You joke, but the phrase "black list" isn't allowed where I work. It contains "black," which has racial connotations. We use "block list" instead. I didn't realize the connection to Newspeak until now

Yes, a lot of dumb little "American political brainrot" like that has been getting pushed in places.

Another example is GitHub changing the default branch name from master to main due to their perception that the existence of a master implies the existence of slaves.

Electronics protocols are getting a newspeak renaming with sometimes humorous results when you see documentation where mass search-and-replace mangled a substring or they forgot to replace the bad words in all caps.

This gem comes to mind: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/95508/files/76cf1e1e4...

Reads almost like a haiku

     struct Simba {
    -    mother: u32,
    -    father: u32,
    +    parent: u32,
    +    parent: u32,
     }
     "I don't think this will compile"

Brilliant. The bot also replaced

    // trust that the user knows what s/he's doing. 

with

    // trust that the user knows what s/they's doing.

I'm still peeved about the bot that scolded us for the word "Mastercard," which was not only a household name but also an enum value on the wire that payment processing absolutely had to support.

okay so as much as people like to meme on the whole banning blacklist/whitelist thing, it actually makes things clearer to just say blocklist/allowlist, especially for non-native speakers.

People got grumpy about master/slave being replaced with server/client, superior/subordinate, leader/follower, and similar terms but that actually largely benefits as well in that it makes things clearer. Anyone who has dealt with bus protocols that support the more complex "multi-leader" setups or peer-to-peer setups knows how the master/slave terminology can be confusing and potentially limiting in accurately describing the parts of the system.

And the git master/main thing also is more a matter of just making things easier to pick up. Master can be confusing there for the same reasons it's confusing in bus topologies. Main instead is obvious. It's the main/mainline branch of the project. And that also helps set the divide for main vs feature vs maintenance branches (and release tags).

So yeah some of it was done under the guise of politics but that's generally been more about getting an excuse to make the change without people dismissing it rather than the underlying reason for the change to happen.

I tend to not really notice whtever slight cleanliness/communication improvement any of these changes add (this is probably just a me thing).

So, putting politics aside, I don't really care as long as it isn't breaking existing stuff. My only point of contention has been the politics behind some of the pushes.

2 fewer characters to type every time you switch branches. I can’t complain.

Aren't blocklist and allowlist strictly better as terms? Black and white (even ignoring the connotations) require at least one level of indirection compared to explicit terms that describe what they are

Mea Culpa :)

I actually agree with some of the other commentators that "blocklist" is probably a better term but it’s not easy to start using a new term instead of one I’ve been used to for decades.