• towerful@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    It’s not been cancelled.
    I’m sure someone raised concerns over racist origins, or that they were uncomfortable with the terms. Or perhaps programmers did it themselves as a part of introspection that came around with GitHub changing from “master branch” to “main branch”.

    Which likely lead people to realise that blacklist and whitelist aren’t really descriptive.
    Blacklist came from the 1600s, regarding regicide. And the opposite of that is obviously whitelist.
    But it doesn’t actually describe what it’s doing, and ultimately it is an idiom.
    Removing idioms in coding is generally good practice.
    And you can have other things like “FilterList” or “AdminList” or whatever.