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Comment by fwipsy | Hacker News Reader

I haven't met anyone who is actually uncomfortable with the term "master," only people concerned about what others might think of them. It's not really being inclusive; it's just signaling inclusivity. Surely the time would be better spent, I don't know, volunteering to tutor underprivileged students or something? Or just living your damn life.

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I have met several people who are uncomfortable with the 'master/slave' terminology. In my experience, those who do not experience much racism in their day to day lives do not find it offensive, and vice versa. Therefore, it is at least slightly offensive in my opinion.

Once I was explaining how my day went to an ex, and my day happened to involve the terms, and they were absolutely floored that those terms were still used. Then the whole conversation was about racism in tech, and that had significantly less aura than my story of how I fixed everything. Beware ye olde words, lest ye scare thein hoes.

Why not spend the 5 seconds it takes to do that refactor and then tutor the kids?

More like 5 days, unless by "refactor" you mean #define master main

It takes your team 5 days to change a variable name?

It's used in our PTP protocol implementation which is integrated with a half-dozen different customer-facing UIs, APIs, and documentation. We could add the new terminology, but we would need to keep supporting old terminology indefinitely for backwards compatibility.

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