Once you agree that one word is apt for removal then you agree with the agenda that the article author roundly rejects.

By going down the road of agreeing to some words to be removed you're then imposing a presumption of guilt on anyone who refuses to remove said words. If I maintain some software that uses the word slave or blacklist and I don't accede to making the changes to remove it, or agree to approve a PR that does the same, then it's presumed I am stubborn or worse still, racist. Despite the usage of the word being completely innocent.

Of course, context is everything, which only proves the point. You cannot systematically ban certain words.

Same here, until this debate surfaced I never thought about slavery when I saw these terms.

What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That's an actual master/slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure.

But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably.

Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it.

But it's always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.

And now I am imagining some video where they go down into sulfur mine and tell one of the miners "We bring great news for you! Github changed the default name of master code branches to something else! Gitlab too! It was kind of a little bit annoying a little but they're doing it anyway!"

Yeah and just think, then we could also tell those people about how a wrongly accused man in not their country was released after charitable efforts to clear his name, in the process overturning a negligent evidence handling process which will make things much better going forwards!

And...it still wouldn't matter to those people at all because it wouldn't change their specific situation!

This is a pretty insipid argument.

There was no argument. It was an image.

But the parent argument is valid, you just somehow missed it despite it being descibed and illustrated.

github's action isn't absurd because it doesn't change any random person's situation. It's absurd because of the specific people whose specific situations are not improved.

>I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word

I disagree, however I'm not a native English speaker. It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. We can't ban master/slave as a word or we will loose understanding of what it means. Another poster already mentioned that there are actual human slaves in existence today. I once heard in our time there are more human slaves than ever (mostly due to there being more people overall). It is sad that large companies like Microsoft(Github) choose to waste energy on such pointless activities instead of actually doing something about modern slavery.

Microsoft is still in unique position of being able to pressure hardware makers. Why don't they pressure them into at least trying to improve conditions of actual slaves that mine cobalt and other rare materials at the bottom of their supply chain?

> It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working.

It often isn't. It's not uncommon that "replica" or "secondary" actually make more sense.

Replica means replicated data, usually a copy.

Secondary means backup or parity module.

Slave means neither of those things. A slave, in technical terms, means a "dumb" worker (meaning it doesn't make its own decisions about how it operates within the greater system) that is controlled by another module in the system (often called a "master").

And no, "worker" isn't descriptive because it doesn't specify the nature of autonomy within the system - oftentimes, a worker might autonomously pick tasks off a queue and perform work offline or something. A slave is directly, actively and imperatively given commands by another entity in the system.

Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.

"Slave" is the only word that accurately infers the technical operating aspects of such an actor within system's design.

Stop messing with our vocabulary please. We need it to do real work. Bring on the downvotes, because I know the performative woke crowd loves to ignore these facts.

> Replica means replicated data, usually a copy.

Yes, and a slave database is probably better called a replica. Because that's more descriptive of what it is.

> Secondary means backup or parity module.

Or it could mean the second device on a bus, IDE master/slave for example seems to me to be better as primary/secondary (or even, first/second.)

> Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.

I dunno, that sounds to me like overloading a word unnecessarily.

> Stop messing with our vocabulary please.

No. Choosing more descriptive words is only a better thing. Stop trying to weirdly limit vocabulary, please.

Slave is the more descriptive word. These aren't my definitions. They have been around for ages. You're the one changing descriptions for your own amusement.

I would have likely upvoted you without the request for downvotes, but sure I guess I'll oblige. Even if it won't convince you to change, maybe I can warn other people you're using such an annoying rhetorical device.

Because the topic is annoying rhetoric. It doesn't do anything to solve the problem of racism or prejudice or poverty or socioeconomic imbalance or guard us against a police state or whatever it is people seek to "fix" with these inane changes.

I'm also very tired of being a labelled a Nazi, hence the tone.

I’ve also seen leader, follower in use.

I don't know of any meaning of the "slave" word besides a person doing involuntary labor.

BTW I remember Russians translating master/slave (in the IT context, e.g. primary/secondary master/slave for IDE PATA drives) as the the leading and the led.

That’s my impression too. “Slave” should be replaced with some other more neutral term, but “master” shouldn’t be a problem. There are multiple uses of it in different contexts, but the shared implication is of a definitive source:

Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts/Sciences; Mastery

Etc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.

The English word “master” comes from the Latin “magister,” which is freighted with thousands of years of meanings and history. The meaning of slaveowner was not one of those meanings until probably the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In Latin, “magister,” never meant the master of slaves (a “herus” most properly, or a “dominus,” an owner of anything with legal title to that thing). Instead, the “magister” was a leader of a group: the “magister equitum” was a cavalry commander, and a “ludi magister” a schoolmaster or classroom teacher. It is from the latter that we have “master” in the sense of an MA (magister artium) degree, which, like the PhD, was originally a teaching license. The use of the English “master” to refer to slavery is comparatively recent and might well not predate the eighteenth century.

On the other hand, “family” comes from Latin “familia” (household servants) from “famulus” (servant).

I'd be really interested to hear from any black people here - does the idea of having a device or piece of software being called a 'slave' really actually offend anybody?

I'd never subconsciously linked the term with human slaves, only ever really thinking of it as an abstract concept, until people started complaining about it... Part of it may be coming from a different cultural context, not being from the US though...

Why not use gimp for slave? Master and gimp.

Edit: No! You see Ivan, it should be master and margarita!

Master bedroom, master record, master copy. The word master is just a synonym for main.

'Master bedroom' is going out of real estate descriptions, being replaced by 'main bedroom'. E.g. https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/fun-at-home/a1087/m... but that's just the first google hit, there's plenty out there.

In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term 'master bedroom' was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it's now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with 'ouderslaapkamer', which is literally translated 'parent bedroom'. Although now that term itself is 'controversial' (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I'm not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) 'parent bedroom' implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can't make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn't be.

Not sure what my point is, maybe that using 'master' for 'main' is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?

About 'parent bedroom', a lot of houses are occupied by house-sharers these days. Some sharers get the 'parent bedroom', others get the non-parent bedroom but they are all the same age. It makes some sense to change the description.

That's a utilitarian argument (I think?) that I could get behind (not that anyone asks for my opinion on what rooms should be called). From that POV I guess it would be best to just call any room that isn't a kitchen or bathroom just 'room' and let buyers decide. But then again, most people don't have much imagination and like to be shown how space can or is intended to be used, much like how a neatly decorated house sells easier than an empty or cluttered one.

But the objections I read about last summer (tried looking but I can't find it any more) were moral, that the term is also 'oppressive' (not sure if that's the actual term they used, that was the gist of it), basically the same arguments that are made for removing 'master' from Git, language frames our thinking etc.

In the UK, lots of real estate descriptions side-step the problem completely and use terms like 'Bedroom 1' for the largest bedroom and 'Bedroom 2' etc for the 2nd largest.

I'd never heard of any stigma around the word 'master' until today... It's still as commonly used to refer to master bedrooms in Australia as it ever was...

In Ye Olde Dayes it referred to someone who had control or authority over a place, object, craft, etc -- a teacher would be a master for example. It's a common word across European languages, and certainly predated the atlantic slave trade.

Probably descended from the Latin word "magister", which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn't neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schools

Etymology of "master bedroom" seems to come from "Master's bedroom" in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)

It should be noted that of all of the ways master is used in this thread, master bedroom is pretty high up there in bad history and connotation. The etymology derives from the 'master of the house', a term which historically served to diminish the agency of wives, servants, and slaves. I don't know about master/main, but I could definitely get behind renaming master bedrooms.

And MasterCard. Everyone must switch to Visa now.

> I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word

Can you clarify this? If one machine/repo/system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn't "master" and "slave" be clear, descriptive choices of words?

I don't think anyone is arguing that it's always a bad metaphor, just that it's an unnecessarily violent one.

Do you not see how ridiculous that is? Do you wince every time you kill a process? A program crashes? You slice a steak? chown a file?

I don't think it's ridiculous, no. (But I think wincing at some of your examples would be.)

Really I'm not the best person to judge though. I'm happy to be guided by people who experience racism and groups tackling the legacy of slavery. Because those things seem important whereas my terminology preferences for asymmetric nodes in a distributed system, when there are plenty of sensible alternatives, seem less so.

Let's say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn't call that feature any variant of "ethnic clensing", "genocide" or "Holocaust", no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function.

Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description.

There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"

Actually, we do call it a "purge". That's not a word without connotations.

We also kill child processes. No-one's had a problem with that till now. Sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor.

These aren't metaphors, though. For example, a "parent process" uses the term "parent" that's defined as "a source or origin of a smaller or less important part," not "a father or mother," or one of the other half-dozen definitions

"Kill" is definitely a metaphor. A more literal phrase would be "force stop".

One of the definitions of "kill" is "to put an end to or cause the failure or defeat of (something)." This is not a metaphor either.

One of the definitions of "slave" is "A device (such as a secondary flash or hard drive) that is subject to the control of another". Is that not a metaphor either?

> There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"

Which is a worse analogy, because "following" is a choice and doesn't have to be strict, unlike slave (execute commands or get killed).

There is no need for the metaphor to be perfect. It should make clear what each device/process/whatever does without confusing people. The exact details aren't that important, understanding the roles is.

On my computer I can open a folder twice without closing it. I can't open a physical folder twice without closing.

With a race condition, no one cares if both processes started at the same time. That's not an important part of the analogy.

Even your point about killing doesn't really fit with the metaphor. Historically, whipping would be the most common punishment.

I do agree with your idea that the metaphor has to be clear. Modbus replace master/slave with client/server, which tends to confuse people used to the old analogy. It's not ideal, but neither is referring back to that time we could trade people.

We use terms like demon, basically a personification of evil.

The origin of the term is not so evil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Etymology

But we don't seem to care about origins of words, Master itself didn't mean slave owner until late in the 17th century.

And we'll stop in the event of the demonic invasion of Earth, but Doom 2 remains just a video game.

Demon, also spelled daemon, Classical Greek daimon, in Greek religion, a supernatural power. In Homer the term is used almost interchangeably with theos for a god. The distinction there is that theos emphasizes the personality of the god, and demon his activity.

Apparently copyright infringement is also tantamount to raping and pillaging on the high seas (piracy).

The important thing to know here is that it is not how you interpret the words that matter. Social justice isn’t asking how github or existing developers feel because it isn’t a change that takes their feelings into account.

I’m playing devil’s advocate. I don’t have strong feelings on this specific change, but I can see my line of thinking surprisingly absent in this entire thread.

Note how master is not even the main term used to describe people who had slaves. The term typically used is owner, as in "so and so was a slaveowner."

A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.

Both gitlab and github make heavy use of the term owner and ownership. Someone should let them know they have more renaming to do.

The word "master" when applied to slavery is itself a euphemism for owner, which is the truly abhorrent type of interpersonal relationship.

With the NBA right now, there is debate about teams having "owners."