I've been surprised that there is a new generation of developers who never heard that master/slave is offensive/irritating to some people. I first ran into this in 1996 when I joined a team building a product that had replication. We changed all the uses of master/slave to supplier/consumer. I had just relocated from the UK, where (at least by my perceptions) race is less of a core societal issue. I remember asking what this was about, someone said there were people who didn't like the use of master and slave, I thought "ok that's interesting" and moved on to fixing bugs.
Fast forward more than 20 years and I find people complaining about github branch names. This seems odd because it's like whoever came up with the default branch name (Linus?) didn't receive the memo I got in 1996.
Anyway, I see this pattern every so often : something that offends group A, where group B is asking "what's the big deal?". I've seen it with dogs in the workplace, with "blackface" and with use of the "n-word", and on and on.
To be honest it mystifies me (the "what's the big deal" part). Why not just take folks at their word? a) they say they're offended, b) whatever change they are asking for is minimal and low-cost, why not react with "I didn't know that, but ok no problem"?
It's interesting you bring up Linus Torvalds in this discussion because he, around the same time as the Github changes, signed off[0] on an update to the terminology used in the Linux kernel. To me it's not a decision I expected, but watching some older talks where it's been brought up to him he seems to be indifferent to the controversy and just wants to focus on the tech.
Fast forward more than 20 years and I find people complaining about github branch names. This seems odd because it's like whoever came up with the default branch name (Linus?) didn't receive the memo I got in 1996.
Anyway, I see this pattern every so often : something that offends group A, where group B is asking "what's the big deal?". I've seen it with dogs in the workplace, with "blackface" and with use of the "n-word", and on and on. To be honest it mystifies me (the "what's the big deal" part). Why not just take folks at their word? a) they say they're offended, b) whatever change they are asking for is minimal and low-cost, why not react with "I didn't know that, but ok no problem"?