Can we please stop wondering about being politically correct and focus on the real problems of the world? Thanks!
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.
I think there is a growing awareness in the mainstream that, in fact, everything is political, and that people who thought thing X wasn't previously and are upset that it apparently is now are simply in the early stages of discovering the privilege they've enjoyed in being society's default gender, race, culture, etc:
Imagine if instead of master/slave the terms were master and "n-word". Would there be a reasonable argument to change it at that point?
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.
Master/slave has a technical meaning beyond the sense of one person enslaving another. "Nigger" has no use case outside of making horrible and offensive remarks, aside from historical writing (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird) or making a point about racism, cases in which it is accepted.
So, two things (and I realize you aren't the person I originally replied to).
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.
My point is that master/slave actually conveys a relationship between two things. It was picked for technical use because of that. Naming something "nigger", even in a technical would do what, offend some other piece of code? If somebody chose an offensive name arbitrarily (like, say, "git"), I would understand the impulse. Though the former is fraught with specific and awful connotations towards a very specific group (American blacks) whereas the latter is simply a general derogatory term (which is tacky, but not unbearably so).
> My point is that master/slave actually conveys a relationship between two things.
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.
Maybe it’s you who should stop being abused by random words? Change yourself, leave me my technical language I’ve been using for decades, please.
Also a fun part of it is that in my (non-english speaking) country the terms master/slave are being used in their technical meaning only (as loan words). Why do we need to change our technical language and adjust to the concept of guilt that is completely foreign to us? I find this offensive.
I agree it isn't the same as a racial slur but master and slave mean completely different things in different systems. Usually if not always there are more descriptive terms like primary and replica.
>Imagine if instead of master/slave the terms were master and "n-word".
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.
master/slave is an analogy that is used in technology which has an obvious origin and personally has always made me slightly uncomfortable since I first heard about it with reference hard disk priorities. Similarly the terms male and female make me slightly uncomfortable with respect to cables and sockets.
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".
The thing here is that master has meanings that exist outside of the context of master/slave. Yes, slavery is wrong, and hopefully everyone agrees, but there are no slaves in GitHub. There are no slaves when it comes to master records. Erasing the word master from our language isn't about healing, it's more akin to forgetting or denying the past, and everything that could remotely be construed as having a connection with things we shall not speak of.
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.
Pure algorithms, for one. I don't think that Merge Sort for example has had or will ever have any political / social ramification.
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
We already assign pronouns and gender to connectors. Seems like you've not actually worked in IT if you don't know that?
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.
I wasn't talking about calling a female connector or a male connector, I was referring to the somewhat new trend of having to specify a pronoun in your Twitter bio because genders are non-binary.
> 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)
> I wasn't talking about calling a female connector or a male connector,
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)
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.