
We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech - dsr12
https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1038081592986464256
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peterhadlaw
If you want to make progress in tech, don't let "progress" (in quotations)
live rent free in your mind. Focus on actually building stuff.

I hate to use oppression Olympics as an argumentative avenue but I'm a Slav,
the word slavery comes from the enSLAVement of Slavic people.

It's often an accurate description of the relationship and even if it's just
slightly inefficient, still works great. Why pollute your mind and thought
stream with such trivial qualms. Build. Learn. Don't sweat dumb crap.

Same with whitelist / blacklist. From an English perspective these and
master/slave have been archetypes for as long as the language has existed.
Don't make problems where there are none, and don't TRY to pollute my mind by
making me think there are problems, where again there are none. Enough people
outside of tech are doing that to the populace.

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spdionis
The "political correctness" in our society is extremely obnoxious.

We are criticizing perfectly appropriate and meaningful terminologies for the
most ridiculous of reasons.

The argument that there is a clearly better terminology has no basis or
evidence.

If an argument was made that modern tools are slowly migrating away from
"master-slave" and Redis should keep consistency with that, it would need
evidence.

The "connotation" mentioned by dhh has no business whatsoever to be mentioned
in relation to the technical terms, and any argument that mentions it should
be just ignored.

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knaik94
Should orphan processes be renamed as well? What about brainfuck?

Terrible connotations don't mean anything when you treat a word objectively
and technically. I am not thinking about people when I am having issues
synchronizing a slave db.

The same terminology is still used in bdsm and I would argue most instances of
partners engaging in the specific dynamic is out of love.

I do agree that better terminology is available and should be used. Negative
connotations, however, do not apply when the application in computer science
is so far removed from what the author alludes to.

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AnimalMuppet
Random white dude here. Nobody cares about my opinion on this. But I thought
the opinion of the African-American developer down the hall might be
interesting, so I asked him. He saw nothing wrong with master-slave as a term
for hot spares for databases and such.

Just one opinion, but he's got more right to be listened to than I do as to
whether the term is offensive.

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finnthehuman
>Also, I know Twitter is a supercharged environment for carefully discussing
these things.Happy to switch to email. Again, I recognize the impulse to
digging in when attacked in public.

aka "I knew exactly what I was doing when I put you on blast, now I'll save
face in public and claim respectability by retreating to the higher ground"

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malvosenior
Antirez is taking a considered approach to this and weighing the very real
time and technical cost to making an api change to a project the scale of
Redis.

He has stated that if he were to start today, he'd use different terms. It's
important to remember that even 10 years ago, life hadn't become as
politicized as it is today. Master/slave was and is a very common technical
term that does accurately describe the relationship.

All that being said, attacking open source developers of popular projects with
politically motivated requests seems like a horrible idea. This guy did a ton
of great work that many people have benefited from (for free) and now he's
being bullied for even questioning if whether changing the API for a non-
functional reasons is worth it.

We should treat the people who created something and offered it to the world
for free with a bit more respect.

~~~
tomohawk
This was a thing in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and now. It's a thing anytime someone
wants to try to make a point by hijacking something they have no real stake
in, and where they have nothing useful to say or add. It's better not to feed
the trolls.

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dsr12
Antirez opened an issue in Redis repo for Changing Redis master-slave
replication terms with something else:
[https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/5335](https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/5335)

I think it's best if we give our thoughts there.

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philodelta
it helps that the computer science concept is so simple that it has multiple
plain english correlations. If it were put to a vote, I'd put in for Dom-Sub
:P

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wetKoala
The only way forward is to use a term that confuses and irritates in some
other way, yet remains somehow aligned with the ideals of the agitators. So,
try something like...

    
    
      master -> becomes: vegan
    
      slave  -> becomes: enabled
    

It needs to be treated this way, so that with every decision made going
forward, someone is forced to remember the cognitive burden of considering the
potential transgressions of cultural misinterpretation and insensitivity.

Now, when someone needs to debug production issues, their minds will weigh the
consequences of a history that will never leave anyone alone, no matter how
distant or removed from our current circumstances.

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LinuxBender
Is this concept legacy?

Disclaimer: I fully expect this response to become very light gray, as this is
only partially a technical topic.

Traditional slavery required the slave owner to provide lodging, food,
clothing. Modern slavery requires the slave to purchase their own home,
clothing, food and pay compounded interest for most of their unnatural life.

