Apple bans ‘blacklist’ and ‘master branch’ in search of inclusive language


Apple began moving towards more inclusive and less racially charged language at its WWDC conference in June.

Apple began moving toward more inclusive language at its WWDC conference in June.

Stephen Shankland / CNET

Apple has joined an industry trend toward more inclusive language in its technical domain, replacing the terms with racial connotations such as a “master” branch of a software project or a “blacklist” to describe the resources to which a computer may have blocked access.

Apple began making changes to its own documentation and beta software released last month at its WWDC conference. But on Thursday, he began describing the changes more directly on his developer website to developers who might be affected by the change. This is important since some changes in terminology can affect how the code works, for example, programming interfaces that use particular words.

“At Apple, we are working to remove and replace non-inclusive language in our developer ecosystem, including within Xcode, the platform API. [application programming interfaces], documentation and open source projects, “the website said.

Apple declined to comment beyond the developer’s announcement.

The effort to move technical language away from terms like “master” and “slave” has been going on for years. But it has gained new momentum with the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, 46, in Minnesota in May. Advocates do not hope to cure racial injustice, but are trying to tackle racism in domains where they have some influence.

Twitter formally started a similar lobby to abandon language with racist connections in January. An impetus for change was when black programmer Regynald Augustin received an email with the phrase “rekick automatic slave”. It was part of an engineering discussion about restarting a secondary process, but Augustin said it made him “angrier than I thought he would be in the workplace.”

Microsoft’s GitHub is making related changes, and programmers in Google’s Chromium project have discussed similar moves.

In the case of Apple, it is replacing the blacklist with the denial list, the whitelist with the allowed list, and the master branch with the main branch. When talking about people, Black is now capitalized.

The changes announced Thursday are also now included in the Apple Style Guide. For example, for the “blacklist / whitelist” entry, Apple says “Do not use. Instead, use a context-appropriate alternative, such as deny list / allow list or unapproved list / approved list.”

For the “master / slave” entry, Apple has this advice: “Don’t use it to describe the relationship between two devices or processes. Instead, use a context-appropriate alternative, such as primary / secondary, primary / replica, primary / child or host / client. “

Developers should be on the lookout for terminology changes that could affect them when their applications call Apple’s interfaces, Apple said.

“Developer APIs with exclusion terms will be deprecated as we introduce overrides in internal code bases, public APIs, and open source projects such as WebKit and Swift. We recommend that you closely monitor disapproval warnings in your databases code and proactively move to the latest APIs available. “Apple said.

Black Lives Matter. To visit blacklivesmatters.carrd.co to learn how to donate, sign petitions and protest safely.