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Comment by bonzini | Hacker News Reader

The concept of a master branch is completely detached from distributed systems, so much that every clone of a repository has a separate master branch.

I am not a native speaker so my brain might work differently but I don't believe the theory on associations. We're even talking of a noun vs an adjective. Do people make the same associations also when you hear about a Masters degree? Or when you hear about Slavic people, do you feel for the times when they were enslaved?

I have no problem with replacing master/slave, there are usually clearer names since that pair has been overloaded (though changing master/slave to master/replica should be just as acceptable as e.g. primary/replica or active/backup, for the same reason!). Even outside distributed systems other names are clearer (controller/device for example).

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All three are used as a noun to me, FWIW. When you say "merge to master", master is a noun. My point above is that it's more uncommon in my experience to fully say "master branch".

"Masters degrees" as far as I linguistically understand means "mastery of subject", which is indeed the same language, though perhaps closer to feudal master/subject, which was more ethnic slavery in Europe than the specific iteration in the US. Maybe we do eventually change that one too. Higher education has the same problematic founding as everything else. Let's not forget that Harvard and many other top schools were literally constructed by slaves. As said elsewhere, this is very much about engrained subconscious defaults and norms and you've just highlighted another.

I think generally these are indeed small effects and you have to pick your battles, but I am always saddened when people spend so much effort fighting and arguing against these really costless changes. No one is saying to change overnight and break everything, but it costs nothing to slowly transition away. Those who argue it "changes history" I also find curious as those people seem to be doing a great job ignoring or denying the histories of the words in those same arguments.

In "Merge to master", "master" is a proper noun, the name that was given to the branch because it is "the master branch" (adjective); just like St. Paul took his name from the adjective "paulus", meaning small.

Otherwise, it would be "merge to the master" which I have never heard.

It's not a costless change; all documentation would be split between that for "master" and that for "main". The cynic in me sees Embrace, Extend, Extinguish all over again.

A proper noun is a noun...?

> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

How did we get from "change one word, find/replace basically" to an entire predatory policy by Microsoft?

If anything, this proves that it is possible over time. The issue with EEE was not the change itself but the power Microsoft gained by enforcing examples itself. Where's the power issue in making a change that is a positive for the world without negatives once past the transitional issue?

Again, my point here is that this just feel like people put more energy into fighting it than the change costs, and I think often that speaks more to people marginalizing the underlying issue than caring about the problems with the change itself.

Everything that you name gets a proper noun.

If you name your git branch "maint", that proper noun comes from the common noun "maintenance".

If you name your git branch "master", that proper noun comes from the adjective "master".

> The issue with EEE was not the change itself but the power Microsoft gained by enforcing examples itself

Exactly, making things different is effectively a potential lock-in issue for GitHub vs. other git hosts.

And this changes what exactly? Its derivation doesn't change its use as a noun in the common use.

Even if it was an adjective, you act as if that magically excludes it from being associated with the master/slave distributed systems reference, but it's still a CS term at the end of the day and I fail to see how there would not be a subconscious association there.

> Exactly, making things different is effectively a potential lock-in issue for GitHub vs. other git hosts.

Or all the others can change too for the low cost of near zero, at the same time. If those companies don't want to change for the societal good, maybe that's a legitimate reason not to use them. Do you really believe a single rename in the name of societal good that anyone can do with low cost is going to cause vendor lock-in?

A proper noun and a common noun are grammatically different and easily distinguishable. Same for an adjective and a noun. This is why my original comment was specifically about reading comprehension.

I don't believe there's any gain at all to achieve in terms of societal good, therefore any possible damage is going to be greater than zero. I am ready to be called a racist or fascist for this, which would be quite ironic given that my grandparents and great-grandparents had several unpleasant interactions with the Italian fascist party.

> I don't believe there's any gain at all to achieve in terms of societal good

The only thing I can say then is to look to psych research, implicit bias, and biases in decision making studies. The conclusions there clearly point the opposite direction. I'll drop one such example to start[1]

> I am ready to be called a racist or fascist for this

People walk into these assuming this hostility, but if you want such hostility to change, it's a two way street. It's been well established we are all a little racist, ironically here thanks to ingrained biases such as the one we are discussing. What matters is that you're trying to fight against those tendencies, learning, and correcting where you can. No one is asking for perfection. When people bring in hostility into these conversations though is where that then becomes interpreted as a choice, not just subconscious.

> my grandparents and great-grandparents had several unpleasant interactions with the Italian fascist party

I don't see why we are still trying to use this line of argument. There are plenty of sexist women, racist BIPOC to other races, etc. Being of or having been related to X can help statistically at a macro level, but does not magically stop an individual from developing any of those ideas.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/

I always assumed Git chose "master" as an analogy to audio mastering, thus a hint that the master branch should be the final result of "mixing" other branches. Maybe that's reading too much into it though.

In this case, those are siblings of the same root, so not reading too much into it at all.

That said, both origin and practical use have relevancy here.

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