this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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I genuinely can’t understand why words with alternate definitions linked to slavery might make people uncomfortable. It unintentionally reminds you bad things in history, and? Should we stop using words like "Nazi" or "War" too? Can we all stop using "death" while we're at it? It reminds me the mortal nature of human
@lowleveldata In general, I would say yes, it’s better not to use “Nazi” as a metaphor for otherwise everyday activities where there are plenty of unobjectionable alternatives.
I don’t know that trying to divorce it from context and find a general rule is particularly helpful, though. It’s not just “alternate” definitions, it’s the primary definition for most people that the industry adopted.
@lowleveldata I am fully aware that most who use it regularly probably have recontextualized it by default, but why not be more inclusive to those who might be put off by it when we have perfectly cromuoent another options?
Because that's a theory that could be applied to any words. We're catering to some imaginary person ("who might be put off") so it's basically devil's proof.
Because there are words that have less violent associations that can still capture the relationship sought to be described.
Those aren't used for computing though. And, yeah, I think if we did we probably should. Like if terms related to genocide were used for stopping a lot of processes at once that would be pretty weird to me.
Kill is used to refer to stopping processes and that's probably where the line is in my opinion. It feels very different to me to say "kill a process" versus "genocide a group of processes"
We do use
war. It's a common package in Java. Should we rename that because it might make people uncomfortable when we say "We are going to deploy the war tomorrow"? Why can't we just accept the fact that words have multiple meanings?I want to update the web app but war never changes.
hmm... have you tried nuking everything? That might help
No, because it is an abbreviation for web archive.
There's a project I'm following where an opcode called "SUICIDE" (which deleted the program it was triggered from) was renamed "SELFDESTRUCT" because people were bothered by the reference to self-harm. I personally considered it a waste of effort, but at least in that case it was really just a matter of changing some strings in the documentation and having compilers accept either label for it, since the opcode itself didn't change is value.
The opcode is likely to be entirely deprecated soon anyway, which IMO makes it even more of a waste of time. Oh well.