names are arbitrary, but for convenience a default of 'main' is provided. There's nothing special about 'main'.
Of course I'd double check they really are arbitrary for all contexts before adding the above since I'm not 100% confident it's true.
The name 'origin' for the remote repository that you originally cloned from is likewise arbitrary. There is nothing magical about `git push origin master`. You could name your remote "my_github_account" and do `git push my_github_account trunk`.
This knowledge becomes essential if you're synch'ing with several remote repos. OTOH, knowing that these are arbitrary names and not part of the command make it more obvious that it's _possible_ to have multiple remotes in the first place.
But it comes at the cost of making life more difficult for authors of tutorials designed to get people to memorize difficult git commands without understand what they do.
This would sort itself out pretty quickly, though. Different aspects of git's usage are constantly changing and any tutorial that doesn't keep up to date would be irrelevant sooner or later.