crazyilian's blog

On the question of diversity on Codeforces
By crazyilian, 4 years ago, In English

Rating

Codeforces has ranks "candidate master", "master", "grandmaster", "international grandmaster" and "legendary grandmaster". I propose renaming these titles for the following reasons:

  1. They are insultive to differently-abled people who can't reach high results and thus can't "master" competitive programming.
  2. "master" sounds like a reference to master/slave terminology, it needlessly references awful history. I believe it's inappropriate for such a great platform as Codeforces.

I think the following titles should be used instead:

  1. "candidate master" -> "candidate professional"
  2. "master" -> "professional"
  3. "grandmaster" -> "genius"
  4. "international grandmaster" -> "international genius"
  5. "legendary grandmaster" -> "legendary genius"

Additionally, I believe "genius" is more descriptive than "master" or "grandmaster".

I want to note that a similar change was adopted by many projects:

  1. Python — Avoid master/slave terminology
  2. Android — Changing whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/blocklist
  3. Go — Replace usages of whitelist/blacklist and master/slave
  4. ZFS — Remove unnecessary references to slavery
  5. PHPUnit — Initial work on removing the blacklist/whitelist terminology
  6. GitLab — Rename master branch to main branch in the GitLab project

Theme

Codeforces doesn't have any sort of dark theme. Even the special extensions (like a Dark Reader) don't really work with it — it leaves the logo background white. It looks like white is always better than black no matter what.

I hope you'll add dark theme as soon as possible and make it the default one.

just to point out: this is a sarcastic post, except for yet another request for a dark theme

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Comments Comments (4)
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4 years ago, # |
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Can't tell if the titles are jokes or not.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    Exactly. Can't tell if he's just trolling or milking the current global situation. I hope it's the former.

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4 years ago, # |
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So in chess too, we should rename Grandmaster to Genius and National Master to National Genius? I believe this type of renaming is quite gratuitous, and if anything makes the title names more arrogant (after all, imagine working your face off the Earth to reach a Grandmaster title, only to be called a genius and have all your hard work brushed aside in place of "talent"). I have never thought of the current titles as having a master/slave relationship (the term "master" has another definition being having or showing very great skill or proficiency.), and I doubt many others have thought of it that way either. Sorry to say, but I think the current naming convention is perfectly fine, maybe even more so than that which you have proposed.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    I believe the proposed renaming is a parody on the modern "master" word removing (as pointed out by the reference to GitLab).

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