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Comment by lcrz | Hacker News Reader

I just want to add a link to this[0] post here as a counterpoint for why changing language _can_ matter.

The author seems to imply that the name change is all about being non-offensive to some people. Since the author doesn't find the language offensive, they conclude that name change is only political correctness or virtue signalling and a hollow gesture. I do not agree with that. Language and words are very powerful in how we perceive the world. A changing vocabulary is part of cultural change.

[0]: https://mokacoding.com/blog/main-vs-master-xcode-12/

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> Since the author doesn't find the language offensive

You're missing the point, the author concludes that the companies decide that the language is offensive without asking the people who are supposedly the offended party.

Are you sure about that though? They didn't publish anything about their internal decision making. It is an assumption that they didn't talk to any person of color. The idea of using so called neutral terms is not new: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3243656.stm

See my other comment, the author says the change didn't involve the black developer community. I have no knowledge either way, just emphasizing their point.

Sure. I'm just calling their point into question because I see a lot of people of color that are actively engaged in the evolution of language in the context of slavery. The Rijksmuseum in The Nederlands has changed most occurrences of 'slave' to 'enslaved person' and trying to find out the actual name of the person depicted, among other things. The commission that was responsible for this change was headed by a person of color[0]. This isn't a movement that we are only seeing in Silicon Valley.

[0]: https://www.parool.nl/ps/hoofd-geschiedenis-rijksmuseum-ik-w...

No, he's complaining that they didn't ask him specifically. It really easy to find black developers who were consulted and agree with the change.

Here we go (this took under 5 seconds for me to Google)

https://dev.to/afrodevgirl/replacing-master-with-main-in-git...

Now there's duelling anecdata and the OP provides no suggestions on how to reconcile them.

They could simply rename their own branches.

...yes? No one is forcing anyone to do anything.

I don’t think anyone expects “main” (“develop”, “default”, “trunk”, ...) to ever become the default branch name.

It is already the default branch name... That's the point of this whole fluff. Nobody would care about people changing their own branch names.

From the article:

"So if this change did not really even attempt to involve the black developer community..."

As far as I know, most of the changes happening at large companies regarding this have been driven internally primarily by people of color - at MSFT, which owns GitHub, some of these changes were being driven by Employee Resource Groups (affinity groups) which are made up of those who would be affected by the language, for example

Everything humans do is part of cultural change, because what humans do is change things.

The post is about prioritisation. Moving the needle in a way that matters, not merely doing something so we can pat ourselves on the back for doing it.

Just because you can change something it doesn't mean you should or ought to. Opportunity cost....

But that's just saying that a change that only has a small effect is almost never worthwhile. What are the real opportunity costs here?

No, it's not saying that at all. You are missing all the nuance.

It's saying that the change which has a small effect is never worth while (and... pay attention now. This is the other part of the post you missed: context)....

*IN RELATION TO* the larger effect which costs the same in time/effort/capital/energy/emotions/stress/give-a-fuck.

That's just how prioritisation/choice works.

Ok, so what is that larger effect that costs the same, then?

The idea that you need to do something that is better before you can do something that is less, even if the cost is the same seems to imply that there is only a limited amount of energy that is expendable on these topics.

As seen from the bucketloads of comments and posts about this OLD issue (the python link is from 2018) it seems there's enough energy going around.

The idea that something can't be good, just because it is not the highest item on a list is nonproductive.

Nobody is saying that X isn't good. Everybody is saying that X is good, but Y is much better.

So if you want to make a productive choice then go for Y, not X!

At the very least, if you are going to choose X anyway stop trying to persuade everybody else to choose X with you, when they are already focusing on Y. That's just attention-seeking behaviour.

You are extremely uncharitable. There's no point of engaging you further.

That article is garbage. He just takes it as given that the change is more inclusive.

Oh course being inclusive is good. That's not the argument here.

This article doesn't explain how "main" is more "inclusive" than "master". I don't agree that it is at all.

That article hurt to read. I'm not surprised the author is from Melbourne too.

Frankly this is the opinion of a white guy, why should latino and black people care about his perception of "racially charged words" like `master`?

This is like some dude from Vermont telling me I should use latinx as it's more inclusive -- linguistic colonization eh

From the article, I don't believe this is "the opinion of a white guy":

Being a highly paid software engineer, like most of you reading this, did not stop a bully van flying up the curb I was walking on and 7 City of London police officers pinning me against a wall with guns in my face. They wouldn’t believe it was possible for someone like me to work in central London till one of them searched me and found my work ID. All this because I fit a description. What was this description? I don’t know, black male between 4’11 and 7’4 probably.

I was talking specifically about the link in parent comment. https://mokacoding.com/blog/main-vs-master-xcode-12/

My bad, thanks for pointing that out.

I read this whole article, super disappointed. Its nothing but a bunch of assertions about something being offensive without even a small effort to show why it is. This just perpetuates the idea that this is just virtue signaling and has no effects.

The person your parent linked to is a white guy, who also links to the Twitter account of another white guy.

Ok, that's fair. Here's an article from Wired where there are people of color on both sides of this issue: https://www.wired.com/story/tech-confronts-use-labels-master...

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