DEV Community

Discussion on: 9 problems with replacing "master" in Git

Collapse
 
woubuc profile image
Wouter • Edited

Thank you for updating your post. Point 7 reads a little more nuanced now, although I still believe it's a slippery slope.

Interesting about the .bro extension story, I hadn't heard about that! I haven't really read up on the impact of 'bro culture' (although I've heard that it can be toxic in some situations) so I don't know how valid the complaint was/is. But in general, my stance is that if someone takes issue with something (assuming it's at least somewhat tangentially valid), and it doesn't really mean anything to the other side, then why wouldn't we make our language more inclusive.

Here's a Twitter thread I came across earlier today asking black developers just that question. It turns out many of them are in favour, for various reasons (some of which I touched on in my reply). Very informative, I learned a lot from reading through the replies and subsequent discussions.

Regarding your linked arguments, the author of the first tweet you quoted immediately followed it up with "The people quoting this as an argument against the change are very clearly racist though." which is direct and maybe a little harsh, but it does drive his point home - people pushing back against this change are showing their inherent bias because there shouldn't be a logical argument that is stronger than "make our language more inclusive and less racist" unless they're actually racist and opposed to inclusivity. Even if we're just talking about something as silly and insignificant as the default name of a Git branch.

Regarding the US-supremacist argument, that's simply not true. European countries have just as much of a racism problem. There are BLM marches and protests in several major European cities, with for instance London experiencing white supremacist violence similar to what I've seen from the US.

It may not be as bad in Europe as in the US, because most European countries don't have an openly racist leader who actively incites and encourages violence against minorities, but all western countries have their own problems with race and discrimination. I live in Belgium and the same things do happen here - we also have white supremacist organisations that get in the news from time to time for attacking or killing POC, we have news stories about police killing innocent black people, and nationalist political parties lobbying for things like deporting non-white people and more use of force by police (wikipedia does not do the tone and impact of their propaganda justice but their own material is only in Dutch). I also know at least one coworker who recently argued that "negro" should still be an acceptable term because they "don't mean it pejoratively, it's just a word" - and that's very anecdotal but it shows that people like this do exist everywhere. Of course I can't directly speak to the general climate in other countries but racism is definitely not a US-only thing.