I would also like to add the fact that politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general. I don't think that any other engineering field has this much drama over some words that have been part of our whole life until now like IT is having.
https://brettclt.medium.com/why-is-everything-political-beca...
If you say "yes" then you agree there is a line somewhere. If that's the case then we should discuss where the line should be and why it should be there instead of saying "stop [worrying] about being politically correct".
If you say "no" then your argument is that no words are too offensive to use or we shouldn't care if people are offended by any term at all. Which is an argument that you're free to have but if that's what's happening then make that argument and advocate for why it would be ok to use the n-word as a terminology as well.
I think that in these discussions it's easy to get sidetracked because people are actually arguing different points without realizing it. You're talking about the same scenario but you're arguing from different premises which means there's no hope of coming to a shared understanding because you're not actually talking about what you disagree on.
1. Your argument here is implicitly agreeing with my point number one. There are terms that would be considered too offensive and so the conversation is about where the line falls. We can't just say "let's not ever talk about whether a term is offensive" because there are some that we really wouldn't want to use, and so we should be talking about what terms are too offensive and why.
2. This is the conversation what what's too offensive and why. "Master/slave" only has technical meaning because we've been using it that way for awhile. But master/slave was originally picked because of its meaning in the historical context of slavery. The terminology itself has no inherent technical meaning. So, to me at least, that is not a great argument for why we shouldn't change it now. But at least this part of the discussion is two people talking about the same premise and not arguing past each other.
Slavery exists with the shitiness of our culture. That's not something that should be used to convey a relationship between things.
Abuse shouldn't be part of our technical language.
yes, it implies a negative one though. What about manager/worker? mentor/mentee? commander / responder? I could go on and on. So we do reach a point where one has to wonder what the point of clinging to master/slave is.
It's not “beyond”, it's literally the use of human slavery as a metaphor for relations between technical components.
This is absurd. Hypotheticals are important thinking tools but please don't set the parameters of a discussion to be absurd. No quality content/insight can emerge.
n-word is inherently racist unlike master which has acceptable uses.
However, master in the context of git has no connection to the concept of master and slave. They are two different words with different meanings. So to answer your question yeah I think there is a line and it is somewhere near to that drawn by master/slave but nowhere near that drawn by master as in the concept of "original".
As for male and female connectors... It seems like an apt analogy, no? And uh, when it comes to male and female connectors, they are both equal, they both play a part, neither is better than the other.
> To allow for two drives on the same cable, IDE uses a special configuration called master and slave. This configuration allows one drive's controller to tell the other drive when it can transfer data to or from the computer. What happens is the slave drive makes a request to the master drive, which checks to see if it is currently communicating with the computer. If the master drive is idle, it tells the slave drive to go ahead. If the master drive is communicating with the computer, it tells the slave drive to wait and then informs it when it can go ahead.
This pattern of truth flowing from one agent to another is called the master/slave pattern.
It is the simplest coordination pattern there is, which is why it was used to control people doing menial tasks. We agreed it's not a good idea and no longer deprave people of agency (as much), but it still remains the most simple coordination pattern.
How would that work?
On the contrary, I see that now the SJW trend is to attack IT in general and make a huge deal out of terms that (given the context) are perfectly fine.
I wonder how much it will take before we'll have to assign pronouns to the connetors or to the USB cables
Pure algorithms have the capacity to change the world. Sometimes for the worse. An example of a pure algorithm with massive political and ethical considerations is crypto currency algorithms.
I think a lot of people here would've benefited taking a basic "ethics in CS" class.
> Pure algorithms have the capacity to change the world. Sometimes for the worse. An example of a pure algorithm with massive political and ethical considerations is crypto currency algorithms.
Nobody was arguing that. I just said that we shouldn't integrate politics into software, not the other way around. Obviously the code that we write is going to have an impact, but that's completely different from adding the impact from day 0 (e.g: software that spams propaganda in the stdout)
then you’re gonna need to explain, because that’s pretty much exactly what you said.
> Obviously the code that we write is going to have an impact, but that's completely different from adding the impact from day 0 (e.g: software that spams propaganda in the stdout)
So it would seem you have no issue here.