I see no supporting argument for “replacing master with main at GitHub hurts others”; is it somewhere in this thread and I wasn’t able to see it unassisted? If not, we would benefit from you typing it up.
I reviewed your initial post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500764 and I was unable to parse out of your objections why you think that this change hurts others. Could you summarize?
Ok, here is my objection. I'm saying that it won't help people at all. It is an indulgence to make Microsoft feel like they are doing something positive when it will not materially improve lives.
It would be fine if it just made them feel good as people's mental health is an important thing that too many ignore. But, this will suck attention away from people who are actually doing things that will help people. The world has only so much time to pay attention, and that time is valuable. Microsoft is just adding to the noise.
They are bringing homemade cupcakes to a food bank and making the national news.
Inconsistent naming standards hurts everyone. Now some repositories will have master branches while others will have them named something else, it makes things harder to work with. If every developer spends just a minute wondering where the main branch is before realizing the new naming standards, that is still a lifetimes worth of time lost due to this change.
