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Comment by tkfu | Hacker News Reader

Good for them! When it was first pointed out to me that these terms feel harmful for many, I rolled my eyes a little bit. But after thinking about it for a while, a few things became clear:

(1) There's no particular reason to start using the terms in a new project

(2) Leader/follower is much more accurate and clear than master/slave in basically every way

(3) It's a lot less difficult than I originally thought to fix legacy docs and code with nicer language

(4) The fact that master/slave has never bothered me personally has absolutely zero bearing on whether I should support their continued use.

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Well, there is one drawback I can think of: they are well established terms that have a very specific meaning on an engineering context.

I agree that "leader/follower" might be easier to grasp for someone who has never encountered these terms before, but it is also true that it causes a bit of confusion for more experienced engineers.

For example: if I am reading documentation about a hardware controller and find the "leader/follower" terms I would wonder (and, in fact, this has happened to me in the past) if they have the same meaning as "master/slave" or if the author has decided to use these other terms because there is some particular behavior quirk that applies to this hardware that I should be aware of.

All in all, you have to compare cons and pros and, for this particular context (engineering), I think correctness and lack of ambiguity is more important than "feelings"... but this is (obviously) just my personal opinion.

It isn’t clear to me that master/slave has a specific meaning. For instance in the DNS world, it's better to talk about read-replicas, public authoritative servers, update servers, zone transfer servers, DNSSEC signers, etc. - the nuances aren't captured by a primary/secondary distinction. The old master/slave terminology is badly misleading since the DNS protocol doesn't allow the master to command the slaves to do anything: in the DNS it's the slaves that make the demands. (BIND now supports primary/secondary in its configuration though there are parts that still require the old words.)

> it is also true that it causes a bit of confusion for more experienced engineers.

Experienced engineers are used to handling new and changing terminology. It’s the nature of the job.

This is a ridiculous and sad move. We are living in 1984 a bit more every day.

Master/slave was chosen on purpose because it is very clear, clearer than the alternative you suggest, and is no more offending that using Knight, gladiator, etc.

Sometimes we must realise that an issue lies with the people who are offended by anything and everything, not with what offends them.

The language of 1984 was meant to euphemize to the point of inverted meaning.

Master/slave hasn't made sense since consensus algorithms came on the scene and started "taking leadership"

A consensus algorithm isn't master/slave hence the different terminology.

Master/slave is a very clear analogy and is used extensively for example about hardware interfaces.

The point here is the same as in 1984. It is aimed at suppressing 'incorrect' thoughts. It is totalitarian and we see society moving that way more and more.

Changing some terminology is totalitarian and oppressive? Give me a break.

Language is expression and offense is subjective. Forcing people to change their language is bordering on totalitarian control and is usually followed by compounding changes and eventually physical force. This is a single software project but it's the same when scaled up to an entire state.

There are a million terms that have negative connotations but are used in technical jargon. It would be endless to account for them all in case someone somewhere finds it disagreeable.

It's much more logical to ask why 0.1% of people are taking offense and seem to draw such stretched interpretations rather than asking 99.9% of people to change for them.

I initially rolled my eyes too, but if there's one thing I learned in the last two weeks is that you can't "imagine" how something is perceived by a member of a persecuted minority. No amount of thought experimentation can reproduce a lifetime of experiences that hurt your self-worth.

That said, leader/follower and allowlist/blocklist are both better than the older terms in every way. The represent the actual mechanisms better and they're less metaphorical.

That’s absolutely false. It’s gatekeeping, pure and simple.

I’m a guy, so I can’t imagine the pain of pregnancy? I had a large kidney stone once. The female doctor who had two children of her own told me that I experienced was more painful by a good bit than a pregnancy.

I’m also Hispanic, from a super high crime rate country. You think I don’t know what fear is, fear of random government kidnappings, fear of cartel kidnappings? Trust me, I do. Racism? Check. Genocide? Check.

Now should I be able to tell my white friends they can’t imagine what I’ve felt? Bullshit. I suppose SpaceX couldn’t imagine a self landing rocket either. They absolutely can imagine it.

Maybe some people can’t imagine it. Maybe some people are so closed off they really can’t try to put themselves in that position. But everyone? Nah.

It used to be guys were told they couldn’t imagine what it was like being a woman. It was their reserved space, so the gatekeepers claimed. Then trans became more of a thing. Suddenly it was politically incorrect to say these guys couldn’t imagine being a woman when they had been thinking about it for years.

Lol still not sure if you 'for' or 'against' the changes?

I don't think the poster is even addressing that, they're instead addressing the gate keeping mentality of the poster they replied to.

> Leader/follower is much more accurate and clear than master/slave in basically every way

Not for me. A master is to me much more controlling than a leader. A follower is to me much more independent than a slave.

Again, take say i2c where the master is the only one who can initiate a transaction. Being an "i2c follower" doesn't convey to me that the follower is prohibited from initiating a transaction.

The controller/worker suggest by others is much better than leader/follower, but "worker" doesn't work very well in all cases IMO.

Agreed. Manager/worker work better for me.

"Leader" == "Führer" could be constructed as offensive in Germany, if you are motivated enough. Should we accuse Google of cultural imperialism? Antisemitism?

Also, when I'm working in a corporate hierarchy, I don't want to see the words "leader" and "follower" all day. But perhaps that is an intended side effect of that change.

It's still a word that people use alone and in compounded forms, and Germans only avoid its use use it in a political context.

Wow I 'm not german... but man... I can imagine all hell breaking down in our offices if came running in yelling to everyone The "Führer is DOWN"

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