The increased awareness of all things related to race spurred by the death of George Floyd has spread to every corner of life.
The newest area where change is being brought is in the word of computer coding, as Twitter and JPMorgan are removing the words slave, master and blacklist from their codes.
Slave and Master refer to a code where the execution of one code affects how another code is printed. Blacklist is a list of various forbidden items on a website, such as auto-detecting coarse words or blocking access from certain IPs and such.
While the name of these codes existed for a long time, there has been an increasing call from within the engineers who called for the renaming of these codes, especially as the engineers themselves got much more diverse throughout time.
Along side the Black Lives Matter movement, two engineers in particular have lobbied and asked for big companies to rework the kind of discriminatory language that is so commonly used in these settings. These two are Regynauld Augustin and Kevin Oliver, who both work for Twitter.
Chief engineer of Twitter Michael Montano emphasized the role that words play when it comes to forming thought. Montano said that he will ensure that a more inclusive language is used throughout the entire process.
Twitter said that the codes for master and slave will be replaced with leader and follower or primary and replica. Similarly, the code for blacklist is said to be renamed as denylist. JPMorgan has announced that they will make similar changes as well.
Augustin explained how he felt a dire need for rewording after he got an internal email that read ‘automatic slave rekick’. While he said he knew exactly what the coding meant, he could no longer pass over the usage of the word slave especially after the death of Floyd.
Augustin said that while he has been using the word slave ever since college, it just felt so different in today’s world, saying that he felt fury for the first time.
Twitter said that other codes names will also be renamed. For instance, the word dummy value is likely to be replaced with placeholder value or sample value as the word dummy may offend those with mental illnesses.
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Replaced!