• douglasg14b@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      I mean…

      Yeah, depending on the word, it can invoke specific feelings. Words don’t end to have that effect…

  • F/15/Cali@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    3 months ago

    It’s weird seeing language shift away from “master” as we become more politically correct in the US. I’d never even considered the connotation until recently.

    • bisby@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      The point of political correctness is that it’s always things you’d never consider… but someone else does. I’m not here to say whether things are right or wrong or if “master” is good or bad. but you perfectly highlight the reasoning behind it.

      To you, the only thing that comes up is the technology context. And that’s perfectly reasonable. To someone else, the unrelated slave owning context may just be tightly coupled with that word, and that immediately comes to mind when they hear the word regardless of context. And someone in that scenario is probably not having a positive correlation with the word.

      So a group of people have a very understandable reason to have a negative correlation with the word, and it’s super easy to use a different word, so it seems to make sense to just use the other word.

      All my git scripts these days have a $(git remote show origin | sed -n '/HEAD branch/s/.*: //p') in them, which just fetches whatever origin calls the head branch. so if I want to rebase from main/master/prod/lead/front/etc … the command will figure out which one to use for me.

      • 0x0@lemmy.zip
        0·
        3 months ago

        To someone else, the unrelated slave owning context may just be tightly coupled with that word,

        Considering slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, no one alive ever felt what it’s like to be a slave.
        Most people moaning about this are virtue-signaling.
        And corpos only do it to avoid lawsuits.

        Oh, unless you mean wage-slaves, then i’m onboard!

        • bisby@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          You don’t have to have been a slave to have dealt with racism. Enough people still get really excited about their confederate flags that clearly the era is still heavily topical.

          The word “confederate” means nothing beyond referring to a type of government, but when I hear it, I think immediately of the American civil war. Even though that ended in 1865 so I was never alive to witness that.

          That’s not how word associations work.

      • nialv7@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        What weirded me out is that (IIRC) most who advocated the use of main weren’t who would have a negative correlation with the word master.

        Not that I have a problem with avoiding the use of master (I don’t use master for my branches), but this felt virtue signal-y to me at the time.

        • bisby@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          Yeah. theres a fine line between advocating for positive change because it’s the right thing to do vs because it makes you look good. Theres a fine line between being an ally and empty virtue signalling, and those things may not look different within the scope of a single interaction. It can sometimes take a bit to understand if someone is genuine or just performing.

          • LwL@lemmy.world
            0·
            3 months ago

            There’s also the possibility of having genuinely good intent, but still speaking entirely from your own conjecture of what might make others uncomfortable.

            Ultimately, you should always talk to the people actually affected and take action based on that. But anyone can and should start the initiative when they think something is harmful.

      • Schal330@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        For me I pictured “master” as perfecting something. So when I asked someone as a noob why things were being switched from master to main I was surprised at the possibility that it could be related to master/slave, but completely understood why from that point.

        • Wiz@midwest.social
          0·
          3 months ago

          I wonder if you could think of another word besides slave terminology that might mean that.

          Like maybe the “perfect” version?

    • QuadratureSurfer@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Next up, we’ll have to change terminology for “parents” and “children” once they find out how we use those terms with memory management.

    • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I believe it was more because in database terminology there were masters and slaves for replication. Version control came under fire soon after.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        3 months ago

        Apparently master / slave goes back more than 100 years. An example is “slave jib”, which was a sail on a sailboat that was permanently set to catch the wind, and was almost always working. Or slave clocks and master clocks, where one primary clock is used to set other dependent clocks.

      • F/15/Cali@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        3 months ago

        That’s funny, I’m guessing they thought they were being original and edgy when they merely looped back to the older use. In any case, I’m glad programming lingo doesn’t sound like a klan rally

        • woop_woop@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          It doesn’t have to be edgy, it just explains what happens. In db replication, a master holds the truth and slaves repeat it/follow orders. The US has a unique and relatively recent relationship with chattel slavery so people are more sensitive to it now. Doesn’t make it right or wrong, the words mean certain things that describe what the system does.

            • bob_lemon@feddit.org
              0·
              3 months ago
              • Leader/Follower
              • Origin(al)/Replica
              • Primary/Secondary

              There’s a lot of really well-fitting words to accurately describe the relations. Master/Slave is honestly not one of them.

          • 5C5C5C@programming.dev
            0·
            3 months ago

            Your description actually illustrates how terribly inaccurate the metaphor was. If enslaved people imitated the people who enslaved them, they’d be sitting in a rocking chair on a porch sipping lemonade.

            The US has a unique and relatively recent relationship with chattel slavery so people are more sensitive to it now.

            The earliest record of the master/slave terminology being used in engineering is 1904 by which point slavery was already outlawed in almost every country, including the US. You’re right to say that chattel slavery in the US was a uniquely grotesque form of slavery, but there is no system of slavery in history where slaves are primarily imitating their masters. No matter what anyone’s sensitivity to the topic is, it’s a bad fit for what’s being described.

              • 5C5C5C@programming.dev
                0·
                3 months ago

                I assume you’re referring to the technicality that the thirteenth amendment allows unpaid labor to be legally compelled out of prisoners, and that’s a valid thing to be outraged about, but your statement is wildly misleading to anyone who isn’t already aware of that technicality.

                The existence of the loophole is terrible and should be amended, but it’s nowhere near the humanitarian crisis that widespread chattel slavery was. Ironically that will probably make it that much harder to be fixed since it’s more difficult to draw pubic outage towards it.

    • aquovie@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      trunk was the common name before git anyway. Why the move away? I’ve heard it’s because git is more of a weird graph than the trunk+branch model of CVS. But if that’s the reasoning, master is still a stupid name because it implies the same primacy as trunk. Why not just default or start or something?

        • bob_lemon@feddit.org
          0·
          3 months ago

          That would make sense for forks, not branches. Although to be fair, the word branch also doesn’t make sense for branches (since those don’t exactly merge back into the trunk).

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      When I first started using SVN trunk was where all the code was, so I thought it mean like a chest instead of a tree. Like “just throw it in the trunk.” My first experience with it was manually installing Gmod mods so anything related to branches was lost on me because it was irrelevant. It wasn’t until after I began using git and seeing people refer to subversion as “trunk based development” for a while that it finally clicked. “Oh. Like a tree trunk. With branches.”

  • RichardDegenne@lemmy.zip
    0·
    3 months ago

    I’ve always taken issue with this “master” v. “main” argument.

    People think it’s “master” as in “master/slave”, but forked branches are not “slaves”.

    Instead, it’s “master” as in “master/proxy”. The forked branches are altered copies of an original. We have remastered movies, music and games, and I’ve never seen anyone complain about the word in this context. Why should version control systems be any different?

    • Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one
      0·
      3 months ago

      I feel master as in “master copy” is sort of problematic too. Git has no concept of “master” as a “master copy”. All the clones and forks are the same fidelity as the original. It’s a hold over from source control which did have an authoritative repo like SVN/CVS.

    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      3 months ago

      People think it’s “master” as in “master/slave”, but forked branches are not “slaves”.

      I think they’re just uncomfortable with the word “master”, and that seems completely reasonable to me, especially when they’re people from a group which has been subjected to slavery.

      • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        3 months ago

        I don’t recall any actual person saying they had an issue with it before corporations started changing it though, I always thought it was a precautionary measure more than likely thought up by a committee looking for exactly this sort of thing…

        That said, it may be different in the US given the history of overall more systemic discrimination, and divisiveness over what’s acceptable, rather than the fairly widely accepted casual slur-slinging and stereotyping you get in Europe.

        • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          3 months ago

          I don’t recall any actual person saying they had an issue with it before corporations started changing it though

          I have heard people complain about it.

          I always thought it was a precautionary measure more than likely thought up by a committee looking for exactly this sort of thing…

          What makes you think that they have a committee like that?

          • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
            0·
            3 months ago

            I don’t think they have one full time, but I think given the context of the changes it’s very plausible that companies put together committees formed of minorities or marketing or anyone with an opinion to workshop rebranding and renaming options to make the company appear progressive, and I think even if it wasn’t the case, the perception of that sort of thing happening is more responsible than people think for the rise of Trump, AfD, Reform, FN etc. as the average person doesn’t want posturing and is pushed towards the opposite direction by it, with the shift amplified by the fact that people aren’t happy with the status quo at the moment, so if the status quo are acting like the left then the people will see the right as the opposite of that, regardless of who’s in government.

            That’s not to say the opinions of the people who you know have complained about it aren’t valid, it’s just that I’d much rather have some dated vocabulary, slurs occasionally being used casually and questionable branding than raids on immigrants and the rights of minorities being eroded after one extreme pushes moderates to the other extreme.

      • NostraDavid@programming.dev
        0·
        3 months ago

        I think they’re just uncomfortable with the word “master”

        1 person over at Microsoft complained, and they moved mountains for this person to replace master with main. It sounds like a joke, but it’s not.

        and that seems completely reasonable to me

        No it doesn’t. Why does an entire industry need to flip over, because of a single person? Like the ability of changing the master branch for yourself should have been enough. Changing the default over on Github to strong-arm the rest of the world is disgusting behaviour. Which is why I’m sticking to master wherever I can.

        especially when they’re people from a group which has been subjected to slavery.

        That is literally every group… Every group has been slaves (and slavers) at some point in time. That’s not a good argument.

        • LwL@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          The original audio after mastering is also still called a master, but I haven’t seen anyone complain about that. And that (as well as the same meaning for other media) is the word that the branch name master came from, so etymology can’t really be an argument there (though I also think etymology is terrible reasoning for renaming something in general).