The concept predates the music business and goes back to middle ages
when a guild master would create a "master work" or "master piece" that
the apprentices could use for study or for imitation.
There's a GNOME mailing list discussion which suggests the etymology is different.
"""
First appearance of "master" in git is in a CVS helper script...
Why is that branch called master? Probably because BitKeeper uses "master" for its main branch...
But maybe this "master" isn't the same one that's in "master/slave"?
"""
It then links to a BitKeeper file saying:
"We are then going to modify the file on both the master and slave repository and then merge the work."
There's a quite a few false positives in that list (e.g. a person named "slavek" always using his name in branch names), a few references to the "master/slave" analogy, and browsing the first few pages I keep seeing the same usernames over and over again (mostly from what seem to be non-native English speakers).
So the number seems much lower than 4000, and mostly the result from a very small group of people. I don't know how many branches there are in GitHub, but this seems like a very very small percentage.
Replaced with what, though? Nobody talking about "slave" seems to notice that "servant" and "robot" have similar baggage despite different linguistic roots.
Nobody talking about "slave" seems to notice that "servant" and "robot" have similar baggage despite different linguistic roots.
As I sometimes say, I've been Black my entire 50+ years on the planet. I've never met another Black person (or anyone regardless of their race or ethnicity) that felt that robot has “similar baggage” to the word slave.
With a glorious newspeak that greatly improves on the legacy language by simplifying the grammar and adding safety mechanisms to ensure all conversations are safe spaces.
Otherwise +1, but a masterpiece is what the apprentice would create in a bid to demonstrate that they're ready to be a master. Think of it as the hands-on version of a MSc thesis.
It's hard to take this as anything more than PC nonsense gone mad. Context is important. Master branches are not perpetuating slavery and this kind of lazy political thinking that words have singular meanings and must be banned is dangerous and scary.
Master can also refer to a term used in the BDSM community for totally consensual purposes. Should we be demonizing them too? How regressive.
Of course we know that using master/slave terminology doesn't actually perpetuate harm. But the reason to change it is because a lot of people don't like hearing it or saying it.
It feels like a punch to the gut when I have to hear master/slave being applied to hard drives. It's perhaps a difficult thing to describe if you have not felt it.
I know some of you will think I am being dramatic. I know some of you will flub your lips at it. Yes, I am aware it's just words, and you aren't literally advocating for slavery.
But it really does cause me discomfort to have to talk about masters and slaves.
Maybe that isn't enough justification for you. But I assure you I am not a theoretical person conjuring ways to make the world more PC just to virtue signal. There really are some people who would rather avoid those terms.
Why do you think that your discomfort about a word which you've applied the wrong definition to should result in the censorship for everyone of that purely innocent word?
There are people offended about many things in life, but that doesn't mean we should try to accommodate every single person offended over every little thing (especially when you use the wrong definition to perpetuate it).
Git is software that provides a level playing field for developers of all creeds, and had zero bad intentions when naming elements of the software. "Master" isn't even a slavery reference at all. To say that it is is to claim that words cannot have multiple meanings, something which is patently false.
Master (the definition invoked by Git) has no negative history, and no negative connotations.
renaming the master branch is just the more inclusive path, that should be pretty clear at this moment in our history—why do you want to insist on pushing back against that just to keep a name that has caused (and continues to cause) so much emotional and psychological harm?? https://twitter.com/vaidehijoshi/status/1271555825069244417?...
But master in git has nothing to do with master-slave... it's nomenclature derives as far as I can tell from the idea of a master copy which is the authoritative version of something.
Meh, I find that argument less than compelling and a slippery sloap.
But hey who am I to judge what is a good or bad use of people's time and political capital?
I'll stick with calling my main branches master and if someone doesn't like it they can fork it and keep their own special version just for themselves. Freedom!
I think this is a great example of people taking virtue signaling to points of stupidity. Master-slave being problematic is something I can get behind, but git's master branch isn't even referencing the master-slave analogy.
What about people who are really good at something? Should we never call them masters? Just experts? I'm now a chess GrandExpert? I have an Experts degree?
You're burning a lot of political capital to change things that really don't matter instead of things that do.
I appreciate the cogency of your broader point, but please reconsider using the terminology "virtue signaling."
When one person accuses another of virtue signaling, even implicitly, there are typically only two possibilities:
1. They hold such a cynical worldview that it's reasonable and coherent to criticize someone else for attempting to publicly advocate for what they honestly believe to be right, or
2. They believe the other person is not being honest in their advocacy, and more importantly that they should call the person's integrity into question by opening that up for discussion.
When you label another individual's behavior as virtue signaling, you forcibly shift the focus of discussion on that person's behavior and identity rather than the thing they're advocating. This can have a chilling effect on people voicing their opinions with honesty and authenticity. Likewise if an idea if worth critiquing, it should merit criticism on its own without calling into question its advocates' motives.
I don't mean to pick on you in particular, I'm just calling out the use of the term.
3. Advocacy that mainly serves to make the advocate sound virtuous rather than substantively address the difficult aspects of a difficult tradeoff or help to wisely deploy resources in a way that will make progress on a problem.
It's distinct from your 1 in that it accepts that people can exist who legitimately care about improving the world.
It's distinct from your 2 in that it doesn't assert the person's advocacy is dishonest (or otherwise not heartfelt), only that their specific contributions are unhelpful or present a bad framing.
Example of a useful difference that 3 highlights:
Virtue signaling: "I just think we should help everyone wherever we can." -> suggests that the speaker is particularly noble while also setting a herculean standard for how to live one's life. (Really? Every single moment?)
Not virtue signaling: "As a rule of thumb, you should give about 10% of your net income to charitable causes, since this is historically feasible, and mainly would force you to cut back in ways that have disproportionately high utility for others. Any more than that is nice, but is more than I can legitimately ask." -> recognizes upper bounds in what they expect out of others, and what might be feasible or excessive.
Naturally, most advocacy lasts more than two sentences, but that gives the general idea.
I feel like the term virtue signaling is used in a way that almost always implies some implication of insinceerity, i.e. they are doing it for popularity/upvotes/etc and not out of moral concern. As such i agree with the other poster that it is in essence an ad hominem, although usually its not solely an ad hominem but combined with some argument that the advocacy is superficial or ineffective. (Although typically on the internet its a pretty weak argument most of the time)
To me, writing off a stance as "virtue signaling" is the same kind of laziness as writing off a stance as coming from a "position of privilege": it may well be true, but rational debate requires assuming your debate partners came to their position through reasoned thought and honestly hold it.
Rational debate is not the virtue signaler's goal or means. They just want to flaunt a "holier than thou" attitude while actually caring zero about the topic. Demanding that those targeted by virtual signaler's passive-agressive's attacks must not point out the virtue signaler's inherent dishonesty is like complaining that the targets must passively serve the the virtue signaler's desires without a hint of rational or objective thought, as if the only acceptable outcome of a virtue signaler's attack is getting the target to publicly recognize how the virtue signaler is so virtuous and that the world should follow his teachings, no matter how empty and inconsequent and self-aggrandizing they might be.
Honestly I think the real chilling effect is from internet people patrolling an monitoring everyone's use of language and making sure people are only saying the "correct" words and ideas.
When someone suggests an action whose visibility is so far out of proportion to its efficacy, this should call their integrity into question. Whether consciously or otherwise, they are proposing to take advantage of the movement for their own personal benefit; we should view them with the same skepticism as someone suggesting that group funds should be used to renovate the meeting place, which they just happen to own.
I agree with your two possibilities (and there are more). What I'm not clear about is why you object to the use of the phrase for either of those reasons.
1. If someone genuinely believes something absurd to be right and reasonable, why are they above criticism? Ridicule is a very valuable and effective tool in maintaining social cohesion and resisting subversive methods that use absurd arguments that are unworthy of or incapable of being reasoned against.
2. This is far more straight forward. If we genuinely believe someone to be disingenuous in their advocacy of the absurd, should they not be called out on it? What responsibility do we have to earnestly engage with deliberate subversion? Identifying it and raising awareness of bad actors and trolls is a valid defence, potentially saving good people a lot of time, money, and heartache.
I'll conclude by saying that I believe your attempt to dissuade people from using "virtue signalling" to identify these behaviours is, itself, virtue signalling. I'm quite sure it would serve your sociopolitical objectives very well if all these people 'in the way' would stop noticing such behaviours.
It doesn't seem like you are objecting to the term so much as the idea it represents. If the original poster instead substituted in the meaning of that term, e.g. if they said instead "This is taking insincerly aligning yourself with socially progressive causes in a trivial fashion in order to gain social standing while avoiding taking a stand on things that matter,to an extreme"* I assume you would still want to object? If so you should object to what they are saying not how.
*The term virtue signaling seems to be used differently by different people, so not sure if that was a fair substitution of definition.
Many employers have general policy of not using potentially sensitive terminology in their codebases when there are good alternatives, whether it's "master" (could be master-slave, could be something else), "blacklist", etc. If it's easy to apply that policy you can just do it and then you never have to worry about whether an employee slipped a regrettable word choice into a string literal that a customer's going to see 6 months from now. It's nice to have options for doing this cheaply instead of doing a panic audit of your codebase and changing a bunch of stuff by hand.
Determining whether a given use of the word is appropriate requires context and careful consideration, and people already tend to have a bunch of work on their plates! For something like "master" I think it's reasonable to go "let's just not use it in our repos, there are alternatives", it's not erasing any useful nuance or meaning.
I disagree. Changing a word which could potentially offend someone even though it is not rooted in something offensive is exhausting and silly. People can find anything to be offended by. If someone is ignorant about the terminology, such as the 'master branch', then I would explain to them the history of the word. That is much easier than forcing everyone to change industry standard terminology with the bonus of conveying some knowledge.
If you tell people which words they are allowed to speak based on programming convenience, then you will turn them into robots.
By the way did you know that the etymology of robot? Wikipedia has this to say
> The word robot was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920.[79] The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called robots. The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. These mass-produced workers are depicted as efficient but emotionless, incapable of original thinking and indifferent to self-preservation. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of human dependence upon commodified labor (especially after a number of specially-formulated robots achieve self-awareness and incite robots all around the world to rise up against the humans).
> Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.[79]
> In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word robota means literally "corvée", "serf labor"
Long before this article appeared, I was already renaming ‘master’ to ‘default’. The term ‘master’ has always felt out of place and unnecessary to me.
If anything, the article affirms my gut feeling when I first started using version control back in the day. It didn't occur to me someone else might feel similarly.
When creating a new repo using Mercurial, the default branch is called default, which always made more sense to me.
Interestingly enough, both Mercurial and Git were created by Linux kernel hackers to handle the Linux kernel source code after the Linux project could no longer use Bitkeeper. They were released 12 days apart in April 2005.
Just pointing out that certain things, even seemingly small things, are often assumed to be okay. And especially in team settings, people don't always feel comfortable speaking up or being that person.
Reminds me of the aphorism: There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
Master and default have different meaning. Master in git mean master record for other branches. In mercurial default is more applicable because common workflow is not branch based but change set.
seeing all the pushback to the “rename the master branch” movement is disheartening. if renaming the branch makes even one current or future employee (or even an open source contributor feel more welcome!), why push back so hard on this?
Because not all uses of "master" have negative connotations. I can support renaming master-slave, but git is not such case. There is pushback because it creates massive amount of work for us without a good reason.
All CI/CD pipelines, scripts, tools. Integration fixes, regressions and failed deployments because branch was main not master.
While there was almost certainly no original malintent with the phrase 'master' in this context, it's a very small and relatively easy change to make to avoid hiccups down the road. Even if you don't agree that this is needed, I think it's clear that it's easier to just rename it now than it would be to explain to someone a few months down the road the deep historical context for why this should not offend them.
If people could just remember that there are in fact several meanings for words, having to engage in that conversation down the road would not even happen. Or perhaps it would, but assuming reasonable people, it might amount to clarifying what the word (such as "master") means in a particular case or where it came from. As long as the usage of the word isn't particularly strongly associated with what is offensive, that conversation shouldn't be a huge problem.
If people start jumping on the bandwagon of renaming "master" (or any such term) en masse because of it being "potentially offensive", that makes people think the usage of the word is offensive, and the potential offensiveness and having to explain that it's not becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And then we'll all need to change what we call this or that, just because people can't remember that words have multiple meanings.
Let's not turn meanings that are not problems into ones that are.
It’s not deep historical context. It’s a contemporary, widespread usage of master to refer to an original or an exemplar. In the rare case an adult doesn’t know this, they can catch up in seconds.
I don't think that's true. Then you would just be explaining to new team members why you are not using master. You can explain to someone who doesn't know in one sentence where the term comes from.
> easier to just rename it now than it would be to explain to someone a few months down the road the deep historical context for why this should not offend them
Do you have any examples of such conversations, specifically regarding to the naming of the "master" branch?
I'm pretty sure "master" in git refers to "gold master", which is the version of software that is released to manufacturing. I've never heard of a slave branch.
I don’t believe anyone genuinely hears a word like this and thinks, “your use of that word offends me due to its etymology.” I think it takes someone with a certain immaturity to go searching for things that offend them and reenforce their political bubble.
This is my definition of virtue signaling: Vapid action which serves no purpose other than evoking a pat on the back from your politically-like-minded peers. It’s not specific to a political party, but it disgusts me whenever I see it.
Important detail that I don't see mentioned: Does this affect clones? If a newcomer these a project and tries to clone it, does github knowing about the default branch suffice to make that seamless other than a moment of confusion if they try to look at the branches?
I am thinking of technical uses of slave in a real master/slave context - is it not then really proper to use the term slave? A slave transmitter, only retransmitting what the master sends for example.
I can only imagine this will break a great amount of tooling around Git. I also have never had anybody complain about this in real life, in any context (drive jumpers, database nodes, or git branches). I remember within the last few years Redis removed the slave terminology but kept master...
master is the default branch, but as this shows there’s no need to actually name you default branch that. Tooling that treats that specific branch specially is arguably broken to begin with.
Can you imagine being in a class to learn programming or something and your teacher starts talking about how A is a master and B is a slave? Can you imagine that your phenotype matches a minority population that was formerly enslaved? Can you imagine that you're the only such person in your programming class, and feeling everyone's eyes run over you when these terms are first used? Can you imagine that being, if nothing else, a distracting or unwelcoming experience?
Sure, technically git doesn't use both ends of this metaphor and it probably comes from something like "gold master" in this case. But if you're throwing up your hands like the underlying intent is absurd, maybe chew on it a bit more?
There's a lot of "can you imagine [..]" going on with these things. The question is, does this actually happen? Because if it doesn't then the entire point is moot.
I've read through a lot of these kind of discussions in the last week, and one thing that really strikes me is that they consist almost entirely of white people discussing this. This seems a bit odd to me because there are plenty of non-white programmers as well (especially if you look beyond the Silicon Valley bubble). I'd like to think that these people are more than articulate enough to raise these kind of issues themselves if they want to. In general, it seems to me that black people are not so fragile that they will be scared at the first sight of the word "master", especially when it has no direct relationship to slavery (it's a common word in quite a few different contexts).
Quite frankly, the entire thing has more than a bit of a "white saviour" smell to it and comes off as rather patronising.
I suspect one reason this is happening is that many people feel powerless to change the status quo – a frustration I share – so they do stuff like this because, well, have to do something, and this is where they do have the power to influence things. Another commenter called this "virtue signaliging", but I think that's a bit ungenerous; I think by and large people are actually looking for ways to make a difference, which is great but ... it also doesn't mean you actually are making a difference. All of this strikes me as the programmer equivalent of "slacktivism".
To not be bothered, even though the 'master' analogy isn't applicable in the context of git branches, is coming from a place of privilege. I hope the folks saying such a change 'goes too far' could walk away after reading all the comments with a delta on this point. To you (generically), it may not matter. But we cannot project our own feelings onto others.
' a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” '
And no, "Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either."
Yes, the dislike is lowest among African Americans, but still at a whopping 75%.
So who supports PC? The only group is progressive activists. What do they look like, demographically? Rich, white, educated.
The author additionally ran a twitter poll: "Nearly all of my followers underestimated the extent to which most Americans reject political correctness. Only 6 percent gave the right answer. (When I asked them how people of color regard political correctness, their guesses were, unsurprisingly, even more wildly off.)"
The word "only" is a direct quote from the article:
"Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem."
(My emphasis)
There are no "absolute" conclusions in my summary, it's all in the text, mostly direct quotes, and the text is, as far as I can tell, a fairly straight representation of the findings.
> Life is rarely that cut and dry.
But sometimes it is, such as in this case. The data are unequivocal.
Now, you are obviously free to believe that you are right and the (vast) majority is wrong. But if you think that you have majority support for your opinions then you are deluding yourself.
Perhaps there is some privilege in having knowledge to understand where the terminology comes from, but that doesn't mean that it should change because of someone else's ignorance.
The suggestion to choose new terminology isn't to appease people who are 'ignorant'. It's to use more welcoming terminology, in spite of the fact, that to you, it may look like they're being ignorant.
The problem with saying others are being ignorant is it denies them the recognition of how they feel about the terminology, with or without the historical programming context. It essentially states: "Because they are ignorant, their feeling are invalid".
And that's a very un-welcoming attitude to have to new-comers.
I don't think purging every word that you deem 'unwelcoming' is a good idea. It is very authoritarian and reeks of 1984. Understanding historical context is something to be sought. This is an innocuous term, and instead of trying to purge everything you don't like and sweep it under the rug, you should be educating other people.
This seems like a strawman. Is changing a few words in the context of computing going to change our ability to innovate down the road? It sounds highly unlikely.
Also, there's plenty of historical texts that use master/slave that capture why it's problematic to use those terms today. The folks suggesting to update our field's terminology are not saying 'burn all the books that describe the systemic racism present in America' which would be a requirement of the "purging everything we don't like and sweeping it under the rug" mindset.
The point is simple: some terms are associated with terrible sentiments, when clear alternative terms exist. Can we be welcoming enough to accept this?
It's not a strawman, we are talking about the issue at hand--master branch. Why are you talking about master/slave terminology, which has nothing to do with the master branch terminology?
I don't think it's worth completely changing terminology and disregarding history because some newcomers don't understand the meaning of an innocuous term. I think that it is more valuable to preserve it than to change it just because there are a few people who do not understand it.
I believe in changing terminology that actually is rooted in oppression. It's a good rule of thumb which allows change while also not forcing everything little thing to have to change. Master branch is not rooted in oppression.
Welcoming to me does not mean walking on eggshells and avoiding saying perfectly accepted industry terms that someone just may find offensive because they don't understand it. Welcoming is mentoring, teaching, and kindness.
Innocuous, to you, because you have the privilege of ignoring the alternative definitions of the word. It is not innocuous to others. Not caring about the feeling of others isn't being welcoming. It's not about "walking on eggshells". It's basic human decency and empathy to care about the feelings of others, which your replies haven't addressed. If people are bothered by the usage of the word, do you care? Plain and simple, you do not. You say they're being ignorant.
Alternative definition.. reminds me of 'alternative facts'. There is a clear definition that is out, and if someone knows it but continues to choose to define it as something offensive, that is their problem. I don't cave to willfully ignorant people.
It is painfully obvious that you just weaponize the word 'welcoming'. If someone does not do what you want them to do, then they are 'unwelcoming'.
Given that I did address your points and talked about what being welcoming really looks like in terms of human decency, it's also clear that you didn't even read my thoughts, which to me says a lot about your own empathy.
a man who has people working for him, especially servants or slaves.
"he acceded to his master's wishes"
For clarity's sake, are you asserting this definition isn't valid? Also, nothing is defined as 'offensive'. It's subjective. When you say the usage of the word 'master' is innocuous, for example, that's subjective. It isn't a fact.
For clarity's sake, yes, I am saying that historical definition for master branch is not valid. Click on the "Electronics" button. That is the valid one. You can see in the comments section here where this is explicitly called out.
Why is the historical one not valid? Because context matters. We are not talking about the word master itself, we are talking about it in a context. Master branch was not defined using the historical definition. In our case here, it refers to the electronics definition.
The English language is completely full of words where meanings have changed and are different depending on the context. Using your logic, we would not only be renaming master branch, but also removing all other contexts, like 'mastery' of a discipline, or the record industry's 'master copy', or even terms like 'maestro' in music.
If you take something out of context, it can be offensive to someone--no doubt, but that is why context matters. Going thru the English language to find every word that used to mean one thing we don't like and then removing all modern usages which don't even mean the same thing in a different context is mindbogglingly silly, costly, and frankly, puritanical.
From: Konstantin Ryabitsev
Git doesn't use "master-slave" terminology -- the "master" comes from the concept of having a "master" from which copies (branches) are made:
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_recording
The concept predates the music business and goes back to middle ages when a guild master would create a "master work" or "master piece" that the apprentices could use for study or for imitation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_craftsman