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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Microsoft's adoption of the Google-developed Chromium browser engine for Edge has resulted in a proposal to cleanse the open-source code of "potentially offensive terms."
Issue 981129 in the Chromium bug log lists a suggestion by Microsoft to “cleanup of potentially offensive terms in codebase” aims to rid the software blueprints of language such as whitelist (change to allowlist), blacklist (change to blocklist), “offensive terms using ‘wtf’ as protocol messages,” and other infelicities.
This bug report was raised by a Microsoft contributor, who stated: “We are just sharing a subset of what PoliCheck scanned for us,” Policheck being “a machine-learned model that another team manages that does context based scanning on hundreds of file formats.”
Googler Rick Byers, a Chromium engineer, gave the issue a cautious welcome, saying: "This sounds like a good strategy to me, thanks for doing this! We certainly have never intended for anything in the codebase to be potentially offensive, but I'm also not aware of anyone making an effort to find them all." He added:
I don't expect Chrome teams to necessarily make these bugs a priority (we haven't seen this pose a problem for us in practice as far as I know), but if cleaning this up is valuable for Microsoft (or any another Chromium contributor) then we should have no trouble getting the necessary code reviews (at least in the platform code). And yeah there are folks who look for GoodFirstBug and may want to pick up some easy commits.
Although changing comments or variable names in the source code is generally invisible to the user, this kind of revision can be problematic if it wrecks things like names in preferences and policies.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @11:40AM
Jawohl, mein herr. I am sure that "blacklist" came from "black sheep" - the connection is so obvious! It would have nothing to do with finding things objectionable, suspicious, or in need of punishment [macmillandictionaryblog.com] from the 18th century. And would have nothing to do with a biblical mistranslation [phrases.org.uk] either. Could they all be lumped together in 16th century usage? Certainly could be, but if you have evidence for that you might share it. Until then I'll assume you are making up what you think the etymology should be.
But it really has nothing to do with etymology but what people today are viewing such terms as. There are many words that had innocent origins but today are considered racial epithets. Blacklist isn't there, but nor does how the word was historically used mean anything with what today is and tomorrow should become.
The terms "allow" and "deny" are more descriptive and accurate to what the lists are actually supposed to do. Why not use them?
It would have nothing to do with your being judgmental enough to decide anyone who disagrees with your convenience would be a snowflake, either.