https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
There’s perfectly reasonable alternatives: allowlist and blocklist. It’s not really that big of a deal.
It’s about death by a thousand cuts. Nobody has suffered trauma by seeing those words. Nobody is going to refuse to work with you because you use those words. But they can be reminders, triggers, maybe just pain points.
If by slightly patching my vocabulary I can make some people more comfortable, why wouldn’t I?
Well, no. And you illustrate it so well:
> reasonable alternatives: allowlist and blocklist
If both statements are true, then "allow" is good and "block" is bad.
See, if there's any implication of value then it needs to apply to whatever words you choose to use. In reality, none of those can be qualified as good or bad. They're tools. As such, when put to good use, they will be good; when misused they might be bad. This is true for whatever (black|white|allow|block)list is used.
That's the truest part of your post, but not in the way you meant it. It's killing useful work and productivity via a death by a thousand cuts. I still have git push origin master in muscle memory, and have to regularly "fix" that to main, all because people with power over the git project insisted on changing the default branch name for made up reasons. Master refers to things other than master slave relationships, and even git's usage explicitly meant it in the slavery sense it was still a waste of engineering effort to change and an annoyance to anyone like me with muscle memory (or all of the people with build scripts they had to update).