Comment by 🚀 RubyMaelstrom

I think that you make your own best case against the point that you're making: Words are just words. Language changes over time, and always has. Certain terms fall in and out of use, for various reasons. There have always throughout human existence been people looking back and saying that others are using language incorrectly, and yet it marches forward nonetheless.

Aug 30 · 4 months ago

38 Later Comments ↓

Poppycock, thine language hath never undergone nary a change, dawg. Pray thee forgiveth me for all this flapdoodle, for I am a gigglemug.

I remember learning that "decimate" meant "to reduce by ten percent." I saw people using it to instead mean "completely destroy" and thought man, those people sure look like idiots using that word so incorrectly.

You know who the idiot actually was? Me.

Language changes. The dictionary isn't a prescription, it doesn't tell us what the meaning of words should be. It's a journal that's constantly updated as words come, go, and change meaning.

Blocklist. A list of blocks in a filesystem or a memory manager.

Let me allowlist this IP address. Sounds like crap, doesn't it?

Sure, language changes -- based on need, and occasionally, forced by people with guns or whatnot.

What is the need to rename things? Too much money given to the Linux Foundation -- and now they hired some jackass genzeeer (that is what we call them now, according to the Stack Foundation) -- who cannot code, or see that Biden's crew is no longer policing language.

I noticed that many terms that were previously blocked on Google Translate are now allowed again.

Try this, in your favorite language:

"You are a C*NT".

I thought it was well known that the Linux Foundation is a Microsoft takeover effort aimed at the FSF and GNU/Linux. It should not be surprising that one of their main tactics is harassing people and starting divide and conquer fights over what words you're allowed to say, write, or think.

Indeed, friends. Ignore them and rock the words that are colors, indicate stupidity, servitude, sexual orientation, ugliness and extreme girth, if they accurately describe your technical needs. Take back the night, and don't let the bookburners erase things they don't like.

Hate speech is only that if you have hate. If you don't and someone accuses you of it, it is their problem and insecurity talking. Or perhaps, even their hate coming through.

"let me allowlist this IP address" sounds just as crap as "let me whitelist this IP address" because in both cases, verbing weirds language.

"let me add this IP address to the allowlist" sounds perfectly fine to me.

@jpjr -- blacklisting and whitelisting (possibly white-listing for some reason) are actual English words in the dictionary!

Goes back a long way, at least to McCarthy's era, amusingly enough, dealing with censorship. WRONG: recorded verb usage as early as 1702! Take that, deniers!

When they take it out of the dictionary, I may consider not using it. Until then, over my charred black body.

At no point have I said you can't use the words you want to use. Just that I prefer to use other words.

At work, whenever somebody says "blacklist" or "whitelist" - I don't correct them. I just casually use my preferred terms instead. Sometimes they switch, sometimes they don't. I don't make a fuss about it.

Language changes. That's really all there is to it. Digging your heels in and insisting on using outdated terms just makes you look like a crotchety old person. Don't be surprised when people say "yeah I'd rather not deal with this person." 🤷‍♂️

True enough!

I _am_ a crochety old person. I don't play well with others. I don't have many friends who care about political correctness and virtue signaling. All true.

I would rather not work with people who instead of focusing on work and using the clearest terminology available are offended by words like blacklisting.

It goes both ways.

The bookburners -- those who insist that the problem is words and not the intention behind them -- will huff and puff, and continue 'changing the world' by euphemizing, and wondering why racism is still around, even though Indians are now Native Americans or whatever the word of the day is.

But the Linux Kernel is not improved by renaming words in the source code

I think this whole exchange is the system working as intended.

"We don't want to use the term blacklist anymore."

"Well, I'm going to keep using it!"

"OK. See ya."

If a group makes a rule and you don't like it, then you just don't participate anymore. You can insist the group is wrong, the group can insist you're wrong, it doesn't really matter. If they make a choice you don't like then why would you stick around?

it didn't take you much time from "I don't correct them. I just casually use my preferred terms instead. Sometimes they switch, sometimes they don't. I don't make a fuss about it." to getting rid of people not using your preferred terms. :O

I don't have a problem with replacing old terms with new terms if it has any purpose, however, I can't see why changing them makes sense. Real issues aren't going away because you change already inoffensive terms and then distance yourself from people who dare to still use them.

If I find myself arguing over naming something -- often happened in pair programming -- I don't appreciate choosing a politically correct and less descriptive name. Naming is hard. I'd rather work with someone who cares more about important things, which are definitely not politics for me. We all make choices. We all gravitate towards what we are comfortable with.

There is an attack on sensibility, with preference to not offending imaginary people at the expense of everything else. Opportunists pop up to become spokespeople of such victim groups. Tax money is spent. It's catchy. It's been going on for a long time.

@stack Hearing the word “unalive” makes me want to unalive people.

YouTube’s censorship of the word “kill” via demonetization has been a disaster for language.

Real issues aren't going away because you change already inoffensive terms and then distance yourself from people who dare to still use them.

I thought if we changed crippled to handicapped to disabled to handicapable to differently abled we could make people walk again through word magic.

Hopefully youtube will follow google translate with decensoring words. I don't see how k*ll changes anything.

There are some scary precedents.

Toll collectors renamed themselves 'Bridge and Tunnel Officers', then unionized and demanded guns, which were given.

you know maybe one day we'll all sit down and decide "actually blacklist is fine."

but if someone asks me to use blocklist instead - it takes zero effort for me to change terms.

You must be smarter than I am. I would be looking at that every day, or typing blacklist because it makes sense.

That's probably it, yeah.

Perhaps you are sarcastic, but most of my coding time is trying to remember names for things and searching definitions and invocations, which is very hard if you can't remember names. Then you have contortions like 'it is not whitelist... oh, permitlist? allowlist? no, allowedlist. Damn these pc jerks.'

which are definitely not politics for me.

Everything is political. Choosing mastodon or bluesky over X is politics. Choosing matrix over Whatsapp is politics. Choosing Gemini over Facebook is politics.

I don't want to be the bearer of the bad news, but if you haven't noticed yet, pretty much large part of OSS is leftist.

We all make choices. We all gravitate towards what we are comfortable with.

And that's a nice summary and tagline.

Software (especially OSS) is not a democracy, it's an ecosystem existing between maintainers, contributors and users.

You don't like rules enforced by maintainers? Fork the project. Gain support. Build.

I would hope there is more to kernel programming than blindly following Democrats or Republicans when it comes to naming an array.

This conversation is indeed retarding me in every way. Thank you for participating.

int BigBeautifulVariable1

bool BigBeautifulVariable2

char BigBeautifulVariable3

etc

Big may offend little people and those volumetrically challenged.

You are hereby canceled.

Triggers my sizemophobia. This code is hate speech.

Also an affront to ugly bastards like me

People can use words such as "whitelist", "blacklist", "allow list", etc that they want to do, if it does not result in an unnecessary confusion. If you want to avoid a word and use something else instead, OK, but don't force everyone to do, and don't ban words. Furthermore, you should consider the consequences before changing an existing program; there might be significant advantages to avoid changing it even if the new word is otherwise better.

Also, a flight recorder is sometimes called a "black box" but it shouldn't be called that, because it is orange and is not black.

@flipperzero, wow, that is something to bring up with your therapist. We are an inclusive community, I hope, and anger at people expressing a negative opinion about banning words is not necessary.

What -is- the importance of retaining

This is shifting the burden.

Everything is political.

No it isn't. This cliché is used to smuggle in ontological premises. I don’t believe the gravity holding me to this planet or the beauty of a sunset is mediated exclusively through socially constructed power relations. I do believe a concept that encompasses everything explains nothing.

@stacks Speak for yourself, cut it out with your bad faith baits and one-sided hurled projections if you’re gonna attempt discourse. Get a clue, and lot of talk for someone that can’t handle shifts in dialects of jargon. Christ, what a lack of perspective and self-awareness.

WTF! I stated my case, listened to arguments I don't agree with -- some reasonable, countered some points made and even thanked participants I disagree with.

What's your problem? Someone doesn't agree with your idea of what's fair?

Your response is completely inappropriate.

@flipperzero Let's keep it civil? Your long comment above was unpublished so you can move it elsewhere if you want.

Note that my comment expressed disdain for a questionable policy of a corporation.

On a personal level if someone were to ask me to use or not use certain words, of course I would accommodate! As a person with some cognitive differences I understand that people have different and sometimes hard to explain needs.

So let us avoid ad homineming here.

Perhaps you are sarcastic, but most of my coding time is trying to remember names for things and searching definitions and invocations, which is very hard if you can't remember names.

@stack You just made me think it’s going to be really funny when someone throws a fit about the function names in an interpreted language and breaks compatibility with 25 years of code, and it will be a nightmare to fix because it’s not like you can just fork a legacy compiler. Web servers all update to the new -x.0 release and suddenly nothing works because most people weren’t paying attention to these stupid arguments.

Someone will be furious about preg_replace() since it could be interpreted as the language spec calling attention to or endorsing white nationalist conspiracies about birth rates and great replacement, and now every PHP script using regex replacement is broken until someone manually updates every single installation with:

function preg_replace($pattern, $replcement, $subject, $limit=-1, $count=null) {
  return new_retardedness($pattern, $replcement, $subject, $limit, $count);
}

Not especially difficult, but really, really stupid.

function names in an interpreted language and breaks compatibility with 25 years of code

if your deployment does not bind to a specific version of compiler + libs (or in this case specific version of an interpreter), I would argue your actions are questionable in first place ;)

Some superior languages (cough... Common Lisp) allow you to alias symbol-names as part of package importation.

lol. lmao even.

keep this garbage on r/conservative, not here.

Interesting that pushing against authoritarian word banning (and bookburning) is somehow 'conservative'.

I assure you I am not a conservative or a liberal for that matter. I just don't like bull.

And while I appreciate your suggestion, I don't think so. I am glad you find this amusing. To each his/her/their own!

Original Post

Linux Foundation is nuts. — Words are words, and like any blunt object may be used as a weapon or a stepstool. Unfortunately the Linux foundation, instead of focusing on Linux wants to change our language under the banner of 'diversity and inclusivity' by banning words. Master/Slave, valid engineering terms, out. Retarding, nope. I imagine, delayed is also frowned upon. Blacklist is not allowed. Whitelisting is also racist. Black anything is a nono. How about brown, yellow, pink, rainbow or...