Apple next in line to change use of language

Following on from our story last week that Twitter devs are moving to change the language they use while engineering to something more inclusive by removing terms such as Whitelist and Blacklist from use, it seems that other companies are following hot on the heels.

Apple is the next to confirm that they have joined the industry trend and will use more inclusive technical language and remove words with a racial overtone such as Master and Slave and Blacklist.

Apple made changes to its developer website yesterday replacing the terms and explaining the reasoning behind the move.

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

There are many who will not necessarily see the immediate point of the changes, but in removing language with racial overtones now we start to move to a position where people don’t grow up around it and subconsciously think it’s the norm which has to be a good thing.