A short and mostly unserious rant.
Much of the industry seems to have come around to changing the default
branch for git from master to main. It's absolutely terrible. Oh,
not changing from master. That's fine. A modest improvement in
making our industry kinder. I'm all for it. But we picked main.
Literally any time anything to do with git comes up, you've got a whole mess of people complaining about what a terrible user experience it has, and how hard it is to bring new people into the industry when we use such unfriendly tools, and yada yada yada. And they're mostly right.
The git data model is awesome, but the command line interface is an inconsistent disaster that we're all begrudgingly forced to learn. I feel like I have a really solid understanding of the data model and I'm a rebasing and reflogging fiend, but I still end up having to double-check the man page every time I get away from the twenty or so commands I use on a regular basis. But we all recognize how hard it is to change software that's been in widespread use. Backwards compatibility is important.
So there we were as a whole software industry, faced with a rare opportunity to break free from a legacy decision...
And we picked main.
Main? Main!?
The correct answer was trunk.
Obviously.
Choosing main is exactly the sort of short-term local-maxima
thinking I've come to expect from the industry. It's short, and it
preserves some muscle memory from master. So you're saving typing
one (1) character over trunk, assuming you're not a professional
with shell completion. And you're preserving muscle memory, which only
makes a difference during the month or so after your team has switched
away from master, and only for the set of people who are currently
using git. It means nothing to the umpteen million people who will be
coming into the industry over the next several decades (at least!)
that we'll be using git.
Instead, we could have chosen trunk and made some tiny marginal
improvement in the beginner's mental model for all those people. And
calling the default branch trunk is fun. Have some fun for fuck's
sake. A main branch is dry toast.