Complete with someone saying we shouldn't change anything to preserve the history and culture of the older generation.
I personally believe that lack of clarity is the only reason these kinds of changes should be made.
I assumed that master/slave terminology came from the idea of copying from a master record vinyl, am I missing something?
I just wonder if this will set a precedent of controversy about the most innocuous things, just to make sure it's politically correct.
Specifically, even if the phrase is based on an earlier technology, what is that technology's terminology based on? There is no other answer but actually slavery at the end.
Master/slave relationship is not uncommon throught history. I think if someone learned history well this wouldn't offend them all that much. But still,this isn't a misunderstanding worth making anyone uncomfortable. When I was a teenager,I remember similarly feeling uncomfortable with IDE interface's master/slave terminology.
Is contributing to an open source project by any chance an assignment in some college class? Either that or they must be having a really slow couple days over at metaphorical Python HQ where bike-shedding has been taken up to pass the time.
Why it this? Because it is not motivated by code improvement but by political demands. The clarity of meaning will be lost by these changes for future developers, because of the need to censure the word "master" from speech and writing.
And yes, this sets a precedent that all you need to do find more words on the euphemism treadmill that may be labeled offensive to force their replacement. This will result in further loss of clarity in documentation where clarity can be reduced whenever someone demands that "for diversity reasons" words need to be deleted.
Let's go the other way around, how many words that might sound bad, in how many languages, exists in all the codebases. And now, how many people feeling bad about this I have to find to make change to some code? I know that sounds ridiculous, but I want to say, hey where's the limit, should we all speak using some machine - neutral words?
And another argument, what if that kind of change could brake my project, do somebody care about me?
The use of master/slave quickly describes unique a relationship. One orders, the other obeys blindly.
What alternatives are there:
Parent/child - no child obeys willingly, and this implies a hierarchy or inheritance where the parent and child are similar
Leader/follower - this implies the follower will eventually catch-up, great for databases, not so much for describing work allocation.
Aplha/Omega - this was in that comment chain, without going off and learning about wolf social structures, I’d have no clue what this is. It’s just foolish.
Master/slave terminology is used as a metaphor to describe a technical behaviour, it’s not an implicit approval of past human behaviour.
The only people who recommend this change are virtue signalling - they want to look like their are doing a great good, and they pick an easy target. No doubt when confronted with the choice of “change this term, or we call you exclusionary/non-diverse/racist”, people will reluctantly choose the former every time. Which means the signaller gets what they want, change and the ability to say “I did something” not matter how trivial.
If you want to make progress in tech, don't let "progress" (in quotations) live rent free in your mind. Focus on actually building stuff.
I hate to use oppression Olympics as an argumentative avenue but I'm a Slav, the word slavery comes from the enSLAVement of Slavic people.
It's often an accurate description of the relationship and even if it's just slightly inefficient, still works great. Why pollute your mind and thought stream with such trivial qualms. Build. Learn. Don't sweat dumb crap.
Same with whitelist / blacklist. From an English perspective these and master/slave have been archetypes for as long as the language has existed. Don't make problems where there are none, and don't TRY to pollute my mind by making me think there are problems, where again there are none. Enough people outside of tech are doing that to the populace.
Political correctness/SJWism has gone insane and cannot be taken seriously.
And what about a change of commander/obeyer? Sure it might not roll off the tongue at first, but the concept is clearly expressed and if it makes the community more inclusive then I would argue it's a technically better choice.
It really depends on what you mean by "a context that is oppresive to certain groups", but I think this is roughly the same. Nobody should have to endure insults, bullying, harrasment, sexual innuendos, etc. in open source projects, especially maintainers and contributors. However it sounds to me like hurting over words such as master/slave, male/female, kill/fork/dongle/etc is an incredibly small group of people actively looking to cause problems. If you absolutely can't accept the terminology "killing a process" then perhaps the problem lies with you, not 40-odd years of convention.
> The word slovo ("word") and the related slava ("glory, fame") ... [0]
The word is indeed derived from "slav" ethnonym and it's unbelievable that no one actually cares. The whole thing smells not just "word policing" but "history revisionism".
Jewish people were enslaved for so much of their history (by babylonians, egyptians etc) should we simply forget that because some people feel uneasy hearing the word slave and imagining this inhumane practice? Also no one forces you to antropomorfize technical concepts.
It strikes me how fast the discussion went off topic to the "subconscious racism" of black people in the previous threads about this. [1]
As mentioned in other discussion, this is a very slippery slope to go. Next time I won't be able to use the technical term "torture testing" to refer to server workloads because torture sounds aggressive and inhumane. What more combination of words I won't be able to use? Will I be able to write about "cookie stealing", it's illegal to steal so we surely need to ban that word. There are after all people that have their whole life savings stolen from them by the crooked investment managers so the "stealing" concept will remind them about that and might hurt their feelings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs_(ethnonym) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17930979
What word will one replace "slave" with? Should we go to the origins of the word and just use ethnonym "slav" instead? After all it has only positive connotations {The word slovo ("word") and the related slava ("glory, fame"...}. And sure slavic people won't mind right?! /s
I guess it all comes down to context, really... It's easy for me to sit here and say "This change is meaningless" but I guess if I had lots of influence over Python and I knew people who were actually suffering because of this, I may approach it differently.
I'm not totally opposed to changing master/slave. But in light of the real cost of this sort of breaking change I'd want to see some evidence of actual harm, rather than some guy(who, I feel compelled to point out, is a white man) insisting that we change it for what are, at best, totally theoretical and speculative harms.