22nd Week of 2022

Coding⚑

Python⚑

Python Snippets⚑

• New: Define a property of a class.

  If you're using Python 3.9 or above you can directly use the decorators:

  class G:
      @classmethod
      @property
      def __doc__(cls):
          return f'A doc for {cls.__name__!r}'
  

  If you're not, the solutions are not that good.

Git⚑

• Improvement: Master to main branch change's controversy.

  The change is not free of controversy, for example in the PDM project some people are not sure that it's needed for many reasons. Let's see each of them:

  • The reason people are implementing the change is because other people are doing it: After a quick search I found that the first one to do the change was the software freedom conservancy with the Git project. You can also see Python, Django, Redis, Drupal, CouchDB and Github's statements.

  As we're not part of the deciding organisms of the collectives doing the changes, all we can use are their statements and discussions to guess what are the reasons behind their support of the change. Despite that some of them do use the argument that other communities do support the change to emphasize the need of the change, all of them mention that the main reason is that the term is offensive to some people.

  • I don't see an issue using the term master: If you relate to this statement it can be because you're not part of the communities that suffer the oppression tied to the term, and that makes you blind to the issue. It's a lesson I learned on my own skin throughout the years. There are thousand of situations, gestures, double meaning words and sentences that went unnoticed by me until I started discussing it with the people that are suffering them (women, racialized people, LGTBQI+, ...). Throughout my experience I've seen that the more privileged you are, the blinder you become. You can read more on privileged blindness here, here or here (I've skimmed through the articles, and are the first articles I've found, there are probably better references).

    I'm not saying that privileged people are not aware of the issues or that they can even raise them. We can do so and more we read, discuss and train ourselves, the better we'll detect them. All I'm saying is that a non privileged person will always detect more because they suffer them daily.

    I understand that for you there is no issue using the word master, there wasn't an issue for me either until I saw these projects doing the change, again I was blinded to the issue as I'm not suffering it. That's because change is not meant for us, as we're not triggered by it. The change is targeted to the people that do perceive that master is an offensive term. What we can do is empathize with them and follow this tiny tiny tiny gesture. It's the least we can do.

    Think of a term that triggers you, such as heil hitler, imagine that those words were being used to define the main branch of your code, and that everyday you sit in front of your computer you see them. You'll probably be reminded of the historic events, concepts, feelings that are tied to that term each time you see it, and being them quite negative it can slowly mine you. Therefore it's legit that you wouldn't want to be exposed to that negative effects.

  • I don't see who will benefit from this change: Probably the people that belongs to communities that are and have been under constant oppression for a very long time, in this case, specially the racialized ones which have suffered slavery.

    Sadly you will probably won't see many the affected people speak in these discussions, first because there are not that many, sadly the IT world is dominated by middle aged, economically comfortable, white, cis, hetero, males. Small changes like this are meant to foster diversity in the community by allowing them being more comfortable. Secondly because when they see these debates they move on as they are so fed up on teaching privileged people of their privileges. They not only have to suffer the oppression, we also put the burden on their shoulders to teach us.

  As and ending thought, if you see yourself being specially troubled by the change, having a discomfort feeling and strong reactions. In my experience these signs are characteristic of privileged people that feel that their privileges are being threatened, I've felt them myself countless times. When I feel it, +I usually do two things, fight them as strong as I can, or embrace them, analyze them, and go to the root of them. Depending on how much energy I have I go with the easy or the hard one. I'm not saying that it's you're case, but it could be.