this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Even ignoring the question of racism, they are still stupid names.
Imagine teaching a child about this and it asks: Why is white allowed and black not? The only answer is, because it is like this for a long time. If we name them allowlist and denylist, it is obvious to all English speaking people. Shouldn't we strive for descriptive names in programming?
However, if you use names whitelist an blacklist, you need to make the implicit connection white-positive black-negative. Yes obviously this does not make you racist if you do this in programming. But is it good?
White - light. Black - no light. White knight - good. Black knight - bad.
These two colors have a meaning. It has fuck all to do with skin color. And if you do, then you are helping to enable "useless racism" in the form of "this offends the black community", while literally nobody gives a fuck.
Its a useless change in the sake of changing things. Everyone is tech eants the superstar and wants to say "Hey, you are using X (not Twitter in this case)! I made that, noice.".
If someone decided to change it next week to
primary, would you be for or against it?Why is a filled checkbox positive and an empty checkbox negative
Sounds like white true black false is not universal
Yes colors have a meaning. However, they change ober time and culture. So why not use the word which describes exactly what we mean?
I agree, nowadays blacklist/whitelist has practically nothing to do with skin color. However i do think it is weird to use the same words for describing the appearance of people and good/bad.
Well i would be indifferent to the renaming to primary, because it doesn't really matter to me what they call their branches, as long as it is descriptive.
primaryalso conveys the meaning. I would probably continue using main/dev because i see no reason to change.I am not someone who says "You should change this!". I just say, think of it, there are some reasons to change and the only reason to keep it, os that we did it always like this. I think there are reasons for selecting better words. And I am only annoyed by people who are outraged by things others do, which does not really affects them negatively. I get it that someone wants to continue using blacklist, master, etc. and I am ok with that.
AL/BL. See, not stupid at all. You just don't want to admit you're deeply racist and that's your motivation for caring a non-zero shit about this.
Programmers will literally uproot their entire language of choice if it's required it but can't replace one definition? Give me a fucking break.
Taking this stuff personally is just intellectual laziness. The phrase "Allowlist" isn't about that guy, and if he can't grok that it isn't he needs to work on himself.