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On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

antirez.com

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Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#61
post #13

I suspect this is one of those topics that at some point, everyone will have just switched terms because it's not worth the hassle to fight these fights over and over again. Kind of a "I'm not wrong, but is it a good use of 20 hours a year to argue about this?"

Looks like that's the very point the author is trying to make. We can't give in to the dictatorship of the Small Minority specially when the most intolerant people seem to scream the loudest.

[flagged]

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#62
post #9

In the meantime, the Slave terminology is on its way out in Redis too. Here are a few commits: https://github.com/antirez/redis/search?q=%22slave+removal%2... Here's the issue where some of the discussion happened: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/5335

It's paradoxical that they want these changes merged to "master".

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#63
post #48
post #18

Note that this is from 2018. I personally totally agree with the author. Anyone who chooses to be offended by words used in a totally different context is doing exactly that - choosing to be offended. If we keep going down this path of endless meaningless virtue signalling, where will we stop? Is the term "black hole" racist too? What about blackout? Etc, etc. No one really cares about these terms and it they do thei…

Where do you think the master slave name comes from? Masters give the orders. Slaves follow the master. Slaves get all the heavy work. Slaves take the beating. Its tone deaf to ignore this as why it might be offensive to some of your coworkers. And in any case, the name is vague at best anyway. Write db, read db, primary, replica, leader, follower, marshal, worker. All better, more descriptive names for various maste…

> Its tone deaf to ignore this as why it might be offensive to some of your coworkers.

I'm speculating: you believe it's a problem for African Americans, but e.g. not for Polish Americans, right?

I'm trying to understand your thought process here, because the word slave literally (literally literally, I'm not making this up) stems from Slavic people that were captured by Romans.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#64

It doesn't matter if YOU don't think it's offensive. It's about how others think and feel about it. Are people really so self-centered that they can't understand that? And the slippery slope argument doesn't hold water because it's very obvious when a good number of people have a problem with it vs one or two people who are trying to be provocative. People are reasonable and if they are telling you something bothers…

> It doesn't matter if YOU don't think it's offensive. It's about how others think and feel about it.

Your premise actually means no feelings matter and it doesn't matter what anybody thinks. It's self-collapsing and reveals the contradiction in what you're proposing.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#66
post #59
post #18

Note that this is from 2018. I personally totally agree with the author. Anyone who chooses to be offended by words used in a totally different context is doing exactly that - choosing to be offended. If we keep going down this path of endless meaningless virtue signalling, where will we stop? Is the term "black hole" racist too? What about blackout? Etc, etc. No one really cares about these terms and it they do thei…

nvm

> I'm guessing you are white, so you can't really fully grasp the experience of being pointlessly reminded day in and day out by a software product that your ancestors were systematically kidnapped, forced to work for their entire lives, raped, had their children taken, and then often murdered. For generations.

Eh, that describes how all humans lived as you travel back in time. That describes all of our ancestry. Kidnapping, rape, immense suffering at the hands of power hierarchies.

Hell, look up where the word "slave" comes from and which group of people it spawned from. Hint: it wasn't black Americans 200 years ago.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#67
post #59
post #18

Note that this is from 2018. I personally totally agree with the author. Anyone who chooses to be offended by words used in a totally different context is doing exactly that - choosing to be offended. If we keep going down this path of endless meaningless virtue signalling, where will we stop? Is the term "black hole" racist too? What about blackout? Etc, etc. No one really cares about these terms and it they do thei…

nvm

There's no such thing as a "slave branch"

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#68
post #48
post #18

Note that this is from 2018. I personally totally agree with the author. Anyone who chooses to be offended by words used in a totally different context is doing exactly that - choosing to be offended. If we keep going down this path of endless meaningless virtue signalling, where will we stop? Is the term "black hole" racist too? What about blackout? Etc, etc. No one really cares about these terms and it they do thei…

Where do you think the master slave name comes from? Masters give the orders. Slaves follow the master. Slaves get all the heavy work. Slaves take the beating. Its tone deaf to ignore this as why it might be offensive to some of your coworkers. And in any case, the name is vague at best anyway. Write db, read db, primary, replica, leader, follower, marshal, worker. All better, more descriptive names for various maste…

This kind of pretend action is worse than doing nothing - because not only you feel better about yourself and don't do anything actually useful - you also discourage people who actually want to do something about the real problem.

This is the reason people think liberalism and social justice is a meme. This exact shit.

Besides - do you know where the word "slave" comes from?

It comes from Slavic word "słowo" which means "word" (it was written differently in proto-Slavic, but whatever). "Słowianie" mean "people who speak words"="Slavic people". In English it's translated as "Slavs".

Słowianie were the original slaves, to the point that Latin used their name for the word "slave" (sclava) which was later adopted by French and English with small changes.

What will you do about it? Invent a new name for all the Slavic languages and people related to that word?

Slovaks/Slovenes/Slavs/Slovakian/Slovenian/Slovakia/Slovenia/slavic?

Do you think it's "tone deaf" to use a word for "slave" that comes from name millions of people call themselves? Do you think it warrants change of language? Why not?

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#69
post #9

In the meantime, the Slave terminology is on its way out in Redis too. Here are a few commits: https://github.com/antirez/redis/search?q=%22slave+removal%2... Here's the issue where some of the discussion happened: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/5335

It's paradoxical that they want these changes merged to "master".

Trunk is a better term for the long lived main branch of an SCM tree anyway.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#70
post #6

I've read about a bunch of these renaming efforts in the past weeks and I think some of these are very justified while some of them seem to take it further than necessary. The master/slave naming seems clearly outdated to me and this one is a direct reference to slavery. A better word like replica exists so I'm using that instead. This makes a lot of sense. On the other hand there's efforts to rename white/black list…

We just renamed our use of whitelist and blacklist for two reasons, outside of any racial contexts. The easy one is that we don't want to argue about it, much likes tabs vs spaces - the value for us is in having a standard, not necessarily what the standard is. The other one is that I spend a ton of time convincing developers to be intentional and deliberate in their naming of variables and functions, and these terms…

Blacklist has been in English for hundreds of years with the current meaning... I guess it would not be obvious to ESL developers but do you avoid other difficult vocabulary? Just curious

Allowlist and denylist are great alternatives except they don't read well as verbs

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