Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

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We haven't lost anything, but we've gained the expectation that we should be accommodating a tiny minority of people being offended for no reason. Sure it's not much work to switch "master" to "main" (although in aggregate it's probably a tonne of person hours), but what happens when the next trend is to be offended at "blacklist", or "sanity check", or any of the other thousands of words that someone is inevitably going to be offended by.

And once the expectation is that you change your language based on the irrationally offended minority, if you refuse to do so because it is a lot of work and makes no sense you become deamonized as some kind of sexist/racist/*ist.

I've seen lots of people claim that if you aren't a part of the minority in question you have no right to say what is or isn't offensive. I strongly disagree, some people are offended for stupid reasons, and we shouldn't feel obligated to accommodate them. Now if a significant portion are offended then there is probably some legitimate reason behind it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

> "blacklist"

That has already happened in some places, though blacklist/whitelist are still the most common naming convention for that sort of thing.

Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change. I don't have any examples I remember of what people might use instead of whitelist though, allowlist doesn't particularly trip of the tongue IMO.

Grandfathering is another common word that I've seen argued against because of its history.

> Blocklist

IMHO it's definitely not. What I do with my blacklist might have nothing to do with blocking anything.

It doesn't have anything with the color black either.

What about "yeslist" and "nolist"? "Includelist" and "excludelist"?

> Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change.

You should try to avoid using "Blocklist" in most code IMO, it's ambiguous in a number of contexts as the word block itself is ambiguous and can mean very multiple different things such as blockchain blocks or data/filesystem blocks which would be something very different from the intended definition of a disallow rule.

I would assume in most cases context would differentiate the meanings adequately unambiguously, especially in userland rather than when coding.

But you have a point, block is unhelpfully overloaded on the English language.

You mean just like how the context will disambiguate the meaning of "master"?

You're pushing all the "angry minority" stereotype in your language in your comment.

Like, if I as a brown person am uncomfortable something it's me being an irrationally offended minority.

If it's a white person it's just Mike having a bad day.

I'm glad you're not my coworker.

I believe it's called white fragility nowadays bt insane Americans. Also, someone who is from Eastern Europe and white, I'm grossly offended by people using my skin color everywhere, I have nothing to do with your history.

Do you even realize tech community is bigger than California?

When I say "irrationally offended minority", I mean "minority" as in a small number of people, not "minority" as in racial minority, although I see why they isn't clear given that I use the word in two different ways in my comment. Most of the people I've seen get offended for trivial reasons are actually not a racial minority at all.

As I said, if a significant number of people are offended (or if a small number are offended for a good reason), we should probably change our language. But if it is a small number of people getting offended at a word used in a context where it has never been offensive, I don't think we should accomodate them.

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