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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

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". :-/

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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.)

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