> //sarcasm is not even enough to describe this lunacy that's eating the world//
The author’s “accidental racism” phrasing is a little awkward, but the idea is there. The point isn’t that “whitelist” and “blacklist” are “racist terms.” Clearly, they are not. The point is that members of the audience for your documentation, paying members and influencing members, could be harmed by them in certain contexts. We don’t always have control over the context or situation in which the user encounters the documentation. For example, I could say that your response is "hysterical," indicating that I find the notion that this is "eating the world" to be overly emotional and alarmist. If you, or another reader, were female, you might then object that "hysterical" shares its root word with "uterus," and its etymology and current shading indicates "characteristic emotional and mental weakness that stems from having a uterus, i.e., from being or being like a woman."
Writing is an exercise of power. It is even more so than verbal speech, in the context of documentation especially, because it provides no forum for the user, your paying user, to clarify and to point out offenses. And take a deep breath, because even if this lunacy eats the entirety of software documentation, the world will be nowhere near consumed. You might even be richer for it, in both senses of the word.
Yeah, I agree. I should also add that in order to avoid "accidental communism" we should stop using phrases like "shared resources", after all if you at the first linked wikipedia article you will find why it's relevant.
It true that writing is a tricky thing since we can't convey intonation and the use of emojis in docs usually is not somethings that's helping the cause. I don't know how it can be solved but if we'll take the way of the word policing you should be inclusive and surely ban: "shared resources", "killing processes" etc etc - there should be no end to this until we reach Farrenheit 451, how "hystorical" (intenstionally misspelled) this might might seem to you. Cheers
The people who aren't going to be impacted particularly regardless of which phrasing you use may not care, nor even notice. It's the folks that get harmed by this who will notice and probably say nothing about it in specific, but will be more likely to adopt your thing, share your thing, tweet nice things about your thing etc.
Or to paraphrase DHH[1], it costs very little to adjust your terms but can have an outsized impact on a portion of your users/developers who are otherwise marginalized.
I get "harmed" emotionally every day reading the words on the internet, not probably - but there isn't any way for me to be able to point a finger to every direction and show even a small proportion of those people how wrong they are (hell maybe I should quit twitter...). If every sentence would be redacted to suit my feelings as well as all other "harmed" individuals" we could as well ban the whole text communication on the internet.
Could we just communicate in binary and be done with it allready /s
For reasons that are too complex for an HN comment on too little sleep, too early in the morning, I'm less hung up on some idea of justice in the world than I used to be. But just as a point of enlightened self interest, if you use less exclusionary language, you are likely to have more buy in from a broader audience, thereby making your thing more successful.
