The Go Language was rid of blacklist/whitelist and master/slave

Definitely. And "blacklist"/"whitelist" is used for a lot of contexts outside computing that have, to my understanding, not even a historic relation to racism:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_...

What's next, blackboards and whiteboards? What about red-black trees? Do we really need to shuffle around well established non-offensive terms just because they have a color in their names?

If there was some truly offensive embedding in our nomenclature im all for removing it but this seems like a silly PR stunt. We're turning completely benign ideas into something offensive.

I agree that the context determines the intent to offend but I think some words may be offensive or at least distracting to some despite the context.

If you have seen a word used in a certain context enough it can become difficult to ignore that context in other uses. Similarly, after watching an actor play a role well it may be hard to separate them from that role while watching other movies.

It may also be useful to imagine master/slave replaced with words that are offensive to you to imagine what it’s like for someone else. For example, if they were called pimp/bitch servers I’m sure others would find that offensive.

Different sets of words will be offensive to different individuals. I’m sure we could find 2 words which are less offensive to all.

Very well said! I might add, some people seem to look for things to get offended by just to bamboozle others into thinking they deserve special treatment and as a result, gain some political power.

Well, there is one drawback I can think of: they are well established terms that have a very specific meaning on an engineering context.

I agree that "leader/follower" might be easier to grasp for someone who has never encountered these terms before, but it is also true that it causes a bit of confusion for more experienced engineers.

For example: if I am reading documentation about a hardware controller and find the "leader/follower" terms I would wonder (and, in fact, this has happened to me in the past) if they have the same meaning as "master/slave" or if the author has decided to use these other terms because there is some particular behavior quirk that applies to this hardware that I should be aware of.

All in all, you have to compare cons and pros and, for this particular context (engineering), I think correctness and lack of ambiguity is more important than "feelings"... but this is (obviously) just my personal opinion.

This is a ridiculous and sad move. We are living in 1984 a bit more every day.

Master/slave was chosen on purpose because it is very clear, clearer than the alternative you suggest, and is no more offending that using Knight, gladiator, etc.

Sometimes we must realise that an issue lies with the people who are offended by anything and everything, not with what offends them.

I initially rolled my eyes too, but if there's one thing I learned in the last two weeks is that you can't "imagine" how something is perceived by a member of a persecuted minority. No amount of thought experimentation can reproduce a lifetime of experiences that hurt your self-worth.

That said, leader/follower and allowlist/blocklist are both better than the older terms in every way. The represent the actual mechanisms better and they're less metaphorical.

> Leader/follower is much more accurate and clear than master/slave in basically every way

Not for me. A master is to me much more controlling than a leader. A follower is to me much more independent than a slave.

Again, take say i2c where the master is the only one who can initiate a transaction. Being an "i2c follower" doesn't convey to me that the follower is prohibited from initiating a transaction.

The controller/worker suggest by others is much better than leader/follower, but "worker" doesn't work very well in all cases IMO.

"Leader" == "Führer" could be constructed as offensive in Germany, if you are motivated enough. Should we accuse Google of cultural imperialism? Antisemitism?

Also, when I'm working in a corporate hierarchy, I don't want to see the words "leader" and "follower" all day. But perhaps that is an intended side effect of that change.

> I was never happy with the terminology

> If you have a problem with it you need to look deep inside yourself and reexamine your own biases. That's where the real problem lies.

So if you are not happy with established terminology you change it but if someone else is not happy with the change he is biased?

There are valid reason to be bothered by the change itself, even if the new words are OK. For 1) from the leadership, it is intellectually weak/calculating and fear-based appeasement move to a vocal extremist ideology group; there was nothing wrong with those terms in those contexts. For 2) the change and the associated power play has divisive and desintegrative effect on the project. For 3) it is a nasty manipulation of decent people, unaware of the political power game that is the real motivation behind these calls for new, better terms.

> I started replacing master/slave with primary/secondary in my code 20 years ago.

But primary/secondary doesn't mean the same as master/slave.

Consider master/slave from say i2c protocol. Switching to primary/secondary would completely obscure what is going on, you might as well call them apple/orange, while with master and slave it is very clear.

Yes, I think it's important to remember - both for American as well as outsiders - that racism-related notions are different and sometimes are completely alien in other countries/cultures. For example, some Americans believe that racism doesn't include prejudices towards the dominant "race"/ethnicity, and find it offensive to even suggest that it might be so (some even invented the term "inverse racism" for that). For example, the racist implications of painting one's face black are so alien in other cultures that every few years there is a big storm about someone doing blackface in Europe, having no idea it will offend Americans (recently it was Gigi Hadid in Vogue Italy).

For example, as an European, when someone says "slave", I immediately think about ancient Rome. To think that in the USA you had slaves only recently always strikes me as really strange. To say nothing about the segregation period quite recently.

In any case, I still wonder: you can remove these words from software and try to banish their current metaphorical usage. But will it really make a difference to your history? These seems like nervous attempts at "making everything right" in a situation where no right can be made - at least there is no easy way to do so.

> makes sense only in the context of US history

Sorry but I must disagree. The U.S. slave era was not uniquely American. Who operated those slave ships to "import" the blacks from Africa? It wasn't the Americans. No, the Dutch had a big role, as did other cultures.

And as the protests around the world have demonstrated, racial discrimination is a global issue with similar problems in many countries to what you see happening in the States.

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Good thing I don't have a master's degree.

There are animal rights advocates offended by usage of the terms master and owner when referring to an animal's guardian--their preferred term.

Just use dom/sub :)

No, it is not.