THE 'international bullshit machine' (IBM) is telling us that the world's problems boil down to something like a Git branch being called "master". That's easily debunkable. We wrote about it many times before and we explained why it's a pretty big deal.
Now read the comments from fellow developers. We'll quote a few (this is from 2 years ago, before people became reluctant/afraid to publicly object). "I'm a little surprised by this," said an early comment (on the bug tracker). "It's not like slavery was acceptable when these computer science terms were coined and it's only comparatively recently that they've gone out of fashion. On the other hand, there are some areas in computer software where "master" and "slave" are the exact technical terms (e.g. IDE), and avoiding them would lead to confusion. Of the four citations you reference, one of them is a PR for Django, and three of them say "see the Django PR". The Django PR is an unreadable infinitely-long page of miserable arguing. So the context doesn't help much. Have there been any actual complaints? Or is this an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't really exist?"
Early debates included also this: "As a counter-example: A quick grep finds 555 occurrences of the word "kill" in CPython master. Everybody knows killing is bad and using the term might upset certain people. Yet I would not support expunging the word "kill" from Python."
Another one: "I'm not super-excited by the idea that Python has to change its behavior based on secret comments. Python has traditionally had a very open governance model where all discussions happen in public."
This was weeks after the creator of Python surprisingly resigned. We cannot prove there's a connection between those two events (resignation and controversy/commotion).
"To me," said another person, "there is nothing wrong with the word 'master', as such. I mastered Python to become a master of Python. [...] Like Larry, I object to action based on hidden evidence."
"The term "master" has so many positive connotations that I think it is misguided to effectively eliminate it from the current English language," another developer noted.
"In fact," said another developer, "in the BDSM subcultures, "master/slave" can have *positive* connotations. You want to support diversity, then why are you discriminating against that subculture?"
Another comment: "Talking about diversity: my wife is of a nationality that historically were often stolen to be slave [...] Both of us are angered by this attack on our linguistic culture. Stop trying to sanitize and infantalize language."
Also note: "The discussion under GH PRs [Microsoft GitHub] is now censored. What will be the next level?"
That was after Microsoft bought GitHub, at least on paper. No discussion allowed. The debate was secret.
Wikipedia's article on this very subject states upfront (at the top): "This article may be unbalanced towards certain viewpoints."
We know who's good at gaming Wikipedia. Some people receive a salary to do it. Microsoft even got caught doing this, infuriating Wikipedia's co-founder.
"IMO," said another person, "the problem isn't the master/slave terminology itself but the way how the changes were introduced (no discussion) and the justification ("diversity reasons"???)"
Notice this other ticket, also citing GitHub extensively:
It has come to my attention that CPython's source code contains problematic ableist/saneist terms and/or pejoratives, namely
sanity check 144 silly 26 insane 13 crazy 13 stupid 6 lame 2 lunatic 1
Some of those slipped into the documentation. In an attempt to make Python community more inclusive and welcoming, we should clean up these usages and replace them with something neutral (where applicable). Unfortunately, to this day many developers deem such efforts as "trolling", so please note that the precedent has already been set by many major projects. Here're just a few:
https://github.com/unpkg/unpkg.com/pull/81 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/pull/2335 https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/pull/3752 https://github.com/krzysztofzablocki/Sourcery/issues/2 https://github.com/google/xi-editor/pull/126
Other resources:
https://english.stackexchange.com/q/282282 http://isthisableism.tumblr.com/sluralternatives
The goal of this issue is not to stir up arguments, but to figure out the alternatives and ways to replace those problematic terms.