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Comment by rhodysurf | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the master/slave thing pisses me off. They are words in the dictionary used to describe something and that is all.

Except that people's experience of words doesn't come from the dictionary. Words aren't experienced in a vacuum, people assign different meanings to words based on their own experiences. To some of us, "master/slave" is just a phrase to describe an architecture. To others of us, it has historical connotations that makes it inappropriate.

Concepts don't stop existing merely because you ban the words used to refer to them. Masters and slaves have always existed in human history and will probably always exist. When we use the terms in software, we draw a metaphor from this experience. There's nothing wrong with that.

I don't see where anyone has proposed we "ban" any words at all. What I see are people who suggest that we use a different set of words, that accomplish the same ends as "master/slave," except with words that aren't associated with slavery.

> "Masters and slaves have always existed in human history and will probably always exist"

I don't understand this argument. I'm not saying your statement is wrong, but I fail to see how this is a justification for using the words in a technical context.

I don't accept that we can't use words that accurately describe a concept merely because some people find that concept unpleasant.

Okay but that doesn't mean the word stops existing. My point is that master and slave are general terms, not specific to one group of people. This is a slippery slope to go down.

Sure it's a slippery slope, but let's think about this from the perspective of an open-source project (where I most see this issue debated).

If a goal of yours is to attract as many people to contribute to your project as possible, then it only makes sense to avoid using terms that might discourage others by making them uncomfortable, at least in the context of the project (issue trackers, documentation, etc). Saying, "well those words are defined as ___ in the dictionary" doesn't change the fact that you are losing potential contributors. Especially when there are other terms that work just as well, it only makes sense to avoid potentially problematic ones.

I'm not going to say you (as an individual) should stop using those words. That is your business, not mine, and if you run into any consequences of using specific words, that is also your business.

By this thinking any word without context can cause outrage.

All I'm saying, is if you recognize that a word is potentially costing you contributors, why wouldn't you change it if there is another word that is just as good?

I'm just trying to be practical, not trying to force PC-think down anyone's throat.

Right, but in this case master slave often describes the relationship between computer devices better than anything else. The slave device has no choice of what to do other than what a master device sends it. Leader and follower doest quite capture that as well in my mind.

> has no choice of what to do

Tell that to the MySQL cluster I inherited at my last job ;-).

In all seriousness, I have to disagree with you, in that I think leader/follower captures the relationship fine. But at this point, I think "whether the word captures the relationship" is very subjective.

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