In my mind, this opens up a huge can of worms, as there are tons of words (in programming and even in general speech) which could be construed as offensive if you manage to look at them from the right angle.
Not only that, but I find it bonkers that there’s a community of people who would find such terms as ‘master’ offensive, but they are fine with spamming the F-bomb everywhere, even in computer code.
Further more, the replacement terms will inevitably be found offensive by someone, just give it enough time. We may even have to abandon the English language and just speak in . For starters, it is known that a lot of people have been killed by Pythons over the years…
Providing that the words I used above are still okay, what are your thoughts? I personally as of now don’t see it as a call for the BF to drop Python, but it could inconvenience a few addon devs. who now need to do more work to upgrade their code in a future version.
Grrrrrrrrr. This sort of thing really gets under my skin. People who attempt to control language are also attempting to control the thoughts of others by proxy . . . 1984 wasn’t a guidebook for making a society I’d like to live in - but it seems like those on the extreme left missed that memo.
Personally, I am skeptical of stories like this. Next, we might be told that Webster’s Dictionary is going to expunge these “offensive words” from their collection altogether.
And, in each case, we would be pre-disposed to believe it, if only because the idea is outrageous.
Just because you see it on the Internet doesn’t mean that it’s actually true.
This type of language purge, attempted or committed, is hitting other projects as well. Some newcomer made a pull request for the Godot engine trying to change the name of functions for being ‘incorrect’.
One was getting rid of the ‘master’ label for the primary audio bus, even though it had nothing to do with controlling people and is a widely known term in audio design. It didn’t stop there, then she tried to rename functions related to checking for whitespace in text saying they were racially loaded (even though it has everything to do with empty space, and that’s not to mention ‘white’ is simply a color and the actual race name is Caucasian).
So basically these Linux developers are Crybabies? “I don’t like it so i’m going to break it”
So why don’t they fork and call it LinuxFree or something like that.
I agree the background of chanign master/slave part is… messed up beyond anything. But this action looks like Lunix dev’s are a bunch of crybabies.
And worst part, they are providing Windows and Mac (well less mac) but still Windows a perfect marketing window. As less and less people can rely on Linux and their dev’s they’ll have to start relying more on Windows…
I wouldn’t mind if Linus stopped with the profane rants and removed profanity from the code, but the more concerning bit would be if they tried to ‘sanitize’ the OS of anything that ‘might’ be offensive to some overly sensitive person somewhere else on the planet.
Anyway, the next big desktop OS competitor to Windows at this point is likely to come from Google and not the Linux foundation (those Chromebooks are advancing faster than the organization ever did).
I weep for the dumbed down stupidity of our new world. Yes this is going to happen, you can bet on it. They always get their way in the end, no matter how joke-like it seems at the beginning, over time you stop laughing and end up complying.
Language changes constantly, including the revision of previous language. Tech in particular is such a rapidly changing field that it seems like every day there’s a new word or a striking out of an old word. Python didn’t even exist 30 years ago. While master/slave personally doesn’t bother me, it does have a bit of a poor taste to it and I understand why some people are requesting the change. It’s not like it’s particularly difficult to swap the terms out and use new ones going forward, like parent/child or leader/follower which are already common in some software.
It’s funny that whenever a language change request is made, the people that get most upset about it are not the “snowflakes” or “SJWs” but the self-proclaimed “rational” and “logical” ones defending the status quo. Reminds me of when people were extremely upset by Pluto no longer being a planet. Language changes. Facts change. Society is constantly evolving, expanding its knowledge and culture. Society didn’t end when “faggot” stopped being an acceptable slur for gay people, medicine didn’t cease to advance when we stopped calling deaf people “dumb” or “retarded”, and programming is not going to implode because we’re deciding to change “master/slave” to something less politically charged.
Therein lies the rub, the new terms are not politically charged, until they are. The word ‘master’ has only become a loaded word in the last couple of years even though it is a common term used for far more than describing control over someone.
I mastered this video game, I am a chess master, I achieved mastery in math, does the term have to be erased in all of those situations as well? As I mentioned, the new terms will also become politically charged at some point down the line if we allow this trend to continue.
To back up that last point, it used to be that people with certain medical or physical conditions were known as ‘crippled’, but that term became offense and was replaced with ‘disabled’. However, that term is now considered offensive and has been replaced with differently abled, a term that is clunkier to say and less descriptive.
Sure languages evolve, but in this case, language evolution is now being driven by agendas rather than by the natural flow of new terminology as had been the case for centuries. We know it is bad when the names of colors are being seen as offensive, just because a word becomes associated with a potentially insensitive meaning (in the eyes of some) doesn’t mean it should be condemned everywhere.
Don’t be naive, you know full well that the phrase “master” is not the issue here. It is the specific combination of “master” with “slave”, and “slave” is the problematic word.
So your issue is that it’s slightly less convenient to say? That’s hardly a setback in exchange for not using terms that predispose people into thinking those who have medical conditions are less abled, dumber, or otherwise not as good as people who do not have those issues.
Language has always been driven by agendas. Slurs didn’t naturally evolve - they were deliberately created by people trying to hurt or otherwise dis-empower that class. Many racial slurs have origins deriving from specific time periods in history, some as small as only a few years. The difference is now we have the internet, so these changes happen faster and can be voiced/spread more easily by grassroots organizations.
. For starters, it is known that a lot of people have been killed by Pythons over the years…