this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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I think it's the same with blacklist/whitelist -> blocklist/allowlist. ~~It~~ allowlist/blocklist actually says what it does in the name without using the idea of racism and white supremacy. I wish more software would just use these terms by default. (maybe some aliases for the old names)
The problem is that "master" means several things. There is Masters degree, master sword, master blacksmith, master copy, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with master / slave.
The Git "master" terminology came from "master copy". There's an email thread online where someone asked Linus Torvalds the origin and this is what he said.
The whole thing about it being about master / slave was some random uneducated person guessing, and they were wrong.
I agree that main is simpler and clearer, but it has nothing to do with racism.
Clarification: the "it" in the second sentence was referring to "blocklist/allowlist" specifically, not "main"
Of course the name "master" in the git context may mean something completely different from slavery or similar, but the possibility of misinterpretation is IMO another (maybe small) reason that new projects should consider using the clear and unambiguous "main" instead of "master".
The origin of the words blacklist and whitelist doesn't have anything to do with racism. If someone looks around and only sees racism, then who is the racist?
Even if the word's origins aren't racism, I hope you can see why having a blacklist with "bad" things on it that won't be allowed and a whitelist with "good" things that are allowed maybe isn't the friendliest terminology. (especially when there are more intuitive names available that avoid this problem)
Some would argue it's culturally imperialistic to impose US cultural sensitivities on the rest of the international English community. Wasn't the inventor of git Finnish? The entire world uses git.