Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words Microsoft's adoption of the Google-developed Chromium browser engine for Edge has resulted in a proposal to cleanse the open-source code of "potentially offensive terms." Issue 981129 in the Chromium bug log lists a suggestion by Microsoft to “cleanup of potentially offensive terms in codebase” aims to rid the software …
Ah but see, there is no need to associate so much negativity with the color black, or positivity with the color white... It's only reinforcing negative stereotypes!
So let's change these old expressions with unfortunate connotations, hmmmm?
I'd say it was whitewashing, if only that didn't also have negative connotations.
Take the migrant crisis, the climate is reaching a point of irreparable damage that is leading to widespread extinctions and population displacement.
Such a shame to see people at m$ raising such petty issues while leaving the real problems unaddressed. Perhaps their action is intentional diversion tactics to make us look elsewhere, being m$ everything is possible they've done that in the past. Perhaps it's just pure idiocy at work because this is m$ so not really unexpected, we are used to see them behaving like that.
Whatever the cause it is still a shame. diverting our precious little resources to deal with petty issues for no real benefit, such a shame.
Well, at least he's trying to fix issues in front of him and that's better than pie-in-the-sky plans to solve the world's ill. And it's an initiative from just 1 engineer (or a small group), not the whole of Microsoft, even if it's reflective from Microsoft's stance on the subject
He may be dealing with only one petty issue at a time but the compounded effect of all his effort dealing with petty issues add up pretty fast, one day the accumulated effect may become big, real big and soon he will be able to save the world. Hooray!
Where's the sarcasm icon? I can't find it.
Okay, in his position, what would you do?
Leave the code as it is, go out side, find someone in my community who has a real need, fix that need as best I can (or help them find/fund someone who can do it better).
How many people today get offended by terms that yesterday they did not know exist, and last Monday were considered non-offensive and perhaps even the best term available?
People get told that a term they've found OK is supposed to be offensive, and they get told their friends/loved ones should know better and must be deliberately insulting them when the loved ones are using the best language they know how and only speaking with the best intentions. The PC victim then goes from believing their loved ones are doing them right to believing their loved ones dislike or at least disrespect them, and instead of being kind are being abusive. That leads to a great deal of pain and anger.
All because some vile piece of PC scum decided they should get their name in the paper by making out a perfectly accurate and acceptable term should be offensive and everyone should have already known that from time immemorial.
If there is any one in this world who should suffer an agonising and slow death, it is the proponents of PC (not the ones intending to be doing stuff from the best intentions but the ones sticking their nose in and stirring things up for their own motives).
PS if you respond with a contrary point, you will be acting in an unfair and offensive manner as you may show me an error in my thinking and thus damage my belief that I am always right - in doing so damaging my fragile self-esteem and proving you are just as bad as the most racist person out there. To respond contrary to what I said is to risk offending, insulting or just plain hurting me, and in this PC world you are not allowed to correct any wrong thinking I may have!
</rant>
"Such a shame to see people at m$ raising such petty issues"
Don't blame companies for this, the only reason large corps dedicate time to this sort of thing is because there are too many "I'm offended" professionals out there. eg. The Tourettes charity complaining about the recent Fringe Festival joke.
Consider this: Person tweets about some innocuous reference in the code - Celeb notices and re-tweets it to billions - Massive publicity & calls to boycott - Billions wiped off share values - Shareholders lose money. <--- This is why.
Indeed, it's now getting ridiculous.
If you're banishing BLACKlist and WHITElist, don't forget to remove any reference to DISABLING something. Sometimes it seems like there are too many people in this world just looking for something to be offended by.
Sure, if you put deliberately offensive words in there, expect some kind of kickback, but this is just nonsense.
My sister has an autistic son, and some time ago she was on a crusade to stop people using the term "retarded", saying there was no place for it in the English language. Understandable, as an insult (though this seems to be considered more offensive in the UK, and still gets used a lot in the US). Unfortunately this makes it rather difficult to discuss ignition timing.
My point is, context is everything, something that Microsoft seem to have forgotten.
When I was in the Royal Navy (many years ago), there was always a call for people on shore bases or ships in port with no scheduled departure to remain on the base / ship over major holidays (Easter and Christmas mainly).
While the majority of the personnel were on leave, I would remain (single and young) and take my leave after they had returned. This was known as retard leave.
There were advantages; there was really not much work over those leave periods so it was like getting a holiday on the base (I only went on ships a few days prior to departure as I was working with aircraft) over the main leave period and then getting leave afterwards.
That's right - we need to make sure all words that may be offensive in any language are banned!
On a related note, I had a chuckle every time our developers used the term "SOA-bus", as "SOA" is the Dutch term for "STD"...
Gets even better with license plates in the USA, which are often comprised of three letters followed by numbers. English has four-letter-words. Dutch has three-letter-words...
I get a kick out of people who insist on using words like "herstory" instead of "history". They may have a wee bit trouble coming up with the equivalent term in other languages.
"That's right - we need to make sure all words that may be offensive in any language are banned!
On a related note, I had a chuckle every time our developers used the term "SOA-bus", as "SOA" is the Dutch term for "STD"...
Gets even better with license plates in the USA, which are often comprised of three letters followed by numbers. English has four-letter-words. Dutch has three-letter-words..."
Take a French person to Shropshire and see their face when you refer to the place as "Salop"...
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"the United Negro College Fund in Washington, DC? No joke - it really exists.
As does the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."
Those were both terms chosen by the black community at one point and later abandoned. Every so often, the black "leadership" decide that they want to rebrand, that the Current Name has become offensive. So the last name they demanded everyone switch to becomes verboten but they hang around in old organization names.
In the 1970's it was all about "Black Pride" and everyone had to say that. Now they're not proud of Black anymore and want "African-American". Anyone want to start a pool to guess the next rebrand name in another ten years?
I remember seeing an article about British athletes in the US.
They are British of mainly Carribean ancestry.
They got really annoyed about morons calling them British African Americans. They were not allowed to be Black British.
Can't remember who but pretty sure it was an Olympian. and they were proud of being British.
Which kind of hospital would you like to be seen in, one with pristine white walls, or pristine black walls?
The colour black has been associated with negative associations for millennia, same with white etc. - it's the people who then associate these negative connotations to people and link them to the colour of their skin that are the problem.
This is all revisionist bullshit.
The contrary term, unwoke, is terribly offensive to people in comas or persistent vegetative state, - which in turn is a terribly offensive term. Anyone using them has to be a sandwich short of a picnic - an insulting term for those restricting their calorie intake or gluten intolerant. And that term, intolerant, is grossly offensive, comparing a condition which you cannot help or choose, with an attitude you learn and can unlearn.
"Besides "whitelist" and "blacklist" are long-established technical terms."
That's actually part of the problem. I've had to explain what a blacklist is to people (when marketing decided that spamming was a good idea) where blocklist is obvious to anyone. The same for allowlist.
Even without the white good, black bad problem with the words I think it's a good idea just to remove unclear jargon.
Removing wtf is worse as that's just people upset about a "bad" word.
It is presumably related to the notion of black-balling, which is itself presumably an English translation of the original Ancient Greek.
Nevertheless, language evolves and "blocklist" is perfectly clear in context so I don't have a problem with it if someone else is willing to put in the legwork of making the changes and re-testing.
"It never ever occurred to me someone could see them as politically incorrect."
To the Professionally Offended they are. Their meal ticket depends on it.
It's a good gig if you can stomach the hypocrisy and infighting. There's a surprising amount of people that do very well by being Offended on behalf of people who don't care much.
Sir PTerry parodied this kind of people beautifully with his Campaign for Equal Height.
It’s all about context. In the US, a politician recently tweeted, “it’s all about the Benjamin’s”, in debate about US support of Israel. The same term historically referred to Benjamin Franklin’s picture on a $100 bill. One’s clearly offensive.
Me, I think of white hair, black hair. Devoid of color, all colors.
It’s time to stop using colors when referring to race; black, brown, or white are not acceptable. In the US the term African Americans is the preferred identification term; Euro, Caucasian, or Asian are preferred too.
Yes, and the whole world laughs at Americans when they use the term African American to refer to someone genuinely from Africa.
On top of this, there's an underlying assumption that everyone in Africa is black, which is a pretty narrow and stereotypical view of the continent. It's a big place and there's all sorts of races there.
Same as well for Asian - among people from Turkey, India or China (just to name three...) it looks to me there are big ethnic differences - and all of them are "Asian". Strange anyway there's no term for people from Oceania...
And, BTW, why African-American and not Asian-American, European-American and so on??
The real problem is how much US people are fixated with "races" and have to classify people by that in their narrow-view world.
There should be only one need to identify people by the color of their skin and that's when you have to search someone (a suspect, a lost one, etc.) - when every detail which helps to narrow down the search could be useful - skin color, hair color and style, height, weight, etc. - in this case the simplest, non-ambiguous term is the better.
In any other situation, those attributes should be utterly irrelevant.
It seems to assume that everyone from Asia shares a similar culture, whether they're from Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Siberia, China (and China itself obviously has many cultures internally).
How this became the SJW term of art for people from all the above countries is a mystery to me, but it certainly seems disrespectful. Or at least stupid.
"freedomland have already changed the spelling of colour" - not so, sorry. "color" is the original spelling, in Latin and even in English, before (a) it was exported to the early States and (b) Brits changed to the more fashionable French spelling "colour".
Yours truly, a bilingual pedant.
re: UML, flowcharts etc.
1. Not usually blue
2. More relevantly, the article says "rid the software blueprints of language", and strongly suggests that they're editing the code. If the Daily Mail calls code "software blueprints", it's unsurprising, but i expect better from El Reg.
Aww, did the nasty code review tool make you think about other peoples' feelings? Poor baby, have a good rant about the injustice of it all, ignoring the irony of the fact that you think YOUR feelings are important in this situation....
Can you make a snowflake out of gammon? What is that, a gammon flake or a rasher?
In classic western films, the bad guys wear black hats and the good guys white. I think the convention goes back to before "talkies".
Hints to it even in the Bible, verses referring to 'evil [people] likes darkness, because their deeds are hidden'. Even on a moonless night far from city lights, there is often some ambient light and white will far more easily be seen than black.
My first exposure to this was in one of the "Secret Seven" books where a couple of the boys had made themselves up to look like snow men to hide in a field near some old guy's house. Later, inside the house, one of the boys had removed the white clothes and hidden in a dark corner to avoid detection, but had forgotten about the white on his face.. Or something like that.
Don't knock the yanks (offence intended) - I was pretty effectively trolled by a US colleague last week over the term 'router'.
Of course, I was using it correctly (roo-ter) when he was using the Americanism (rao-ter*). Of course, being polite I decided to switch when challenged (I am British after all) only to have him start using roo-ter at me instead! Priceless and totally unexpected!
*no idea how to phonetically do this
El Reg's sub-hed says "Redmond suggests nuking 'profanity, geopolitical, diversity' terms from browser source"
Isn't the concept of "nuking" prejudiced against second- and third-world countries that don't have nuclear weapons?
And I am obligated to quote: "Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm".
Black tea and white bread are fine, because the colour words there have no particular moral weighting. Nobody imagines that "black tea" is somehow corrupt, or that people who drink it are inferior to others.
"Blacklist" and "whitelist", those are another matter.
Honestly, I can sympathise with both sides of this argument. On the one hand, this sort of self-conscious language shifting drives a wedge between us and every previous generation, which is bad. On the other hand, allowing moral weight to attach to terms that are simultaneously used as objective descriptors of some people - is thoughtless at best.
And once that has been pointed out to you, you can no longer claim "thoughtlessness" - you'd have to escalate to "a calculated putdown". So really, Google - and anyone else whose goals include "staying in business" - has no choice but to go along with it.
I am pretty sure the human cultural negativity around the word 'black' has much to do with our poor night-vision and the opportunities that presents for potential predators with better night-vision for sneaking up on us. It likely pre-dates humanity itself, let alone any minor latitude-driven diversification in UV-proeection vs vitamin-D production abilities.
Fear of the dark-unknown is pretty hard-wired, if only for the protection of little-toes!
So what? The history, while I'm sure very interesting to those who care about such things, isn't really relevant. What matters is what effect the words have today. Citing etymology at this point is really calculated to arouse suspicions that you're looking for reasons not to do the right thing.
Unless you have a consistent personal history of caring about the etymology of all words, all the time. Which you may have, I don't want to jump to conclusions about you - but if so, you need to recognise (and deal with) the fact that most of the time, it's one of those arguments that only gets dragged out when it's convenient to some other agenda.
What matters is what effect the words have today.
That is not the case. The case it that people are choosing to be offended by these things, when there clearly is no intent at offence and you have to jump through a whole multiverse-worth of intellectual hoops to even begin to try and claim it's actually offensive.
It's like when people get offended at the word "Niggardly" which, of course, has nothing to do whatsoever with the word "Nigger" and it's historical abusive connotations. Or those who will get offended because I used "Nigger" even though clearly not in any context that could rightly be claimed to be offensive.
Citing etymology at this point is really calculated to arouse suspicions that you're looking for reasons not to do the right thing.
The "right thing" is not to pander to the whims of the PC scum who are constantly trying to drive wedges in between people. These people have nothing better to do than to try and sew discord by claiming that once perfectly acceptable and descriptive language is now a bad thing.
The sooner we are rid of the PC-types the sooner we can all get back to working to stress-free good lives for all. While PC remains, this world must be a place of division, stress and resentment - because as soon as a word become acceptable to describe a group of people the foul PC scum make it out to be an unforgivable insult to use said word to describe said group.
The PC nonsense is wrecking lives and needs to stop. It has gone on far to long.
You were arguing rather effectively, until you unnecessarily added the abusive "scum" to the descriptive "PC".
Believe me, given the harm these cretins do, I've been holding back - just barely - limiting my terminology in reference to them.
I wouldn't dare say what I would love to do to some of them... I do have a reputation as a kind, sane and somewhat wise person to keep around these parts [cough]....
Your choice of words is all very well if you just want to preach to the choir; but it's of no use in winning over anyone with a different point of view, and it instead seems designed to alienate them. Is that your intent? In what way is that outcome useful?
"It's like when people get offended at the word "Niggardly" which, of course, has nothing to do whatsoever with the word "Nigger" and it's historical abusive connotations. "
Outside a Charles Dickens novel, I have never seen the word "niggardly" be used except to insult a black person with plausible deniability and the additional bonus to call anyone complaining stupid. In other words, I have never seen it used today except by a racist.
Outside a Charles Dickens novel, I have never seen the word "niggardly" be used except to insult a black person with plausible deniability and the additional bonus to call anyone complaining stupid. In other words, I have never seen it used today except by a racist.
IIRC the last person I recall using it was President Obama during one of his speeches on a monetary issue (or money around an issue). Are you saying he was a racist trying to insult black people? (some brief searching failed to bring up the incident, but I stand by my recollection that it was used by Obama)
I learned the word maybe 20 years ago from a Maori politician, who was also using it in the correct context as a financial term (probably Winston Peters but it was a long time back).
If people would learn what words mean before speaking, they would not show their lack of knowledge by getting upset at a "racist" word that is a) not racist at all and b) being used as the best word in the correct context.
As it happens, there is a wikipedia entry with some useful context:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly
I came across that one during my search last night, but it doesn't reference the speeches I recall hearing. I was hoping to find stronger support for my point.
Annoyingly, search engines first return the most money-making, then the most popular, then the most -almost-right-by-ultra-twisted-logic results. "Most accurate results based on your search terms" never get a look in these days :(
Always amuses me that Baa Baa Black sheep gets the treatment. The whole point of the rhyme is that the black wool is a premium product. So it is hardly derogatory.
Its the same as calling a spade a spade (or a bowl/shovel a bowl/shovel) being offensive because centuries later someone likens those of recent-ish African extraction (we all came out of Africa according to science and God's chosen people weren't rednecks) to a suit of cards.
Now I had this discussion about the word chairman a few times and pointed out the word man's origin in German does not denote a gender it is the equivalent of Chairperson, ChairWyf or ChairWer (yep that is where we get werewolf from) would however be sexist. One colleague (a devout christian of African heritage) made a very good point that you should consider how its use makes people feel and adjust your language accordingly out of respect.
There are times when you explain and times when you substitute to be polite to your audience. I now use the equally ancient term 'chair' though joke about talking to the furniture. Blackboards can sensibly become chalk boards.
I call a bowl a bowl to ridicule the professionally offended.
I do however defend baa baa black sheep and explain its origin because its improper use is the problem and it is an excellent teaching moment for children.
Allowlist and Blocklist make a sensible step towards this new era of politeness & respect.
"Reply Icon
Black tea and white bread are fine, because the colour words there have no particular moral weighting."
Don't you believe it. My Mum in Law - one of the nicest and most inoffensive people you could imagine - was told off by a nurse (of a non-reflective nature and apparently so well balanced she had a chip on each shoulder), when she asked for "black tea". Apparently, said nurse considered only "tea without milk" was acceptable.
Gobsmacked.
I can see the argument that NHS tea is too inconsistent to actually reliably call a black tea.
Unlike Earl Grey which usually contains black tea but is a blended tea.
Then if we really want to get pedantic we can start discussing green and yellow teas, and why oolong is considered as a category of its own.
Are you sure? Only the rich people could afford soft white bread, while hard black bread was for the poor ones...
From "Heidi": "The baker in Dorfli makes the white rolls, and if we could get some of those he has over now and then–but I can only just manage to pay for the black bread.”"
"On the other hand, allowing moral weight to attach to terms that are simultaneously used as objective descriptors of some people - is thoughtless at best"
Surely the answer to that is to stop referring to people by their colour, and leave the inoffensively meant terms alone?
Sure, but black tea actually is black and white bread actually is white.
I put my hand on a white sheet of paper just to be sure nothing's changed, but I can (re)assure everyone what my hand is positively not white.
Just for the fun of it I put my hand under a color scanner. RGB: 161 102 86. That's RED, folks. Not even close to white, as people insist...
Just for the fun of it I put my hand under a color scanner. RGB: 161 102 86. That's RED, folks. Not even close to white, as people insist...
Do you find it hard living with what life has done to you?
I mean, when you look in the mirror at what you are today - do you see RED???
:)
(Would love to use joke, coat and troll icons as well - but if you don't like the joke at least you can chuck the glass at me :) )
Just for comparison I put my tea under a colour scanner but it got all steamed up and stopped working.
That happened with a SJW I knew once. I asked him to get some more black ink while he was out. Stormed off going on about me being racist and quit the job when the management told him to stop wasting time.
Shame... I was wanting to know if we could use him as a new heat-source for our boilers.
[Even Paris would have more brains than most SJWs combined!]
> On the one hand, this sort of self-conscious language shifting drives a wedge between us and every previous generation, which is bad.
Worse than that, actually. In much less than a generation, the newly-approved euphemism inevitably become the new, exactly-as-bad, insult. Most of us, surely, have witnessed that often enough already.
Everyone knows it's either taken Julie Andrews or Whoopi Goldberg.
That's offensive! If I was to make a black coffee under those terms, I'd then be 'making Whoopi' - and that as you know is a sexual reference that is offensive to the prudish types and the celibate types (many of whom are so by choice - not their's but the choice of every one else!)
[Dad-joke time - what were Mr and Mrs Goldberg doing at the time she was conceived? Why, they were making Whoopi!]
I have found a delightful addition to this problem, including
Indigenous North Americans who call their fellow sell-outs Apples - Red on the outside and white on the inside and
Eco- Warriors who are called Watermelons - Green on the outside, red on the inside.
but they are so numerous that they cannot fit on this page.
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I too have serious problems here. The terms HARDware and SOFTware are absolutely profane. If I say to have HARDware, then the women get offended or assume I have a viagra problem. If I say to have SOFTware, then the women will be put off or assume I have a viagra problem. Neither HARDware nor SOFTware should be used or diversity will suffer.
It is therefore suggested to ban computers and programming completely, including all words associated with the sciences of making said stuff a reality. Calling HARDware SIGNAL equipment will be misunderstood as advancement. Calling SOFTware as FIRMware will only remind us of less hard HARDware. There is no way we can solve this problem. Kill this computer stuff now! We cannot tolerate discriminatory terminology at all. Better safe than sorry.
We cannot tolerate discriminatory terminology at all.
You should look into the automotive industry (and engineering as well) - things like <grease> nipple, nut, bolt, screw, shaft - all supposed to go. You know how some cars have an extra wheel with a (hopefully) properly inflated tyre attached in case of punctures? Well you cannot call that the "spare tyre" as that could be considered insulting to us fatties.
Don't forget knobs of course...
Gas - potentially offensive/mocking to IBS sufferers.
Lights - obvious reference to skin colour and thus white elitism.
I'll leave the good people of El Reg to come up with many more - perhaps from real life perhaps imagined (all above Gas in my post has been experienced or read (in the press) by me)
icon - still need a "despairing for humanity" one - closes we have :(
Does that light-headedness lead to you thinking about a wankel?
Dagnammit! I was about to head to bed, but now I'm gonna have a hard time sleeping thinking about engines and crank shafts and those pistons going up and down and up and down harder and faster inside those slippery tubes...
Even the shape of a spark plug will be getting someone upset. Or just the term "plug"...
[Sorry for the other post - obviously had old data in the paste buffer and didn't proof-read!]
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Personally I'm happy that bastard files haven't been renamed yet. I take great delight in indicating this to my son by handing him the one with the makers having etched "Flat Bastard" on the body near the tag.
To other poster, its gudgeon pin in engineering terms. A gudgeon is a small freshwater fish.
Don't forget about the male and female adapters. Putting a male power plug into a female adapter is akin to rape because the female adapter has no choice but to accept any male adapter that the master chooses to insert. We should change the names of these adapters otherwise people would think of the exploitation of women!
I served as a local authority Councillor about 25 years ago. I climbed the greasy pole to the heady heights of Chairman... Sorry "Chair" of the Cemeteries And Crematorium sub-committee.
However I digress, my first committee meeting was Highways & Traffic. Debate focused on a stretch of country road where motorbike riders where regularly being involved in accidents. I stood up and said this was an accident "blackspot"...... oh dear.
Was then accused of being a racist in the local rag (paper) by members of the Green Party ..... who used to put in expense claims for driving an internal combustion engine for even half a mile.
I wish I could say they were gay old days.....
Toodle Pip!
I remember that in the dim and distant past, it was a given that you should not change code simply to refine names or comments unless there was an urgent need. To do otherwise was to risk introducing bugs or regressions in code that was already working satisfactorily.
Every such change can, of course, be tested, but I wonder if that will happen in this case. After all, it's mostly a 'search and replace' exercise, isn't it? Purifying language and naming, however justifiable, risks turning correct code into problematic code.
If their recent track record with Windows 10 is anything to go by, it seems that Microsoft have already gone through an internal language purge.
What next?
Are they going to ask accountants and bookkeepers to stop using red and black ink for debit/credit amounts? And tell the financial industry, auditors, the press, to stop using the phrases (based on the colour of the ink used in the aforementioned bookkeeping) "in the black" for profit and "in the red" for losses?
The folks who run the Black Hat hacking convention are in real trouble
https://www.blackhat.com/us-19/
Luckily this year's bash is just over.
In colour, Black is an absence of light so you could shorten that to AOL, but perhaps that has been done before. Oh well.....WGAS
Years ago, when there was a furore over swear words in the Linux kernel code, I grepped through our source for 5h17 and f*ck (words redacted for the sensitive). There were a quite few instances, all attributable to a certain potty mouthed developer in our Cambridge office!
The best and the surest way to resolve this recurring controversy is quite clear to me: we must remove all extraneous nouns, verbs and adjectives from all source code and all messages communicated to the users. After all, essentially any word, or a word which is spelled almost the same, or a word which sounds almost the same, or a pictogram which looks kind of similar after folding the printout of the source into an exquisite origami chrysanthemum will be offensive to someone somewhere in some of the languages we speak.
From now on, we shall refer to all functions, methods, and variables by their decimal ordinal numbers. If the computer language specification requires so, then until the specification can be corrected it shall be permissible to insert a single letter at the beginning of the designator. To avoid giving offense, that letter shall be same for all source files within a project tree. Numbers 4, 9, 13, 17, 39, 666, as well as all other numbers deemed offensive by the Supreme Peoples' Denumeration Triumvirate shall not be used and shall be retroactively removed from all sources.
That ought to take care of most of the problem.
All menus should be removed and replaced by toolbars with icons but no labels or tooltips. On the plus side, all applications will be fully internationalised by default, assuming no culture-specific icons or icon colours are used, reducing the burden of translation. We can remove font rendering from the operating system to save space and reduce complexity.
> From now on, we shall refer to all functions, methods, and variables by their decimal ordinal numbers.
Too late, done already. I refer you to LDAP's Object Identifier Descriptors. The one I often have trouble with is 2.5.23.3 accessControlInnerArea. (Fnarr)
Definitely not new - quite a few years ago I ran smack bang into fairly strong reactions to my use of the blacklist/whitelist terms in some documents I was producing. I was to be frank completely puzzled as to why what seemed to me to be the smallest/non technical element of the proposal kicked off such a storm.
Ah, to be young and naive - these days I carry more bureaucratic battle scars than a viking berserker.
Sounds like classic bikeshedding to me.
For anyone not familiar the term stems from an example about a fictional plan for a nuclear power station in which the finance committee devolve into discussing the construction of the staff bike shed and the menu options at the canteen since they're the only parts of the project they actually understand. The writer then concludes that the time and effort spent discussing any given part of a project will be inversely proportional to the money or complexity involved in that part.
"Or her pardon...…"
Not necessary in that day and age.. Any lady would have been married or chaperoned, and the male accompanying her would have been obliged to take out any offense to her to the offender. So just addressing the male bit of the audience would have included everyone.
Looking at this through the lens of conveying meaning, I can see how this might be a useful change. The words 'allow' and 'block' are more descriptive and a lot easier to understand for people who weren't familiar with the existing terms or people who might have English as a second or third language.
Well, it won't be a problem for the people that have any of the current european languages as their native tongue. In all these the word used to describe black has also a negative connotation. It has nothing to do with skin color, however. Besides, skin can be brown, or very deep-brown, almost black; but to be pure black it must have been charred (and that is not compatible with a healthy constitution).
I guess those terms are so old and widespread they exist in literal translation in many European languages - in Italian is "lista nera" which is a literal translation - just like "libro nero", black book.
Anyway, at least we don't call some people "blacksmith"....
That would be inflexible and unwilling to change.
Yeah, this one can run and run, if that wasn't vaguely insulting to people in wheelchairs.
This is why I don't give in to f*cking political correctness - the INTENT matters, not the words that are used. We've all suffered less than ideal word choices - I have a large margin of tolerance for that if the facts and results clarify the actual intent.
New tab - smoking reference
History - obviously blatant male-oriented view of the world
Bookmarks - offensive to the illiterate
Cast - reference to magic/witchcraft offensive to many world religions
Cut - insensitive to sufferers of self-harm
More tools - 'tool' is an offensive derogatory term for someone
Many more are found in the settings pane
Police officer is a bit of a mouthfulI prefer to use the word "pig".
If you'd met the ones I know, you'd not be so polite.
(And you'd probably agree that their partners would never refer to them as being "a bit of a mouthful')
(Ok, getting annoyed and hateful now, best get to bed and to sleep, perchance to dream...)
Remove all comments.
All variables to be 6 character randomly generated strings. (No vowels to avoid unintentional word formation).
All error messages to be replaced by "Something went wrong" in 10 languages randomly selected from all the languages into which the phrase can be meaningfully translated.
Yep... becasue as soon as someone says "black-list", I immediately think about water melon Fried chicken and wood piles....
Words only have the meaning we give them..., if we want them to be racist they will be racist...., this is just controlled speech via the back door...
This is the danger of allowing companies like m$ into opensource projects...... because they bring ALL their political baggage with them...
About 15 years ago I was shown around the server room of a well known independent media organisation.
They had settled on a naming convention for machines for ease of identification, each one denoting what type of platform it was, the core function it performed and the OS platform it was running. This did unfortunately mean that the (S)erver running (EXC)hange on Windows (NT) was branded SEXCNT01. Although its Disaster Recovery twin was DR-SEXCNT
These so called offensive words used to describe different groupings of people is wrong... just wrong. I have never seen an actual black person just has I have never seen an actual white person.
I have seen pinky/peachy/cream coloured people before. I have seen Mocha/Caramel coloured people before.
Perhaps using the Dulux colour pallet to describe peoples enthnicity would be less offensive?
These so called offensive words used to describe different groupings of people is wrong... just wrong. I have never seen an actual black person just has I have never seen an actual white person.
We have refugees from Somalia (and other nations) not far from here. Generally quite decent people too, so far as my interactions with them go.
I have to say that they would pretty much meet the definition of 'black'. They are quite dark-skinned.
This post has been deleted by its author
This is hilarious to see what the world has become, over hyper sesntive idiots who now get offended for other people. Might as well call it the #000List and the #FFFList
Sir, your statement is highly offensive! You should know that the "0" kinda is visually similar to ladie's private parts, and the "F" obviously represents a four-letter word. You cannot claim innocence, you must have known that before you posted and thus were deliberately trying to be offensive!
"Blocklist" and "Allowlist" are also out as they indicate some level of privilege. Obviously these words are being promoted by elitist privileged older white males to remind every one else of their place in society!
The only acceptable terms henceforth shall be "List" and "List". And don't you DARE try to come up with a way to differentiate between the two, as that would be DISCRIMINATION!!!!!!!!!!!
Remember someone I knew vaguely ~20 years ago who worked in documentation at Sun who was on a mission (? is that an acceptable word - I assume crisade isn't) to "persuade engineers to stop talking about master/slave interfaces" ... 20 years later see that she doesn't seem to have had much impact!
Then again, I remeber some years earlier that another engineer where I worked was informed that a customer had looked at code we'd supplied and had not been impressed to find a routine named "F---ING.AWESOME.BOOTSTRAP.LOADER" (n.b. "---" was actually, obviously, "UCK":-)
And on a completly different tack, I had experience of a Chinese engineer who saw that other engineers wer shortening signals names by dropping letters from the name so he tookup this idea enthusiastically - but I had to point out the that reducing the name "xxx_counter" from a large collection of registers by removing the 'o' and 'er' from their names was not the best choice.
Also, we had some IP from another company where the design contained two "fucntional units" identified as J and K .... so all the interface signals were prefixed by "fuj_" and "fuk_"
3 observations
1) Back in the 1980s I was working on some code that ran on the late unlamented GRiD Compass aleged computer. It used a lot of UNIXish terms inside it's multi-threaded OS. One was the technical term for the treatment of a split in the execution road that leaves no path not taken, fork(). A former Presidential candidate's company served on the Air Farce's code review team. That process spat out the comment "Get the 'fork' out of there." It took considerable effort to convince them that was a term of art related to forks in roads. It is heart warming to discover this sub-group of homo sapiens sapiens still exists. But in this case maybe we should carve an exception out of the endangered species act.
2) NOW we understand how Microsoft makes its decisions. I wondered how they managed so many very serious and often very obvious bugs. Now I know. They spend their time on trivia.
3) Microsoft is too big. So is Google. Break them into focused chunks such as OS only, Office only, Compilers only, Search only, and political correctness only.
{O.O}
There's so much more stupidity where that came from, and (in my opinion) mostly from people who have not been able to contribute to society in any measurable positive way.
Next up: fire retardants. And we can't call them suppressants either, that would be too dictatorial.
If I recall correctly, it was Scott Adams who coined the term outragists a couple of years back and boy, was he right. Ah yes, found it.
Sigh.
Seriously? In 2019 yet the word "blacklist" and "whitelist" triggers someone? Stop trying to enforce crap that isn't needed, no one wants to follow your rules to make sure your pwecious wittle fweeings don't get hurt. Have some consideration for other people. We don't want to do stuff differently to make someone feel better about themselves. It's just like the more than two gender crap. Go act special somewhere else where you are not seen as some special snowflake that desperately wants attention.
I can already tell it is the LGBTQ+ people at Microsoft that are doing this, they always make crap so unnecessary to make them feel more special.
Why in Heaven's name are we allowing people who are incapable (or lay claim to being) of bearing the slightest adversity - 'safe spaces', 'crying rooms', 'puppy therapy' are not the hallmark of a robust, sane individual - be allowed to distort the language? This is aggression masquerading as powerlessness.
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