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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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But seeing the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this sort of thing on HN makes me adjust my likelihoods around what, excuse the cliche, I see as the pendulum swinging back away from leftist authoritarianism.

Weird, given how they reacted to blacklist/whitelist and master (branch).

Maybe it's just a little too much nonsense? I mean, "blackbox" doesn't have negative connotations, in any way. "Red Team" - they made an argument which should be used to ban "Red" by itself.

Aside from the nonsense ("user" is offensive?), there are reasonable arguments against blacklist/whitelist (it's less self documenting than denylist/allowlist) and master (the master branch isn't privileged in any way over other branches; it being the canonical source of truth is just a convention overlaid on git's model), and for greenfield projects I'm mildly in favor of those switches. But the key point is that it is individual teams who can decide this for themselves; when orders come in from on high that existing codebases need to be retrofitted to use these new terminologies, it creates a lot more work and risks. And a list like this is very obviously a top-down policing of language that has no interest in helping real work or real people.

There are arguments, at any rate. I wouldn't call them reasonable. "Blacklist" and "whitelist" are well understood technical terms, there is going to be almost nobody who doesn't know what they mean. And "master" doesn't necessarily connote privilege. I mean I appreciate that people tried to furnish non-political arguments for switching off those terms. But the arguments are bad, imo, so they don't really justify why we should change established industry terms.

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