Apple is working to frown on non-inclusive language in its developer ecosystem, forwarding an initiative that started at this year’s World Developer Conference in June.
The company announced the change in an update to its developer portal on Thursday, saying the coding terminology will be modified to remove or replace language that might be perceived as racist for Xcode, platform APIs, documentation, and open source projects.
Instead of references to “blacklist”, “whitelist”, “master branch”, “master / slave” and other potentially insensitive terminology, Apple will implement more neutral language such as “allow list” and “deny list”. “Principal” will take the place of “master” at the default SCM branch in Xcode 12, the company said. The term “black” is now capitalized when referring to people.
Developers are encouraged to study the API changes and incorporate the new language into their respective projects.
“Developer APIs with exclusion terms will be deprecated as we introduce overrides to internal code bases, public APIs, and open source projects like WebKit and Swift,” said Apple. “We encourage you to closely monitor the disapproval warnings in your code bases and proactively move to the latest APIs available in the platform SDKs.”
Updated terminology and other relevant changes have been added to the Apple Style Guide.
Apple’s initiative comes amid a broader push to disapprove of racist terminology from computer technical references. The effort has been ongoing for years, but gained new urgency with the Black Lives Matter movement and protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd in May.
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