Rename "master/slave" terminology to "client/server" (2008) | Hacker News Reader

server" (2008)

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14 pointsrmoriz46 comments

Quoted from the discussion:

    Posted by dman on December 9, 2008 at 7:00am

  Hm.
  First convince all hardware manufacturers and retailers to
  stop labelling their cords and sockets by the grossly un-PC
  terms "Male" and "Female".
  Then get photographers and graphic artists to remove the
  clearly racist words "Black" and "White" from their
  vocabulary.
  Next we can get backup, archive and filesystem listings to
  stop using the horribly discriminatory ageist terms "older"
  and "newer".

  Then, maybe, we can come up with a new pair of words that
  signifies "the one that gives orders" and "the one that
  does what it's told". Or maybe in new-speak it should be
  "committee enabler" and "co-operator". :-/

This is why IT people have a bad reputation in the world of socially adjusted adults.

BTW "master/slave" words don't even make sense for databases. They are "authoritative / possibiy-stale-replica". In many setups, the master doesn't care if the slave exists-- this is an important feature to protect the master if the slave fails, avoiding "many points of failure"

In IDE cables (remember that case, from Oakland CA a few years back?) master/slave means something different again (but I don't remember how IDE works -- it was something like primary/secondary,though, not one controlling the other)

> "IT people have a bad reputation in the world of socially adjusted adults."

They do, but so do those who are constantly offended.

>This is why IT people have a bad reputation in the world of socially adjusted adults.

No, it's not. This isn't true, it's not even an argument for why the terminology should be changed.

Most of my friends are non-programmers, and from what I can see, geeks enjoy a far higher reputation than the censorship goons that run around telling people that they need to stop using their native language.

On an educational note, in IDE the meaning is actually relevant -- the slave only responds to requests if permitted by the master.

> This is why IT people have a bad reputation in the world of socially adjusted adults.

Come on! You run around saying things like this about large groups of people. How is that better than using master/slave about machines?

Hint: It's much, much worse.

Interesting. I always thought "manager" and "worker" (as commonly employed for thread pools) could be less emotive terms. Or "master" and "servant", perhaps? English has lots of words and I'm sure we can find something less emotive.

(But perhaps I'm just too PC - as I actually genuinely don't use the term male and female for plugs and sockets. Never liked them.)

Master/slave usually means very different distinction than client/server.

With databases, both master and slaves are servers.

IT community is much wider than the USA and doesn't care much about quirks of history of USA as a basis for confusing things up.

> quirks of history of USA

Sorry, I don't get how the history of the USA applies in this context?

USAans believe that we have the strongest history of (a) racial-based slavery systems (b) whose victim's descendants are still here to be concerned about, (c) recently enough to still feel relevant (not ancient Rome)

What are other examples that match?

> What are other examples that match?

The existing slavery that still goes on all across the world today? Slavery isn't limited to just the history of the US.

In fact, the article makes this exact point, and as the reason for the issue.

So when someone says:

"IT community is much wider than the USA and doesn't care much about quirks of history of USA as a basis for confusing things up."

they clearly didn't read the article and is ignorant of the issue being discussed.

In European context, slavery is either about distant past (Spartacus anyone?) or failed states.

Both neither very relevant to IT nor drama-prone.

So you didn't read the article and are ignorant of the issue being discussed.

You can start with rereading the article, and continuing here:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/series/modern-...

Of all the problems migrants in Qatar face, computer things being called master's slaves is not one of them. You can take a shot at trying to help them, but I bet you'll just continue to tackle a non-problem.

False dichotomy.

Master/Slave is not exactly same as Master/Client.

You can have a Master Unit with replicating or horizontally scaling Slaves and often the very same Master Unit is also a Server to one or multiple type of Clients. (NFS is a good example.)

I think it is a pretty similar case to racism, if you want to stop it, "stop talking about it."

I find no problem in being politically correct, and it presents a good opportunity to adopt more precise terms since technical language full of anachronisms is clubby and corny. It is all part of making our realm more widely suitable.

"Primary" and "secondary" or "coordinator" and "processor" may be more descriptive.

Yup, projects like openldap switched to provider/consumer, which does more accurately describe the arrangement.

"head" and "worker" is also used in some contexts.

[irony] If we try not to offend anyone, we should ban word 'slave' completely [/irony]

The word 'slave' is garbled version of 'slav' or 'slovo'; an ethnic group enslaved by Byzantine empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slav#Ethnonym

PC issues never look like a "big deal" to most of us. Changing terminology is a "hassle" and why can't people just "get over it?" Aren't there bigger things to worry about? Political correctness is just another form of oppression!

That's essentially how every discussion goes. But this is of course because we're mostly highly educated white males from the richest parts of the world, and it's hard to emphasize with something you don't directly relate to. We don't face much (if any) oppression so things that may not look like a big deal to us can be a big deal to other people.

Master/Slave may one day turn into completely neutral words but today for many people they're not. We don't lose anything by switching to less objectionable terminology -- the right to refer to things as slaves is not a right I mind losing -- so why not make the switch?

No. What this is, is a chance to pick a fight.

A chance to feel powerful, without actually accomplishing anything.

Nothing more.

> the right to refer to things as slaves is not a right I mind losing

Actually, I see this as an opportunity to change the word “slave” to always refer to a thing, not a person.

Why would you do that and how would you call a slave person then?

An abhorrent anachronism?

Much like the word “computer”. What would you call a person who computes?

First, slavery exists today and second, even if it didn't, the word would still be useful when talking about history or when talking figuratively.

The Czech don't seem to have a problem with the word robot: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/robota

Abstractions are not per-se "completely neutral". Nor is slavery racist per-se. Historically, it predates the Atlantic (sub-saharan) era slave trade by millenia. As for technology, its quite common in the field of Hydraulics. That's probably where (electrical) egineers picked up the term. See, eg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_cylinder

Stupid polemics about technical terms. That's getting annoying.

There's nothing immoral about two pieces of software being a master and a slave. Quit with this nonsense already.

Personally I'd rather get rid of the male/female designation for connectors. Ever get asked about it by a little kid? "Well, it's like this cable is fucking this interface! See?"

Server comes from servus which is the latin word for slave so I cant see the improvement.

Interestingly, DNS has gone the other way. It used to be that it was called “primary” and “secondary” DNS servers, but now the preferred terms are “master” and “slave” servers.

Primary and secondary are from the clients perspective. Master and slave has to do with zones. A slave zone is essentially blank and gets all its records from a master zone.

If you look at the old RFCs, you can see that the words were used differently before the change to the current usage.

While we're at it, remove FreeBSD logo, no BLACK chocolate and the world will become a better place.

Oh, and please remove linux kernel, because I'm getting results with `grep "fuck"`.

Sometimes I feel offended with the people who feel offended. ;)

What if, in the future, "master" and "slave" would refer first to the current computer terms, and then only, after much thought, to the old practice we know ? Couldn't we change the first intended meaning of those words that best describes the relationship, without implying anything toward actual human slavery ?

Similarly, as a non-American, when I hear/see the word nigga, it's always used as a word to show respect towards someone else [0], never to diminish the other person. I actually find that word nice-sounding, and I wouldn't want to stop using it because in some contexts it used to mean something else.

For the original issue, if master/slave is an issue, I don't think we could ever find any politically corect replacement words that equally describe one entity that governs and other entities that listen and obey without asking questions.

[0] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/denzel-mah-nigga

The n word and its variants are still used to denigrate people.

I find that only pretty much any time I see that word on the internet it's never in this respect context. I grew up hearing it all the time and didn't realize it was a big deal until I realized the vast majority of the time it is still used in a negative context no matter what the spelling.

We prefer master and slave COMPUTERS than master and slave humans. Isn't it what counts most?

The terms "master" and "slave" come from human slavery. You can't deny the roots of this terminolgy.

I'm just saying geeks have found new uses for these words, and it's good. After all, maybe we can trust humans to evolve.

These words are still in use anyway: master of your pet, master of a technology, a master class is nothing to be ashamed of... Slave/slavery is often used to describe what we called work 100 years ago. Plus some other connotations...

So why stop using slave and master as we use them in software? As long as they represent an abstract concept, they're harmless.

"Robot" is etymologically derived from a Slavic word for slave ("Rab" in Russian, apparently).

The existence of robots is not problematic. Treating a human as a robot most definitely is. The existence of slaves, in the sense of things entirely controlled by other things, is not a problem, but treating a human as a slave is a problem (outside of consensual BDSM practices[1], I guess).

Words change in meaning constantly. Whilst I can see the appeal of linguistic conservatism, the facts of life in this matter really are not conservative. The use of "slave" to refer to devices that are controlled by other devices is only a little over a century old, so it's still quite a new coinage, but words can often change meaning on even shorter timescales. Quite a number of words in common usage today derive from words with different meanings and, over time, these origins tend to either be forgotten or come to be disassociated from the derived word such that we no longer perceive them as the same.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_and_submission_(BDSM)...

> "Robot" is etymologically derived from a Slavic word for slave ("Rab" in Russian, apparently).

More immediately, it's Czech for 'worker': Karel Čapek, the person who coined the word as it's now used in English for his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), was Czech.

Karel Čapek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_%C4%8Capek

R.U.R.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

Robot isn't czech for worker. It is derived from czech robota: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/robota

I try to always use primary/[secondary,replica]. It's still difficult, for some reason.

Client/server just makes no sense though.

The master/slave analogy isn't comparable. The terms "master" and "slave" refer to the relationships between technical components of the system, not to people.

Every time inclusive language comes up, there are people who sound off about the absurdity of trying to avoid offending everyone. Yes, offending people on the Internet is fine, and probably unavoidable. That's not the issue.

Large parts of our society still routinely get excluded from many things, as a matter of course, for no reason except that it's been the status quo for a long time. Deliberately using inclusive language is a way to broadcast a conscious decision: "We are willing to make at least trivial efforts to break that trend in our group."

This is about not making people feel excluded for reasons that are completely beyond their control, particularly when they're routinely so excluded elsewhere in society.

PC crap.

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