Major release nel codice semantico-informatico.
Scordiamoci queste parole: master, slave, blackist, whitelist.
"Server" per qualche motivo resiste ancora.


<https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/08/developers_renew_push_to_get/>

Amid the protests over the death of George Floyd, activists in the
software community have taken the opportunity to remind people that
they're trying to do away with terminology tied to racial oppression.

On Monday, Scott Hanselman, a programmer and educator who happens to
work at Microsoft, published a blog post about how to rename the
"master" branch in code repositories created using Git version control
software with a less loaded term.

"The Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT) points out that
'master-slave is an oppressive metaphor that will and should never
become fully detached from history' as well as 'In addition to being
inappropriate and arcane, the master-slave metaphor is both technically
and historically inaccurate,'" he wrote.

"There's lots of more accurate options depending on context and it costs
me nothing to change my vocabulary, especially if it is one less little
speed bump to getting a new person excited about tech."

This comes from an IETF draft document published in 2018, the same year
developers involved in Redis and Python made a push to purge
"master/slave" terminology, not to mention Rails.

That same year, the terms elicited a bug report in Google's Chromium
project, one that has led to a series of changes since then, percolating
down through various header and source files to change "blacklist" to a
term without racial overtones, "blocklist," and "whitelist" to "allowlist."

On Saturday, that effort led to a proposed name change for the classes
in the components/blacklist directory, the effect of which can be seen
in code diffs like this one.
Put those empty boxes over there, by the stock photography lighting rig
Redis does a Python, crushes 'offensive' master, slave code terms

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but these
changes represent an attempt to comply with the company's code
inclusivity guidelines for its Chromium project.

Google is far from the only company dealing with this issue. Pivotal's
LicenseFinder swapped "whitelist" for "permitted licenses" in January.
Box is currently discussing a shift to "allowlist" and "denylist."
Elixir nixed the terms about a week ago. OpenShift merged a pull request
to adopt alternate language four days ago. Yelp modified its secret
scanning code about two weeks ago. The osquery project is working on it.

Among those contributing to the open source Git project, "master"
terminology came up in a mailing list discussion last month about fixing
the terminology in the Git source code. The proposal met with
resistance, partly because of the amount of work it would entail.

In response to a post arguing for revised wording, Brian Carlson, a
developer at GitHub who also contributes to the Git codebase,
acknowledged the concerns that have been raised about the terms and
objections to making changes. He expressed willingness to review
potential changes to Git source code that would purge the term but said
he couldn't undertake the project himself.

"It appears that if we made the obvious one-line change to
builtin/init-db.c, we'd have 304 tests that fail, which is about a third
of our test suite," he said.

At GitHub, the GitHub CLI replaced "master" with "trunk" about two weeks
ago and the GitHub Desktop software did the same in 2019.

Despite significant support for these changes, there are also detractors
who point out that Git's use of "master" hails from sound recording
rather than slave owning (as opposed to the master/slave descriptors
applied to device networking) and that "master" has other connotations,
like expertise in a field.

Google's guidance on inclusive coding, which focuses more on the use of
gendered terms rather than racial ones, notes some of the potential
problems with trying to apply inclusive language. For example, coders
are advised to avoid the gendered pronoun "he," but "he" is okay if it
refers to Helium, the ISO 639-1 language code for Hebrew or the first
person conjugation of the Spanish verb "Haber."

Hanselman acknowledges that vocabulary revision does not erase history
or make people less racist. "All it does is make the world a tiny bit
more welcoming," he said via Twitter.
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