From Thomas Wouters, on behalf of and with full support of the Python Steering Council: I’ll post a separate reply about the merits of the decision, but we have to talk about this post from Steven D’Aprano in particular. Steven, this reply -- its tone and its message -- are completely unacceptable. It is offensive, dismissive and insulting. It’s a bad faith argument ridiculing a good faith effort. It is particularly insulting that you take the time to draw false equivalences to arguments that weren’t made on this list, and that you’re assuming motivation and ridiculing it, without taking the time to engage in the actual arguments. There are plenty of sources online that you could’ve used to learn more, or you could have just asked in this thread. Instead, you posted this sarcastic, denigrating, mocking reply. Yours isn’t the only post that crosses the line in this thread, but it is the worst. It is an example of the kind of discourse that is too common and that reflects very badly on python-dev. It creates an atmosphere of disrespect and abuse, and actively scares away both experienced contributors and new ones. This is not conjecture; I and others on the SC have heard from more than a dozen people that this is exactly the case. This is not acceptable. It has to stop. The PSF Code of Conduct WG has sent the SC a recommendation on this issue. It recommended a temporary ban from python-dev for Steven, and a warning for someone else. While the SC believes a temporary ban would certainly be a reasonable action, we decided to instead make this public statement, as a warning to everyone. The SC wants to be clear that this statement applies to everyone who has made uncivil and inflammatory posts. This tone is not acceptable from anyone. The SC wants to make this very clear: this is a final warning to remind everyone that this behaviour will result in strong measures, including bans and ejections. If you want to argue something, do so on the merits, in good faith, and with empathy and consideration. If you can only ridicule someone, their motivation or their lived experience, please keep it to yourself.

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-...

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-qua...

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