Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

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> But now a set of Americans seem dedicated to shoehorn it in.

I agree. Its like the whole "master/slave" brouhaha.

The Americans just became obsessed over renaming anything anywhere that used the term.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world doesn't make dumb extrapolations. They understand that calling one server "master" and one server "slave" does not mean you're some sort of right-wing racist nutter.

I'm sure if you took at trip to the African continent and visited various countries and asked those who actually live there about it, they'd much rather you talk about how they can get more financing for their organisation, how they can get more robust and affordable internet connectivity .... or indeed how they can get a COVID vaccine, especially seeing as the patents were not lifted and the promises of donations never materialised in any significant number.

But no, the Americans are too busy with political correctness and willy-waving sending billionaires and their rockets into space.

Yep. GitHub probably spent more on the "master -> main" rename than on offering free education to disadvantaged people of color.

(Though they like to parade open source's impact as their impact https://socialimpact.github.com/ )

However the community did it because it was asked to do it by people. It was fairly easy to do, it was clear and well defined. So why not? The ask was very likely sincere, even if it was useless in the grand scheme of things. Should the community (git maintainers, various project maintainers) score every request based on its social impact or take requests at face value? (I'd argue that they have to do a little bit of both, and if something is a low-hanging fruit, eg. big impact low effort, then why not do it?)

Computing is full of metaphors like "kill".

My 7 year old niece looked over my shoulder as I was writing this and said "kill!?" with a look of disgust! Disgust! I suspect that this reaction is typical of many females getting started in computing. Could it be a small part of why there are so few women in computing?

My niece gets very excited when she sees me use commands she knows like ls, cd, cat (especially cat!). The fact that she could grow up to become a DBA and won't have to talk about "dumb slaves" is something I celebrate. It's not nearly as important as <insert whataboutism here> but it's progress.

(If you or someone you know has been victimised because they're comfortable with existing terminology then I'm sorry for that, really. If you feel that changing terminology is a waste of time that is OK. If you don't want to rename your branches then no-one should give you a hard time about it.)

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