Social media corporations make millions and billions by catering to manipulate - and often darn right evil - advertiser needs, spying and tracking users for them. And then they want to be all moral by playing identity politics and excising inappropriate language.<p>This sounds like an attempt to divert the public attention during the Corona + police violence crises the US is currently undergoing.<p>... and all of this is not to say what I think about the use of these terms. I'm of two minds about that actually.
Our team had someone who's an orphan. We try to avoid using the term because a joke became a pretty sad lunchtime when they revealed the fact afterwards.<p>Words have different impact to different people. It doesn't cost us anything to use "isolated" node rather than an "orphan" node, but it made the dev feel less excluded.
I can get onboard with master/slave when used in conjunction.<p>But the etymology of "blacklist" so far as I know and can Google is not to do with race and it's use and understood meaning is not to do with race. How then can it be racist?<p>I have heard others argue that it's the implication that black is bad - but it's not as simple as that. "Whiteknighting" can be used negatively. "Bad" can literally mean "good". Come on.<p>This especially goes for "grandfathered" - what on earth is wrong with this?
I used to think stuff like this was ridiculous. It's just a database, who even cares?<p>However, now I'm all for it.<p>What has changed? Over working in tech for a while, I noticed some patterns in my coworkers' behavior. I noticed that the same people who didn't switch over to saying "primary" and "replica" back in 2015-ish, and when it started becoming more common, and in fact, <i>actively ridiculed it</i> (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up” while talking about problems with an overseas helpdesk. They didn't even consider that I, as someone of Indian descent who was apparently "all right" in their view would be offended by this (Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”). Oh, and I never heard this kind of stuff from the few women or PoC in our office.<p>Now I can easily see how at least one black coworker would be offended by these people animatedly discussing how the "slave" is not correctly following the "master", and how it might affect their work day, week, or month in a really bad way.<p>In general I have seen that people who think more about the language they use and how it might affect others seem to make better, <i>nicer</i> coworkers. That's really the primary reason I support these changes now.
Names change all the time. Leader / follower and primary / secondary are better for a lot of things, anyway. Even ignoring the social issue, master and slave are not great terms for how they are used. Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology. It’s like the tech industry’s version of the confederate flag.
Why are people failing to grasp that languages have context? Twitter, GitHub and others are clearly lacking some "mastery" of language semantics, such as homonyms.<p>Perhaps we should be lobbying for better English education? Nah screw that, let's adopt a simplified version of the English language that removes any emotion or chance of ambiguity... I'm sure an author came up with a candidate language in the late 40s
How much of this sort of thing (including the hiding/removing of "problematic" TV/films) is being done/encouraged to draw attention away from the defund the police/better social services message?<p>Making BLM seem asinine looks like a fairly easy/standard psyop move.
More important than this change of terminology, I think it's good that Twitter decided to donate ten million dollars to NGOs fighting slavery around the world (it's still prevalent, especially in Africa and Asia)<p><a href="https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalence" rel="nofollow">https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc...</a>
When I read defenses of these moves online, usually it is acknowledged that these terms, when used in the context of engineering, do not have a relationship to human subjugation. However, the arguments offered at that juncture are:<p>a) <i>Every little bit helps</i>: If we can help eradicate injustice even in a tiny way, such as by using more inclusive language, and it's not unreasonable to implement, why not?<p>b) <i>We need to cut ties with a problematic past to improve</i>: If we want a world with equity for all, we must voluntarily let go of heritage that binds us to a world without equity.<p>I have many problems with these arguments. (If I have not steelmanned them sufficiently, please suggest improvements).<p>First, it is not true that the current strategy is reasonable to implement. A solution is reasonable if the effort needed to implement it does not outweigh the impact of the problem. A reasonable solution is to use "leader / follower" yourself and gradually encourage people away over time at their own discretion: a low-effort solution for a low-impact problem. An unreasonable solution is to risk production impact and breaking changes (as in third-party tooling that relies on the `master` convention in git), creating more work for everyone - all so slightly different language can be used. Doc changes are a great low-effort solution if you really want to do this.<p>Second, the claim that improvement cannot occur without cutting ties is a bit of a switch-and-bait. People will defend "improvement is not possible without change", and then morph that into "improvement is not possible without disassociation". There is some merit to this latter claim in some contexts - for example, in cases of domestic abuse - but that does not make it universal. We can keep the past around, but eliminate its ability to impact the present, which is "improvement with change". I think the "master / slave" convention and its history have done this adequately, since everyone agrees that no reasonable person would associate the term now with an endorsement of slavery or oppression.<p>These two points put me firmly in the camp of "necessary changes are good, but this particular change is unnecessary".
I don't understand why there's so much pushback against the moves to remove terminology like master/slave from IT.<p>It makes people uncomfortable and it's such a small change.<p>And it's just software, go use sed or whatever to rename it.<p>Why be disingenuous and say stuff like "oh I guess racism is solved now!" Or "GitHub changing the default branch name for new projects is going to break everyone's CI-CD pipelines!"?
The terms are gross and by no means necessary, but changing them also does not do anything to improve anyone's life. It's an empty, performative gesture unless accompanied by a lot of bigger structural and organizational changes at Twitter. You can't just "tada, we fixed racism."
What about 'robot' and 'bot'? The word robot means 'slave worker'.<p>How about payment providers supporting Mastercard? Maybe we ought to stop accepting Mastercard payment, unless they rebrand to Equalitycard.
I just sold an internet product I built that contains both “Whitelist” and “Blacklist” rules.<p>I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I added the names a few years ago.<p>However I also grew up in the 80s and Dukes of Hazard was still a popular enough television show that I was specifically not allowed to watch it by my mom for reasons I did not understand at the time. [1]<p>As far as changing language of the rules in the product I built, or would build I have no problem using something neutral.<p>Software developers are used to deprecated language. Function and class names are changed for any number of reasons, sometimes just because they are inconvenient to spell.<p>If some people feel that Master Slave, or Blacklist Whitelist constitute micro aggressions, then why put up a fight to switch to neutral language?<p>Just deprecate the syntax and return the narrative and focus to problems developers can overwhelmingly agree are getting in the way of establishing a more inclusive developer community.
[1] <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-dukes-of-hazzard-reall_b_7725078" rel="nofollow">https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-dukes-of-hazzard-reall_b_7...</a>
This master - slave debate is at least 10 years old. And I have the same questions now:<p>- ofc master slave relationship between human beings is wrong, but are we not allowed to "abuse" and "subjugate" IT systems? I mean that's kind of their purpose if you ask me. It's wrong to beat somebody but it's not wrong to beat a carpet.<p>- what is the purpose of removing those words? Is it like pretending these relationships don't exist?<p>- who benefits from the removal of the terms and in what way exactly? How is the world getting better by doing this?
What a creative way to virtue signal. This way you don’t have to do anything that has any positive impact for any single person. But you can tell all your white friends about it.<p>People need to read a history book. ‘Master’ has nothing to do with ‘slavery.’ ‘Slavery’ has a long history going back thousands of years. No race has any particular right to be offended. Romans had slaves of every color.<p>And if you are a person who gets upset when you see the word “master” you need to seriously consider becoming an adult.
I'm not saying I agree with it - but metaphors matter. It's easy to imagine certain design patterns being associated with offensive stereotypes. How much do we have to extend 'master' and 'slave' before the metaphor crosses a line? The introduction of a 'boat' class or a 'chain' class? Of course the underlying technology isn't offensive but we're attaching our human social context to it.<p>At least no one has a problem with the underlying patterns themselves! That would be a doozy.
Primary, secondary. Problem solved. Need more, well English has it.<p>Anyone arguing against this is just pissing against the wind -or worse.<p>Move on. Were supposeto be the people who adapt and change the fastest.
To the cynics: how would you feel about this change if your great grand parents were slaves, lived in shackles and got whipped regularly and called the person whipping them “master”?