The Go Programming Language Gets Rid of "Racism" in Code

The codebase of the Go programming language has undergone changes that have resulted from protests in the United States. The phrases whitelist/blacklist and master/slave were removed from the source texts and documentation. Public rejection towards these phrases was supposedly increased after the events in America.

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The Internet ProtocolIvan Tkachenko

The phrases "whitelist" and "blacklist" are now replaced with "allowlist" and "blocklist." "Master" and "slave," depending on the context, are replaced with "process," "pty," "proc" and "control." These changes will not lead to a violation of backward compatibility and confusion because most of the corrections are in the comments, tests, and internal variables.

The announcement of the changes says that the developers do not intend to unleash the next debate:

There's been plenty of discussion on the usage of these terms in tech. I'm not trying to have yet another debate. It's clear that there are people who are hurt by them and who are made to feel unwelcome by their use due not to technical reasons but to their historical and social context. That's simply enough reason to replace them.

Google has also supported the Black Lives Matter movement and eliminated such subtle forms of racism as black and white lists in Chrome.

Starting in October 2019, a recommendation in the official manual to use a "racial-neutral" code appeared in the project with the source code Chromium, but not all followed these recommendations. Only now, the new code version was introduced, where the word "blacklist" was replaced with a "blocklist" without violating any part of the browser.