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Comment by pancrufty | Hacker News Reader

As a non-American, the dumbest change that affects me daily, is the renaming of the master branch. Master means teacher in romance languages and its variations are part of daily usage. In git there's no "slave" part so it always meant "main" and not "owner"

It affects me daily because "look on master" became "look on the main branch" for no advantage to absolutely anyone.

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The strangest thing about the git branch controversy is that "master" was clearly used in a master/copy sense, just like you used to have a master music record that was then copied, but at the same time, basically every embedded communication protocol and many distributed computing systems still use terms like "bus master" and straight up "master-slave" configuration. Sure, for many protocols it's a very accurate description, but if we're going to try and remove such language from tech, why not start with the places where the words actually mean the same thing, not just happen to be homographs.

(I do support the master-main change in git for other reasons tho: it's much easier to translate and more natural to say. "Master record" is a term that never got translated into many languages, or at least not in a way that still makes sense for git)

I believe these sort of 'word bans' are motivated by Whorfianism; basically the idea that the sort of language we use can influence (or even set the bounds of) the kind of thoughts people have. But scientific evidence for Whorfianism is weak at best, and starts to seem particularly absurd when you try to state plainly exactly what you're trying to accomplish in situations like this. In this case, the idea seems to be that we can denormalize the practice of slavery by eliminating metaphorical references to slavery.

If you think about this, it's obviously a complete farce. The sort of people who engage in slavery today are not enabled to do so by such metaphors. And those apathetic to the problem of modern slavery, who might otherwise be doing something about it, were not made apathetic by the metaphors. The premise of fighting slavery by eliminating metaphors to slavery is pure pseudoscience of the highest order.

> why not start with the places where the words actually mean the same thing

If a word describes a bad thing, that's a reason to get rid of the bad thing. It's not a reason to ban the word.

Because the latter doesn't help anyone with real problems. Wow, we banished "master" from git. Did that make the world a better place for the people described in these articles (see links)?

https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/saudi0704/4.htm

https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_...

Did it positively impact any of these lives? Is it going to do so at any point in the future? If so, what specific outcomes can these people expect from it?

My point is, banishing words describing bad things, doesn't make the bad things go away.

Note how that sentence started with "but if we're going to try and remove such language from tech,". It wasn't a support of the idea, just of the execution. "If you're going to try and mug someone, why not do it somewhere with no CCTV?".

As for the reasoning, nobody thinks not having a "master" and "slave" chip in SPI is going to erase slavery and especially nobody (on the right side) is trying to erase the word altogether. The most common argument is that these terms should not be "watered down" by using them elsewhere - when you hear the word "slave", your immediate thought should be "human rights are being violated! who? where? how can we stop it?". It should bring up the thought of some of the worst human suffering in history, not some chips talking to each other.

(again, I'm not giving a judgement of the idea, just explaining the arguments for it the way I understand them)

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