We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech

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.

The "political correctness" in our society is extremely obnoxious.

We are criticizing perfectly appropriate and meaningful terminologies for the most ridiculous of reasons.

The argument that there is a clearly better terminology has no basis or evidence.

If an argument was made that modern tools are slowly migrating away from "master-slave" and Redis should keep consistency with that, it would need evidence.

The "connotation" mentioned by dhh has no business whatsoever to be mentioned in relation to the technical terms, and any argument that mentions it should be just ignored.

Should orphan processes be renamed as well? What about brainfuck?

Terrible connotations don't mean anything when you treat a word objectively and technically. I am not thinking about people when I am having issues synchronizing a slave db.

The same terminology is still used in bdsm and I would argue most instances of partners engaging in the specific dynamic is out of love.

I do agree that better terminology is available and should be used. Negative connotations, however, do not apply when the application in computer science is so far removed from what the author alludes to.

Random white dude here. Nobody cares about my opinion on this. But I thought the opinion of the African-American developer down the hall might be interesting, so I asked him. He saw nothing wrong with master-slave as a term for hot spares for databases and such.

Just one opinion, but he's got more right to be listened to than I do as to whether the term is offensive.

>Also, I know Twitter is a supercharged environment for carefully discussing these things.Happy to switch to email. Again, I recognize the impulse to digging in when attacked in public.

aka "I knew exactly what I was doing when I put you on blast, now I'll save face in public and claim respectability by retreating to the higher ground"

Antirez is taking a considered approach to this and weighing the very real time and technical cost to making an api change to a project the scale of Redis.

He has stated that if he were to start today, he'd use different terms. It's important to remember that even 10 years ago, life hadn't become as politicized as it is today. Master/slave was and is a very common technical term that does accurately describe the relationship.

All that being said, attacking open source developers of popular projects with politically motivated requests seems like a horrible idea. This guy did a ton of great work that many people have benefited from (for free) and now he's being bullied for even questioning if whether changing the API for a non-functional reasons is worth it.

We should treat the people who created something and offered it to the world for free with a bit more respect.

Antirez opened an issue in Redis repo for Changing Redis master-slave replication terms with something else: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/5335

I think it's best if we give our thoughts there.

it helps that the computer science concept is so simple that it has multiple plain english correlations. If it were put to a vote, I'd put in for Dom-Sub :P

The only way forward is to use a term that confuses and irritates in some other way, yet remains somehow aligned with the ideals of the agitators. So, try something like...

  master -> becomes: vegan

  slave  -> becomes: enabled

It needs to be treated this way, so that with every decision made going forward, someone is forced to remember the cognitive burden of considering the potential transgressions of cultural misinterpretation and insensitivity.

Now, when someone needs to debug production issues, their minds will weigh the consequences of a history that will never leave anyone alone, no matter how distant or removed from our current circumstances.

Is this concept legacy?

Disclaimer: I fully expect this response to become very light gray, as this is only partially a technical topic.

Traditional slavery required the slave owner to provide lodging, food, clothing. Modern slavery requires the slave to purchase their own home, clothing, food and pay compounded interest for most of their unnatural life.