Avoid master/slave terminology

Those namings relate to male/female sexes, not genders, so thats not applicable here. And even if it was applicable, if the name is steeped in a context that is oppressive to certain groups and there is a viable alternate name, what's the harm in exploring those alternatives and making conversations comfortable for everyone who might be involved?

This issue has popped up at least once before where someone on Github was complaining about the terminology "killing a child process" because they had recently had a death in the family and were trying to cope. Most agreed that changing it would be a tremendous waste of time (think of all that perfectly good documentation and code which must be rewritten), unnecessarily polarizing (I won't join your project because your dictionary words hurt me!), placing the needs of the few squarely over the needs of the many, and teaching people that "social justice" means "everything should be as I want it."

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.

What about phasing out the usage of offensive terms in the same way we do with non-programming languages? We don't go back and correct all of our books, but when reading old books the offensive terms that were common in previous times stick out like sore thumbs. And I know that I have at least a few phrases that I used to use without a thought that I conciouslly chose to drop from my speech now that I see the wrong in them. I think we can choose to change as a community with little overhead to the "many" but provide a great benefit to the "few".

>relate to male/female sexes, not genders

It is the same.

That's a reasonable suggestion that's hard to argue with - I still don't see it happening. There's no consensus on what words are bad (what makes "kill" worse than "dongle", etc.) or how these should be phased out. Does that mean at the next major version number? By 2025? Will the documentation be internally inconsistent during those years? If some projects agree and others don't there would be cumbersome fragmentation. And... for what? So a couple dozen people in the entire community can avoid the concepts of murder or sex or slavery, as if they didn't exist?

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.