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 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/LZKYCN6K2ZJB4WJZ5NMQ43MU3I63IJUA/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
