It reflects the dominance of American culture in computing.

Master is good example. It is not offensive word in either of the cultures I grew up in, and its strongest associations for me are “male teacher” and “highly skilled craftsman”. Blacklist sounds related to terms like blackballed.

The history if the US makes terms that even sound as though they are related to race or slavery a lot more sensitive.

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gwbas1c 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's because of IDE hard drives, you could have two on the same ribbon cable, named "master" and "slave."

Edit: I always assumed there was a technical reason for why IDE hard drives use "master" and "slave"; IE, if the master used older versions of the IDE protocol it could slow down the slave, or that the master had some priority on the bus. Specifically, if "1" and "2" or "primary" and "secondary" were designations instead, it might omit some kind of detail that was important to whoever picked those names.

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JaszHere 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

As non-US citizen this is also how I see it. Especially git's master seemed like such a weird change.

But on the other hand, main is shorter than master, and allowlist is self explanatory unlike whitelist, so personally I'm fine with these changes.

	▲	graemep 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Whitelist is self-explanatory, and it means you have a term for grey list. I also dislike American concerns getting special treatment and it comes with the background of the adoption of American English, which often loses meanings and distinctions.