I don't understand why they'd include "blackbox" on the list of words to not say.
It's somewhat common and perfectly acceptable, with no such history to it. The color black is the absence of light. You traditionally need light to see things. A box made entirely of black would therefor be impossible to see into. This is perfectly socially acceptable, is it not?
JonChesterfield · 3h ago
I like greybox a lot as a description of testing strategy. That's going to struggle to adapt to the alternative phrasing. I'm also doubtful that obsessing about the word black is reducing racism.
vindin · 3h ago
This also makes me think of blackbodies, which are literal black bodied objects in physical space that absorb radiation in larger quantities than non black bodies
andrewmcwatters · 3h ago
I disagree with that one, too, because it shows a lack of understanding.
Electronics black boxes are a common item that allows one to enclose systems, hiding the way they are wired or networked, which is where the term originated from.
I struggle to understand how one would replace "ownership" in memory ownership. Memory responsibility? I would hope that it is still OK to be responsible for something, but this is still a form of "owning."
I suspect some of these will receive push back and fail to be adopted in the future, while a majority of them most people would not be able to find meaningful objections with.
nosrepa · 4h ago
As far as I've been aware, 'guys' is mostly now considered non-gendered.
gompertz · 4h ago
And the alternative 'folks' comes off as arrogant to me.
embeng4096 · 3h ago
To me as well, either arrogant or obsequious like a waiter at a restaurant saying “alright folks I’ll be your server tonight”. Edit: or as a sibling comment said, pretentious or inauthentic
To GP’s point, “guys” is interesting to me; it feels like a U-shape where people who don’t “get it” think it’s non-gendered, as do people who are very tuned in online (streamers, gaming spaces -which lean heavy male anyway -, highly online twitter types, etc) where cultural trends move and spread quickly. Then there’s kind of the middle I see, think HR activist types (acknowledging that HR does not always mean activist and vice versa) - clued in enough to follow the ideological trends, not quite enough to sense the ongoing shifts in real time. To be a bit reductive, I’d sum it up as something like people carrying the cultural context with them of the 2000s, the 2010s, or the 2020s
andrewmcwatters · 3h ago
It's also a Southern US term, not a coastal one, so I agree. Using it in place as an inclusive term comes off as pretentious and inauthentic.
I think "guys" is one of the few ones I disagree with, along with man hours, as in man meaning human, not man meaning male individuals. We don't stop using the term mankind because the word man is in it. It's not gendered.
So what is this Linux foundation? As the correlation between this guide and the Linux mailing list is rather low.
vindin · 3h ago
Such a waste of valuable man hours
andrewmcwatters · 5h ago
Is the implication that “hung” threads refers to a hanging? Like someone hung for murder, versus hanging a coat up on a wall?
Because I always assumed a hung process was one that “hung up its boots” and retired, as in, the process has stopped working. It’s not dead, it’s no longer doing meaningful work or proceeding with a task.
I hope this has been an innocent, naïve understanding.
hackernudes · 3h ago
I don't think it is macabre at all. "Hang" just means suspended. A ball on a string is hanging instead of falling. Laundry can be hung out to dry. It's about something that would normally move that is not doing so. Also see "hung jury".
cyanydeez · 3h ago
Remember manchilds, its only allowed to be pedantic about software systems not wetware, cause everyone knows wetware has cooties and agreeing with people means you might have one less thing to argue about.
andrewmcwatters · 3h ago
I think I understand the idea behind not wanting to use the term housekeeping, but that one in particular is a little funny to me. Everyone needs to do housekeeping.
Except maybe sweaty gamers on Twitch whose identities revolve around being smelly gamers.
zahlman · 5h ago
Sigh, it looks like I let myself get baited into a rant about this topic again. I really thought I had been doing better about this in the past few years, but I do feel myself slipping lately.
> Avoid using terms that have social history. Terms that can have historical significance or impact in regards to race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, mental and physical ability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religion, and educational background.
> Avoid using idioms and jargons. These can exclude people who don’t have particular specialized knowledge, and many idioms don’t translate from country to country. Additionally, these sometimes have origins in negative stereotypes.
I can guarantee you, however, that they won't object if you use terms that deliberately make negative associations between "powerful" or "privileged" groups and various negative characteristics, that were specifically coined for activist or ideological purposes. And woe betide you if your own "particular specialized knowledge" doesn't extend as far as the "101" of their particular ideology.
I'm speaking from experience. If guidelines like these were applied fairly, we wouldn't see codes of conduct that preemptively reject claims of "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism" (which are not terms actually used by the people making such complaints). Yet I got banned (https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2024/07/31/an-open-letter-to... ; https://zahlman.github.io/pages/dpo/) from the Python discussion forums for (among other related things) objecting to such language, and then my objections were misrepresented as themselves being such claims — in the process, putting in my mouth the very words I consider invalid. (That incident is actually related to what brought me to HN a bit over a year ago.)
By the way, "jargon" is a collective noun and shouldn't be pluralized here.
> Write inclusive examples. Try to avoid using examples in documentation that is culturally-specific to a particular country, and be sure to use diverse names.
Of course, we are also counseled to ensure that we treat men and women as equal in our writing — as we should; but in some cultures that is heretical.
And "using diverse names" is going to get you in trouble when you choose two names from cultures that hate each others' guts and depict them having a pleasant interaction. Or when you misspell them, or use a politically contentious romanization of them, or are wrong about what gender they connote in that culture, or....
Not to mention the premise that names are associated with cultures in the first place. And not to mention what happens when someone decides that your examples have a bias towards depicting people from certain cultures as more capable than people from others, even if you got the names from an RNG. And that will eventually happen.
> Language that has historical or social roots, often assuming one classification as dominant over another.
Well, no, it doesn't. The etymology simply isn't what you imagine it to be, and there's generally reams of documentation of that fact.
It's frankly offensive to have others try to tell me what my own words mean, and assign purpose to them. These interpretations are not reasonable, and reflect a failure to engage with the culture and history of others in the same way they'd like done for them.
But I mean, seriously, they object to "housekeeping". How, even? If you think there's a negative connotation in that word, and if you furthermore think that there's something discriminatory to tie to that connotation, I think that says more about you than about the person who used it.
> Language that either assumes the gender of the users and developers, or that makes assumptions of a gender.
It quite literally doesn't in most cases. This is ignorant of English etymology and should be considered offensive, especially by speakers of Germanic languages.
Besides which, sometimes your group actually does consist of all men, and interlopers like this want to limit the forms of camaraderie deemed socially acceptable. From outside the group.
You should absolutely be permitted to "assume" the gender of a hypothetical person you made up in your own head for the purpose of laying out an example in documentation. And individuals have as much right to be offended by being referred to as "they" as by "he" or "she", according to their own respective preferences. You cannot have it both ways: if everyone's gender self-identification is supposed to be taken at face value, then you cannot also have gender-neutral, one-size-fits-all solutions.
> Language that assumes a certain state of body or mind as superior to others.
There is no "assumption" taking place here.
Let me apologize, though. Above, I used the word "invalid" as an adjective, to describe something I don't consider valid. But this is also used as a noun to describe people who are "sickly or disabled", excuse me (Merriam-Webster, how could you feed me such horrible language?), in poor health or... you know what, I genuinely don't know how to continue this.
> Normal → typical, usual
> Abnormal → atypical, unusual
These are synonyms. The supposedly problematic terms don't even have anything to do with "states of body or mind" in the first place.
> Language that makes assumptions based on age or that reinforce an age-based stereotype.
... really? The harmful "stereotype" that... people would like to leave an inheritance to their descendants? Or that people who have lived longer have experienced policies that are no longer in effect? What?
> Violent language: Language that practices a degree of aggression or machismo.
Hold on, "machismo", you say? As in:
> Machismo (/məˈtʃiːzmoʊ, mɑː-, -ˈtʃɪz-/; Spanish: [maˈtʃismo]; Portuguese: [maˈʃiʒmu]; from Spanish macho 'male' and -ismo)[1] is the sense of being "manly" and self-reliant, a concept associated with "a strong sense of masculine pride: an exaggerated masculinity".[2]
This is where the mask slips, although I think it was transparent to begin with. (Sorry about the use of idiom.) Yes, the same people that tell us to avoid "language that makes assumption of a gender" will happily and freely associate violence with masculinity on the same page. Thanks a lot, really. I certainly feel more included now.
embeng4096 · 5h ago
While my feelings are not as strong as yours here, I felt a big relief and resonance reading your closing remarks.
I also have sympathy as, if this thread gets bigger, I bet you get more of the same reactions you’ve already described. Feels to me like this is less screaming into the void for nobody to hear and more into a hurricane where, for your troubles opening your mouth, it gives you back a metaphorical lungful of water to choke on and a metaphorical cloud of debris to batter you with.
Thanks for trying anyway
Edit:
> Thanks a lot, really. I certainly feel more included now.
Sadly, I believe that to them, this is a feature, not a bug
yogorenapan · 4h ago
I'm generally on the opposite side of the political spectrum but I agree with a lot of your points.
While some rules make sense in terms of inclusivity, a lot of them will probably cause more confusion than anything...
I really hope those that try to impose their world view too heavily onto others won't inadvertently push the political pendulum further right despite the fact that these rules feel more puritan/religious than liberal.
zahlman · 3h ago
> I'm generally on the opposite side of the political spectrum but I agree with a lot of your points.
With respect, my politics are very different from what you seem to be inferring, if it makes sense to you to say that.
tommica · 1h ago
> You should absolutely be permitted to "assume" the gender of a hypothetical person you made up in your own head for the purpose of laying out an example
Love this one :D
vindin · 3h ago
I really think we need to take a good look at Tux, and consider a redesign. For something as symbolic as him, I really think that we need to adjust his shading, such that he is at least 50% black. His current appearance is a literal example of white supremacy, and this should never be tolerated.
It's somewhat common and perfectly acceptable, with no such history to it. The color black is the absence of light. You traditionally need light to see things. A box made entirely of black would therefor be impossible to see into. This is perfectly socially acceptable, is it not?
Electronics black boxes are a common item that allows one to enclose systems, hiding the way they are wired or networked, which is where the term originated from.
I struggle to understand how one would replace "ownership" in memory ownership. Memory responsibility? I would hope that it is still OK to be responsible for something, but this is still a form of "owning."
I suspect some of these will receive push back and fail to be adopted in the future, while a majority of them most people would not be able to find meaningful objections with.
To GP’s point, “guys” is interesting to me; it feels like a U-shape where people who don’t “get it” think it’s non-gendered, as do people who are very tuned in online (streamers, gaming spaces -which lean heavy male anyway -, highly online twitter types, etc) where cultural trends move and spread quickly. Then there’s kind of the middle I see, think HR activist types (acknowledging that HR does not always mean activist and vice versa) - clued in enough to follow the ideological trends, not quite enough to sense the ongoing shifts in real time. To be a bit reductive, I’d sum it up as something like people carrying the cultural context with them of the 2000s, the 2010s, or the 2020s
I think "guys" is one of the few ones I disagree with, along with man hours, as in man meaning human, not man meaning male individuals. We don't stop using the term mankind because the word man is in it. It's not gendered.
Because I always assumed a hung process was one that “hung up its boots” and retired, as in, the process has stopped working. It’s not dead, it’s no longer doing meaningful work or proceeding with a task.
I hope this has been an innocent, naïve understanding.
Except maybe sweaty gamers on Twitch whose identities revolve around being smelly gamers.
> Avoid using terms that have social history. Terms that can have historical significance or impact in regards to race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, mental and physical ability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religion, and educational background.
> Avoid using idioms and jargons. These can exclude people who don’t have particular specialized knowledge, and many idioms don’t translate from country to country. Additionally, these sometimes have origins in negative stereotypes.
I can guarantee you, however, that they won't object if you use terms that deliberately make negative associations between "powerful" or "privileged" groups and various negative characteristics, that were specifically coined for activist or ideological purposes. And woe betide you if your own "particular specialized knowledge" doesn't extend as far as the "101" of their particular ideology.
I'm speaking from experience. If guidelines like these were applied fairly, we wouldn't see codes of conduct that preemptively reject claims of "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism" (which are not terms actually used by the people making such complaints). Yet I got banned (https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2024/07/31/an-open-letter-to... ; https://zahlman.github.io/pages/dpo/) from the Python discussion forums for (among other related things) objecting to such language, and then my objections were misrepresented as themselves being such claims — in the process, putting in my mouth the very words I consider invalid. (That incident is actually related to what brought me to HN a bit over a year ago.)
By the way, "jargon" is a collective noun and shouldn't be pluralized here.
> Write inclusive examples. Try to avoid using examples in documentation that is culturally-specific to a particular country, and be sure to use diverse names.
Of course, we are also counseled to ensure that we treat men and women as equal in our writing — as we should; but in some cultures that is heretical.
And "using diverse names" is going to get you in trouble when you choose two names from cultures that hate each others' guts and depict them having a pleasant interaction. Or when you misspell them, or use a politically contentious romanization of them, or are wrong about what gender they connote in that culture, or....
Not to mention the premise that names are associated with cultures in the first place. And not to mention what happens when someone decides that your examples have a bias towards depicting people from certain cultures as more capable than people from others, even if you got the names from an RNG. And that will eventually happen.
> Language that has historical or social roots, often assuming one classification as dominant over another.
Well, no, it doesn't. The etymology simply isn't what you imagine it to be, and there's generally reams of documentation of that fact.
It's frankly offensive to have others try to tell me what my own words mean, and assign purpose to them. These interpretations are not reasonable, and reflect a failure to engage with the culture and history of others in the same way they'd like done for them.
But I mean, seriously, they object to "housekeeping". How, even? If you think there's a negative connotation in that word, and if you furthermore think that there's something discriminatory to tie to that connotation, I think that says more about you than about the person who used it.
> Language that either assumes the gender of the users and developers, or that makes assumptions of a gender.
It quite literally doesn't in most cases. This is ignorant of English etymology and should be considered offensive, especially by speakers of Germanic languages.
Besides which, sometimes your group actually does consist of all men, and interlopers like this want to limit the forms of camaraderie deemed socially acceptable. From outside the group.
> Gendered pronouns (he/him/his, she/her/hers) → they, them, theirs
You should absolutely be permitted to "assume" the gender of a hypothetical person you made up in your own head for the purpose of laying out an example in documentation. And individuals have as much right to be offended by being referred to as "they" as by "he" or "she", according to their own respective preferences. You cannot have it both ways: if everyone's gender self-identification is supposed to be taken at face value, then you cannot also have gender-neutral, one-size-fits-all solutions.
> Language that assumes a certain state of body or mind as superior to others.
There is no "assumption" taking place here.
Let me apologize, though. Above, I used the word "invalid" as an adjective, to describe something I don't consider valid. But this is also used as a noun to describe people who are "sickly or disabled", excuse me (Merriam-Webster, how could you feed me such horrible language?), in poor health or... you know what, I genuinely don't know how to continue this.
> Normal → typical, usual
> Abnormal → atypical, unusual
These are synonyms. The supposedly problematic terms don't even have anything to do with "states of body or mind" in the first place.
> Language that makes assumptions based on age or that reinforce an age-based stereotype.
Okay, but...
> Grandfather, grandfathering, legacy → flagship, established, rollover, carryover
... really? The harmful "stereotype" that... people would like to leave an inheritance to their descendants? Or that people who have lived longer have experienced policies that are no longer in effect? What?
> Violent language: Language that practices a degree of aggression or machismo.
Hold on, "machismo", you say? As in:
> Machismo (/məˈtʃiːzmoʊ, mɑː-, -ˈtʃɪz-/; Spanish: [maˈtʃismo]; Portuguese: [maˈʃiʒmu]; from Spanish macho 'male' and -ismo)[1] is the sense of being "manly" and self-reliant, a concept associated with "a strong sense of masculine pride: an exaggerated masculinity".[2]
This is where the mask slips, although I think it was transparent to begin with. (Sorry about the use of idiom.) Yes, the same people that tell us to avoid "language that makes assumption of a gender" will happily and freely associate violence with masculinity on the same page. Thanks a lot, really. I certainly feel more included now.
I also have sympathy as, if this thread gets bigger, I bet you get more of the same reactions you’ve already described. Feels to me like this is less screaming into the void for nobody to hear and more into a hurricane where, for your troubles opening your mouth, it gives you back a metaphorical lungful of water to choke on and a metaphorical cloud of debris to batter you with.
Thanks for trying anyway
Edit:
> Thanks a lot, really. I certainly feel more included now.
Sadly, I believe that to them, this is a feature, not a bug
With respect, my politics are very different from what you seem to be inferring, if it makes sense to you to say that.
Love this one :D