Rant on woke git

19 Dec 2022 - 24 Oct 2024

Something about git's change from master to main irks the shit out of me. Probably not worth talking about in public, but man. The sheer pointless self-righteousness of doing nothing but a purely symbolic thing.

Now – I'm perfectly aware that symbols are important! If it is virtue signalling, well, it is actually an important social function to signal each other. I get it! Symbolic gestures are good, they are better than nothing, and they remind us of more important issues even if they don't do much to solve them. Diversity and inclusion are important and even fossils like myself might need to adapt to achieve them.

But still – couldn't we find a better way of signalling than declaring a common word verboten, evil, outlawed, toxic? A word with many meanings and usages completely apart from its role in slavery. In git, "master" did not mean the master of master and slave, it was more like the notion of a master tape, the copy from which all other copies or variants are derived. The root of a tree of descent.

Now – these usages are not completely unrelated. The master in the master / apprentice relationship is both authority and model for the apprentice. Or a schoolmaster, for that matter, although I guess nobody uses that term any more. Any teacher is a master, in some sense, whether or not the pupil finds themselves subordinated by their own choice or not.

Ah here is patient 0: Rename offensive terminology (master) - Simon Pieters although it is based on earlier movements in Python and other projects.

I hesitate to even make this public, since it puts me on the wrong side of a political divide. But sometimes I have to let my inner reactionary out. There's a lot of shitheels writing on this of course, and I'm not interested in joining their club.

NISTIR 8366 is the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Interagency Report titled “Guidance for NIST Staff on Using Inclusive Language in Documentary Standards”, and functions as a standardized guidebook for choosing appropriate language within CS. It’s a short document – only 8 pages of content – that covers a wide range of topics. Section 4.1 is a bullet-point list with headers like “Avoid terms that assign a gender or sex to inanimate objects” and “Avoid colloquialisms, metaphors, similes, idioms, and other unnecessary jargon”. This is the section where the document first brings up “master/slave”, under the header “Avoid terms that perpetuate negative stereotypes or unequal power relationships”. The same document later gives the example “The terms “master/slave” to describe a model where one device or process controls another as subordinate should be avoided.”

Avoid metaphors! Jesus fucking christ. See, this is why I am bothered. Inclusivity is great, but is it so important that we have to give up basic tools of thought and communication to achieve it???

Avoid terms that assign a gender or sex to inanimate objects: *Examples: male/female connectors; male bolt/female nut*