Dear all,

Apparently renaming a git branch to follow the general convention is now an unbearable outrage. It strikes me as a somewhat odd hill to die on, but okay. However there is a code of conduct that is supposed to be followed here https://www.python.org/psf/conduct. Let me quote

> Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include: […] Insults, put downs, or jokes that are based upon stereotypes, that are exclusionary, or that hold others up for ridicule

If the discussion here can stay civil for changes with far more repercussions for Python (e.g. controversial PEPs), surely it can stay civil for this too. So could we all please refrain ourselves from non-constructive and derogatory comments? If this change actually causes non-hypothetical issues, let us discuss these instead of resorting to poor attempts at being cleverly sarcastic.

Best,

E

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 12:54, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 09, 2021 at 08:27:19PM +0000, Pablo Galindo Salgado wrote:

>    The Steering Council discussed renaming the master branch to main and
>    the consensus was that we should do that.

And about time too. Can we now tackle some of the equally pressing use
of offensive terms that are common in the Python community, starting
with the name of the language itself?

Pythons are snakes, which is triggering to people with a phobia of
snakes. About one third of all people, or more than two *billion*
people, suffer from some level of phobia towards snakes.

The popular "nose" testing framework is a blatant antisemetic and
neo-nazi dog whistle.

"bool" is named after George Boole, a problematic white man who
appropriated the culture of both the Middle East and East Asia.

"dict" is confusable with, and is often abbreviated to, an offensive
word. And don't even get me started with the obvious sexism of "tty".

Unicode is racist because it has unified Chinese, Japanese and Korean
characters as if they were the same thing, and relegates non-Western
languages to second class status:

https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name

It also includes a teddy bear symbol, which is named after notorious
racist and imperialist Theodore Roosevelt, and no less than *six*
swastika symbols. Also the Cross of Jerusalem, the symbol of such openly
fascist groups as the Federal State of Austria during the 1930s and the
Russian far-right extremist organisation the People's National Party.

It even has a symbol for chains, which is associated even more closely
with slavery than "master".

Speaking of slavery, in the standard library we have ChainMap and
itertools.chain.

We have the ableist "runpy", and in the random module a function named
after Vilfredo Pareto, who supported the rule of fascist dictator Benito
Mussolini. There are the token and tokenize modules, which are offensive
for their association with both sexist and racist views.

The tarfile module is associated with the racist Uncle Remus stories,
and a derogatory term for US Blacks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/doug-lamborns-tar-baby-quagmire/2011/08/03/gIQAKmXnsI_blog.html

The textwrap module uses a derogatory racist and fatphobic term dozens
of times.

http://rsdb.org/slur/chunk

Each of these issues are just as important as the "master" issue.


--
Steve
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