Yahoo Finance Twitter drops ‘master’ and ‘slave’ from coding language
Twitter is to stop the use of terms like “master”, “slave”, and “blacklist” in its coding language in favour of more inclusive words.
The terms, which also includes “grandfathered”, “whitelist”, and “sanity check”, are used to describe things like databases, hard drives, and software projects.
For example, the “master” code describes the main version of the code where duplicates - or slaves - are built from.
Twitter also intends on changing the use of gendered pronouns like "he or him" and "guys" to "they or theirs" and "folks or people" in engineering documents and guides.
The changes were spearheaded by a pair of engineers at Twitter, Regynald Augustin and Kevin Oliver, who said that the use of the phrases that hark back to darker times in American history must stop.
Mr Augustin told CNET that an email that included the technical phrase “automatic slave rekick” had made him “madder than I ever thought I would be in the workplace”.
The pair have been pushing for the changes since January but the desire to do so have been accelerated through the company since the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man in police custody.
“Inclusive language plays a critical role in fostering an environment where everyone belongs,” Twitter said.
“At Twitter, the language we have been using in our code does not reflect our values as a company or represent the people we serve. We want to change that.”
The social media giant intends on switching “whitelist” to “allowlist”, “blacklist” to “denylist”, “master/slave” to “leader/follower”, and “man hours” to “person hours”. Twitter released a list of preferred inclusive phrases for its coding and engineering documents.
We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from using in favor of more inclusive language, such as: pic.twitter.com/6SMGd9celn
— Twitter Engineering (@TwitterEng) July 2, 2020
Twitter said it will update its documentation across its internal resources to reflect the change. It also said it’s bringing in a browser extension that will help teams “identify words in documents and suggest alternative inclusive words”.
“This isn’t just about engineering terms or code,” the company said.
“Words matter in our meetings, our conversations, and the documents we write. We know there’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re committed to doing our part.”
US bank JP Morgan has also committed to getting rid of the coding terms. Similarly software development GitHub said it was working on taking the “master” term out of its language.
In the UK, challenger bank Monzo said in February that it will get rid of the terms “blacklist” and “whitelist”. Similarly food delivery service Just Eat said that removing these terms was something the company was “examining”.
