Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms | Hacker News Reader

Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms

theregister.co.uk

This is equivalent to Farmers banning the word "hoe". This just strikes me as kind of silly. I forwarded this to an African-American friend who works with Python a lot. His response was "Lol, why?"

love it how some people are so easily butt-hurt about these kinds of words, while other people in slave families in other countries have no problem configuring their IDE drives without getting insulted by the terminology.

As I was familiarising myself with Go recently I was surprised to see the word "panic" so often. Panic disorder is a real and debilitating disease. I wonder when that terminology will change. But at least it's not as bad as other languages where you need to spawn and then kill child processes. "Abort" is another word we shouldn't use since it reminds some people of the killing of unborn babies. Don't even get me started on the fact that most web pages are predominantly white.

I'll bite. These terms, and particularly "panic" and "kill" have negative connotations in software. These are things that we generally prefer to avoid when creating our systems. On the other hand, the terms "master" and "slave" have been used in the context of databases with an entirely neutral sentiment, and I think that's where the problem lies, as it (slightly) normalizes the word "slave".

So you reckon if a parent was triggered about the murder of their own child they'd be consoled by the fact that it's a bad process that's being killed?

And you reckon a slave who is triggered by the word "slave" would care about that little detail just the same?

Has anyone even asked slaves or former slaves if this is something they care about? Perhaps they'd prefer the word "slave" not being buried by becoming taboo.

Have you asked a father how he feels about this wording, after his partner aborted his child without his knowledge?

Or, are you just making stuff up to justify these changes because they make you feel better.

Keywords Reserved Words Trigger words

Apple did this a long while ago replacing with leader and follower.

Apple also extended their crusade against firearms to modifying the way iOS displays the pistol emoji, rendering it as a toy water pistol, an entirely different object from a deadly weapon.

This sort of newspeak ideology-based purge is bad for everyone. Political agendas have no place inside of general purpose communication tools. This is no different than running an automated string replacement that changes the word “handgun” to “squirt gun”.

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