We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech • Hacker News Board

Re: We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech

#11

Post by dsr12 » Fri, Sep 07, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #5

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 rela…

He ran a Twitter poll to see what people think: https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1038094104129937408

Re: We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech

#12

Post by dsr12 » Fri, Sep 07, 2018, 9:29 PM UTC

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

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

Re: We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech

#13

Post by wetKoala » Fri, Sep 07, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

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.

Re: We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech

#14

Post by AnimalMuppet » Fri, Sep 07, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech

#15

Post by finnthehuman » Sat, Sep 08, 2018, 3:19 AM UTC

>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"