Master and slave [in humans] aren't tied to any identity, race, nationality. Most modern slavery (that I've heard of) seems to be same-nationality.

How is apprentice a good analogy, the slave computing system is directed what to do, or works for the master; it's not training to be a master.

No-one is black nor white: anyone who thinks colour-named lists relates to skin colour is a moron. Presumably such people think night-time is racist.

People are rescued from slavery all the time. Bring mindful of casually using a term which they know to describe their years to decades of abuse and torture doesn't seem like a particularly difficult ask.

Master/Slave should be used judiciously?

I suppose we should get rid of Pastor/Father then. Abuse. Parent/Sibling. Abuse Superior/Inferior. Abuse.

The number of atrocities one may experience in life undermines the practicality of avoiding terminology for the sake of minute populations of people. Setting the precedent once opens the door to having to do it for everyone.

Hope you have enough words to not offend the rest of the class. And if you hide behind "well, there's just so many more of X than Y", then shame on you for cheating on your ideals so quickly, one, and welcome back to where everyone else was at in the first place, two.

Are you seriously arguing that slavery is not abuse? Or not always? Because I have no idea how to read your opening paragraph here except that way, and you seem not to understand the core difference between it and those other terms.

Naming matters, and if you wouldn't use a racial epiphet, a term for sexual assaults or slang for genitalia to name something, then you at least have enough of an idea that it's worth not using a term which defines an active and devastating practice, as well as a historical reality that's 3 human lifetimes old and defines an entire community of people, as just another term that's totally okay.

>Are you seriously arguing that slavery is not abuse?

No, I'm arguing if you're going to use the excuse that it is a form of abuse therefore the word should be verboten, then you have a lot of other words you need to add to your list of being insensitive to those who have suffered X or Y trauma, then I provided several examples thereof.

If you're really behind what people say they are, EVERY term that represents some potential source of physical or emotional harm at some point in their life should be on that list. People can be abused by siblings, parents, or authority figures; therefore these terms exist in the same slots that Master/Slave did. Yet there is no outcry over that when it comes to avoiding those words when there may be people who suffer from those words. I see no one clamoring for renaming the sibling axis of XML, or Child/Parent axes despite the child abuse association. Instead, those words sit entirely unmolested as they are not a shallow easy to achieve virtue signal in the current political environment, despite meeting the same hypothetical criteria of being a possible trigger of disclusion due to the emotional pain they might stir up in a hypothetical victim.

So what about those the hypothetically harmed people that won't win you political brownie points right now? Where is their inclusiveness tax going to be added? Or could it be that none of this was really about that at all and represented a desperate attempt to virtue signal in any way imaginable at any cost, even if it means having to completely rewrite decades of literature under the auspices of inclusiveness and pseudo-equality, and the firm insert of a wedge into a set of communities by a very vocal minority where there was previously no division?

I've no problem with conviction and dedication to a cause, however, if what you say you're about doesn't damn well line up with what you're actually doing prepare to be called out.

Issues of this type aren't handled by someone swearing off I.T. They are handled by acting like an adult and realizing that the only one responsible for buffering your emotional triggers is you. I remember during a Diwali celebration a couple of Hindi coworkers giving out swastikas as a good luck gift to everyone in the office; including a Jewish coworker. Did that coworker go running off to H.R. to have the Diwali celebration canceled? No. After a bit of awkward explanation between the Hindi coworkers and the Jewish coworker, it was smoothed over and life went on. That event made for some heartfelt conversation, and a great deal of empathy was traded between that coworker that day, but everyone left the encounter satisfied it was for the best that the issue was just dropped. Everyone still went back to work. Everyone still had their celebration, everyone was just a bit more mindful to run interference for that coworker afterward even if the Hindi folks just couldn't understand why someone wouldn't want their good luck charm. People coexist in spite of pain. In fact to do so is considered a virtuous act and a sign of growth, in that to do so is to transcend your history and circumstances and to become much more by inflicting the most terrible vengeance on an adversity filled origin: the vengeance of living happily and well in spite having come from those origins.

Everyone has the right to their pain. And it absolutely is not okay to willingly make pain worse once you know of it. However, it's not okay to completely turn the world upside down either because someone might get hurt; especially if in doing so you inflict pain on others. Arbitrarily deciding Terms-of-Art are suddenly verboten is just that. In a profession, the progression of language and culture surrounding the practice are just as near and dear to actual practitioner's as the day of the passing of the 14th Amendment may be to the previously disenfranchised. Hell, one of the first fixes I ended up doing when I was a teen with a freshly minted A+ cert was troubleshooting a set of miscofigured IDE drives. Understanding the importance of how the jumpers had to be, and that the term was meant to communicate that by way of analogy was one of the earliest times I felt like a computer person. To me, that knowledge and experience tied up in that Term-of-Art is intensely personal. To have someone come around and piss all over the term, ascribing to it meanings that were never more than a convenient illustrative analog and ascribing to those who dare use or value it for it's usefulness as a pedagogical tool over the years is painful, like it or not. It's painting with a broad, indiscriminate brush on the intentions and characters of a hell of a lot of decent people who at the time were just trying to be understood amongst each other. Equality states no one's pain takes primacy over anyone else's. It is not okay to inflict pain on one to assuage the pain of another. It is fine to take on that pain voluntarily, but that is a personal choice, and social pressure has no business being leveraged to force it to happen. In the name of just keeping drama to a minimum, it is generally considered the way to go when a Term-of-Art is being retired to not make a gigantic stink about it and assume the good-will of all involved. That characteristic has been notably absent from this entire movement, on both sides, but particularly on the side pushing for change. At no point has any consistency been shown or embraced with regards to the application of social pressure thereupon the rest of the community, who reflexively stay silent, just hoping the drama goes away. Now in the back of everyone's head is a censor wondering whether that phrasing is too risque. Whether that is too controversial to put into code.

You set out to right a wrong; to make a corner of humanity a "more welcoming place"; and yet all around I see nothing but contracts, codes of conduct trying to push ideals where before there was the implied understanding of "Don't break stuff, write code someone else won't unduly suffer to maintain, and leave it better for you having been there."

Where before, the only threat was having a patch rejected, is now the risk of being hunted down and having your character assassinated at the mere risk of someone taking a line of code expressed whimsically the wrong way. I've frankly never seen the online community less "free" than it has become in the last few years.

Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe I've lost the piss and vinegar of my youth, but the beautiful thing I once felt myself a part of looks far less friendly and welcoming to me than it was before. Which makes me quite sad, because I looked forward to contributing to it in a meaningful way once I felt confident in my skills, but the entire way it's morphed from "the faceless bunch that keep the bits flowing over the net" to Cult of Personnality: Developer Edition... I just don't want to anymore. Not for a community where it's more important to cause drama and unmake or make things harder, or to rewrite history in stead of preserving it. Not where you have to have a bloody document thrust in your face to tell you how to act because you're assumed to be a barbarian. A part of me I really liked has died after the last few years... That part honestly believed that the world was all about real equality, and not about brutal half-measures. Where people just trying to make something that works can be left in peace to do so. But that isn't how it works at all. Instead words are tortured and treated like instruments of mass destruction, stereotypes and prejudices run so deep I don't even know as I feel comfortable having really deep controversial discussions with other people I don't know anymore. This coming from someone who has previously entertained the counterposition that the State of Israel was founded in poor form given that it was previously promised to another group in WWII with someone who has more than enough reason to be offended at the mere thought, but still managed to engage in what to me was one of the most fulfilling, rewarding, and mutually enrichinching conversations of my life.

Anyway... This post kind of meandered into some places I did not at all set out to wander, but I'll leave it for posterity anyway. Take from it what you will. I just know I seem to be mourning and I can't figure out why no one else seems to be.

So in short. No, I'm not some evil insensitive racist fragile white bigot. I've been around the block more than once, and worked with all kinds and manner of folks, going out of my way to learn the of the value that even the most humble occupations provide, and the wisdom that underlies understanding before prescribing malice to every controversial term, and the skills that are learned by coexisting with, learning from, and teaching others the art of standing in another's shoes. In spite of all of that; there's still something that fundamentally rubs me wrong about how this entire chain of sentiment and events over the last 4 or so years have gone down. Because all of that I just mentionedseems to be completely absent now, and I don't know why.

Thank you, this is fabulous. You've managed to put into words a feeling that (I think) many people share but have trouble expressing clearly.

They're probably not rescued by those renaming branches though. Those people have more important things to do.

I can see the upside though: after the former slaves have been rescued from their "decades of abuse" which they lost an immense chunk of their life to and almost certainly left them mentally and physically scarred for the rest of their life, they'll take solace in the fact that some people somewhere on Earth have renamed their virtual thingamabobs. Then they will finally know peace.

> Then they will finally know peace.

No one's claiming that.

The word Abd in Arabic means slave/servant [0], so should we ask anyone named Abdullah (God's slave) to change their name because it has the word slave in it? It's not about using a word casually, it's about using it in an irrelevant context.

0.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_(Arabic)

Similarly the very common surname Das in India and nearby countries, meaning slave or servant. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_(surname) says servant, but Hindi and Bengali speakers I know of would translate दास or দাস as slave more than servant.)

I’m now amusing myself by imagining someone requesting that Das Keyboard rename their product…

Applying the term "slave" to yourself is pretty obviously quite different to building a construct and declaring something or someone else to be a slave.

In much the same way that the n-word is most definitely not a term for people with my ethnic background to use, given it's history.

I know foreign culture and all but no one ever chooses their birthname.

They do choose whether they keep using it though.

I'm sure the people now offended by master happely skip the football World Cup hosted in Qatar. That might actually make a difference.

Ok, why do you feel that?

Can you share some examples of what you believe to be toxic or exclusive behaviour? Personally (as a young bloke) I find IT to be extremely inclusive for those who want to learn, there's so much freely available information and material on the internet it's literally unbelievable. That's how a lot of us young blokes got into this space, and I don't see why minorities would be less likely to go down that path as well (although empirically minorities and women obviously are less likely to do so because they are massively underrepresented).

My women friends constantly get creepy messages in a professional setting. I was staggered when I was shown the abuse they would get after a tech talk. Half of it was "u r cute :D" the rest was "you don't know what you are talking about because obscure hair splitting point x"

For example I gave a talk where I was critical about the networking schemes of kubernetes. Had I been a woman I would have had a barrage of hostile questions. I know because my more experienced female co-worker raised the same points in her talk.

Another example is that person who did the visualisation for the black hole. She was abused simply for being a young woman. Those little shits who combed through the git repor to work out exactly which line she had touched. _Its just not healthy_

It wasn't until I worked at a place where the gender ratios were almost 50:50 that I saw the problems up close. _Every_ woman has a story where they were creeped on in the most toecurling way. These were people who'd only been in the industry for less than two years.

I have a daughter, and I want her to follow in my foot steps, but I don't want her to deal with the horrid shit the small but very vocal minority shart out.

> "you don't know what you are talking about because obscure hair splitting point x"

I'm a man and have been told that countless times. Are you sure it is a sex-specific issue? Some people just need to gatekeep their precious fields and feel attacked when a newcomer works on them. I would not go as far as calling that "abuse", I even find it mildly amusing when I'm on the receiving end of ridiculous critique.

> I have a daughter, and I want her to follow in my foot steps, but I don't want her to deal with the horrid shit the small but very vocal minority shart out.

I also have a daughter and a son, and I'm trying to teach both of them that the world is a horrible, hostile place, and that they are out to have an epic fight for survival. Petty creepers will be the least of their problems. There's also a few beautiful things in the world, and I'm also teaching them to appreciate them when these are found, but never to expect or somehow think that they are entitled to them.

The reason I don't think that it's "far more descriptive" is because we had a pair of words that meant exactly what they meant. You can't get more descriptive that what they meant. And if you say the actual words have in them the description, I don't think that's relevant because most words aren't like that unless you account for etymology but you don't do you.

I wonder where does that leave derivate words like greylisting (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting).

Watchlist?

Suspectlist?

Not sure I like either of those options, just the first things that came to mind.

I think I'm in favor of changing these terms, because the proposed replacements are clearer about what happens with the list's contents, and the original phrases are rooted in some analogies that are definitely problematic.

No, they don't really have those meanings any more, but changing them sends a signal to the people who could be hurt or offended by the terms that we want them to be welcome.

If b-word is no and white is yes, then something like "maybelist" or "perhapslist".

If people get swayed away from an entire profession because of a few words, how can they have the mental capacity for constructive criticism? For being told directly that their work is sub-par and they need to improve? And how do they have the capacity to do their job if they are constantly annoyed by a few words?

> If people get swayed away from an entire profession because of a few words, how can they have the mental capacity for constructive criticism?

First, you probably mean emotional capacity.

Second, very easily, especially if they have other lucrative and rewarding alternatives, which people with the mental capacity for software development probably do.

Having the capacity to deal with necessary unpleasantness to improve one’s quality of work doesn’t imply the lack of self-respect necessary to voluntary put up with completely unnecessary unpleasantness just to work in one of the very many fields one has the facilities to successfully perform in.

But thanks for bringing out the classic hazing defense.

What lucrative alternatives? Is there another Linux kernel I'm not aware of? Another Google?

If you can't sit down and do a good job instead of having inequality living rent-free in your head [1], who would prefer you over someone who can? Remember, there's a reason these people are a minority. Companies turn down applicants all the time so this special case isn't that influential.

[1] The girl who started the cancel movement of Dr. Stallman was admittedly too frustrated to do her job.

> Remember, there's a reason these people are a minority. Companies turn down applicants all the time so this special case isn't that influential.

such a wholistic view.

My female colleagues would love to sit down and do a good job, but they have to put up with men stalking them because they had the brass bollocks to give a speech at a conference without possession of a penis

You've missed my point. master/slave isn't the issue, that's something we can change when we have fixed the attitude problem.

Almost no one cares about the terminology. Its the constant dick pics, the "oh you're clever for an x". Those picky little shits who have to prove the point because they simply can't be wrong in front of that <<insert person type>> its the constant cutting across someone simply because they are different.

Constructive criticism is precisely that, constructive. Annotating _every single_ line of a pull request with nitpicks is being a top class dick.