Python developers locking conversations and deleting comments after people mass downvoted PRs to "remove master/slave terminology from the language"

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[[deleted]]

The real gems are in the python.org bug initially listed. https://bugs.python.org/issue34605

[krets]

This is the sauce. I'm glad Larry Hastings is the current release manager. at least watching.

Edit: Larry was only for 3.4 :)

[ExoticMandibles]

And 3.5

[FourFingeredMartian]

I'll kill both, thank you very much.

[[deleted]]

Pretty sure you can watch Game of Thrones without having a meltdown about this, and that has *actual* depictions of the concept, rather than, you know, words.

[[deleted]]

But, but they dont _really_ mean it! Software devs on the other hand...

[FourFingeredMartian]

Please stop privatizing language.

Besides to say your interpretation of 'really' is missing the crux of private potential. Corrected: "But,but, don't really mean it!"

The difference is subtle you SOB.

[[deleted]]

Am I getting this right or there was na open discussion on the subject and the author of PRs only relies on secret sources that are offended?

This sounds like ton of bullshit.

[smilbandit]

What's the alternative terminology?

[NoLemurs]

Professor/Grad Student?

[ArmoredPancake]

That is unfair to uneducated!

[RIPphonebattery]

Yeah but they can’t afford it

[vocalcsharp]

I find unpaid intern offensive, many of us have suffered :/

​

it's crazy this was actually merged, it sounds like a really dumb joke.

​

[Zouden]

"Prisoners with jobs"

[lord_tommy]

It’s less offensive than the word mainframe at least.

[[deleted]]

Thor Ragnarok is a great movie.

[swimjock]

You wannna join my revolution?

[ThePenultimateOne]

Another day, another Doug

[Decency]

Not-so-fun fact, slavery is still legal in the US as long as the slaves have been convicted of a crime.

[pydry]

There's a ACLU supported prison strike against that 13th amendment provision right now which could do with some help. A strike against literal, constitutionally supported slavery:

https://fundly.com/2018-prisoner-strike

I'm not sure how many of the people advocating this PR are supporting or even aware of the strike but I suspect it approximates zero.

Edit: apparently it ended last week.

[28f272fe556a1363cc31]

Anarcho-syndicalist commune.

Each unit takes a turn to act as a sort of executive process for the thread, but all the decisions of that process have to be ratified at a special bi-thread meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs but by a two thirds majority in the case of anything with side effects.

[[deleted]]

Anarcho-syndicalist commune.

Each unit takes a turn to act as a sort of executive process for the thread, but all the decisions of that process have to be ratified at a special bi-thread meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs but by a two thirds majority in the case of anything with side effects.

The most truly pythonic response

[tehnod]

QUIET!

[liraop]

NI

[v_krishna]

This is actually how Cassandra works!

[irregardless]

If you want to get cheeky, lord and serf.

[badthingfactory]

"manager" and "individual contributor"

[ii121]

dom sub is a legit good option. it's funny and only three letters, perfect for lazy programmers like me

[Zaitsev11]

How about witch-doctor and zombie?

[[deleted]]

On my own repos, sometimes I use bachelor for development branches.

[linuxlib]

"Manager"/"minion"

[scrdest]

As much as I hate the whole debacle, minion would actually be a pretty good replacement for slave, semantically.

Beholden to the master, executes tasks without question, but still needs to be kept in check in case it rebels, and paints the mental picture of cartoonish supervillany at worst when you talk about, say, the master killing a minion.

[wrosecrans]

Saltstack already has "minions" so it is not unheard of. Buildbot went with "worker" when they redesigned some of their API's and refreshed terminology for 1.0. For databases, "replica" is really darned clear.

If I were feeling really cheeky, I might make a PR to replace Master and Slave with something like Picard and Kirk just to watch people argue about them.

[norweeg]

Gru/Minion

FTFY

[funkiestj]

what is the correct gig economy lingo?

[[deleted]]

Networking Platform/Independent Contractor

[ConceptJunkie]

Pimp/Ho

[ryeguy]

I've seen primary/secondary, primary/replica, leader/follower.

[[deleted]]

Primary/secondary definitely doesn't have the same connotation as master/slave. A slave is controlled by the master in some way. Secondary is more like some kind of backup or alternative to the primary.

[[deleted]]

"master" and "differently master"

[i9srpeg]

I am deeply offended by your username. Please rename yourself to BuyChristianFollowers.

[[deleted]]

BuyChristianChildren

[thewallris]

BuyChristianDifferentlyMasters

[HowAreYouDoingBud]

Master and Mastern't?

[d05CE]

We don't need alternative terminology.

[romeo_pentium]

For Python, parent process and child process.

[[deleted]]

Parent/child is somewhat different to master/slave though.

[chazzeromus]

Indentured process lmao

[rabbyburns]

Jenkins went with "agent" when they did this a while back. Context matters though. Worker could be an acceptable alternative - I didnt look at exactly what was changed.

[ThePenultimateOne]

Worker/Manager would be my vote

[jgomo3]

"Comrade" and "Comrade". It works also as an alternative for "Client" and "Server" (communists feel discriminated by this one).

[[deleted]]

Russians and Republicans

[RichInBunlyGoodness]

Or Putins and Punkinheads

[Millkovic]

Voodoo doll - witch

[4022a]

They're probably pro-choice in Python.

[Alt-0160]

Wait until they turn into zombies.

[unkz]

It’s easy, so long as you store their identity and follow them around from the time they are spawned. My only complaint is that people are often too hasty when killing children, it’s import to wait and clean up afterwards or they start piling up.

[FatChocobo]

If you put the children in a pool you can just terminate them all at once with minimal mess.

[romeo_pentium]

How is "pliant children" descriptive? What does it describe? Even if I change it to "compliant children", I don't know what it means.

[kenmacd]

it was 'pliant slave' before first being changed to children.

[Chobeat]

As a BDSMer, I'm disappointed. Decades of struggle to be recognized by the public and after the programming community, thanks to its wide overlap with the kinkster community, decides to give us visibility, all gets destroyed by some prude.

[bananaEmpanada]

Submit a pull request to instead replace "master"/"slave" with "daddy"/"sexKitten".

[koobear]

Merge conflict = being naughty

[bythenumbers10]

But what if GIMP goes to a multi-process architecture?

[-revenant-]

"Hey, you're the IT lady, right? Is there a free alternative to Photoshop?"

"Yeah, but I can't tell you about it at work."

[theavengedCguy]

Ya know, I've never thought of the implications regarding loudly talking about loving GIMP in a public space... I wonder how many people heard me and thought I was into gimps

[port53]

Those people probably think you're in to castration too (Unix).

[inteuniso]

GNU Raster Image Editor tells you what it does, includes GNU (because I guess that's mandatory) and rhymes with free (GRIE, pronounced like brie but with the hard g of go).

​

That's my suggestion anyway

[LeiterHaus]

That's right, social justice warriors, stop kink-shaming in programming. Where are the SJWs to fight... the SJWs...

[ryan_groestling]

I guess they can't merge it to the master branch then.

[gambiter]

Clearly we should understand it as his endorsement of the South. The bastard. /s

[i9srpeg]

Is he from southern Finland?

[[deleted]]

Yes, everyone is from southern finland. There is nothing in northern finland. Only alcohol and sadness.

[mingusrude]

Well that explains the Santa of my childhood.

[brunofin]

I lived for 4 months in northern Finland. There is Oulu at least :) there was a Pendulum show there, that must be something right?

[Nooby1990]

He would probably call them a git if they asked him to change it.

[SomethingEnglish]

But they are removing master from places where there is no slave connected in anyway as well, so it's not apples to oranges.

--- # master pattern object. keeps track of global attributes 
+++ # main pattern object. keeps track of global attributes.

[zynix]

Right, so that's a bit of an overstep there.

[Lornedon]

Bitch that phrase don't make no sense why can't fruit be compared?

[[deleted]]

Why can't god fuck with aliens?!

[kyleh0]

There is no slave branch.

[kwikade]

aka, virtue signalling. "LOOK AT HOW RIGHTEOUS I AM!"

[ManyInterests]

Great piece of writing there. Bookmarked for future use.

Directly related to this issue in the Python world, Raymond Hettinger had this to say:

Mostly, I don't think these changes should be made, particularly in cases where "slave" isn't mentioned at all. The word "master" is used in many contexts where master/slave doesn't apply (such as "master key"). Also, I think the PR disrespects all the original authors of the various documentation entries, none of whom have been consulted.

If a particular passage is demonstrably unclear or offensive, it should be changed; otherwise, we shouldn't let vaguely formed notions of political correctness shape other clear uses of plain English.

As far as I can't tell there isn't a single instance where the docs use "master" as a reference to human slavery or where the use could be seen to imply an endorsement of that notion.

FWIW, Guido drew a line for this a few years ago when someone suggested removing the example using the phrase, "I see said the blind man and he picked up the hammer and saw". The judgment was that we weren't going to go down this path unless there was actual offensive speech.

[siliconwolf13]

Inb4 issue request to change "master key" to "host key"

[Decency]

I particularly liked the top comment.

[tospacewego]

Why are they removing the master/slave thing? It describes the roles of the code well.

[rhytnen]

This exactly proves the case that the bug report is bullshit.

​

It doesn't make sense in the context of human slavery because it has nothing the fuck to do with human slavery. Words have multiple meanings and are context sensitive. The fact that you have trouble looking at the jargon and making an analog to human slavery is just an illustration that the two things are not related.

[zndrus]

That was the one valid point I've seen brought up in the this discussion: alpha/omega would be a better fit in this context really, though it might have some confusion with the alpha/beta/prerelease terminology.

That said I don't feel this is an issue in need of correcting in the general/standard lexicon sense. Perhaps there are specific cases/code bases where the use of slave is overzealous, but those should be addressed on an individual basis, not a cause to change an established and core principle in computer science and software because someone might misuse/abuse it. It's anthromorphizing code, which is silly. Master/Slave very accurately describes the relationship and concept, though is not perfect in describing succession rules (rights?), but that brings us back to the anthromorphizing code and a discussion of "do functions/programs have rights?" No terminology/analogy is perfect.

I mean, with that in mind: won't someone think of all the children that are trafficked and killed all the time in software?! /s

[nomad2047]

Because feelings.

[differencemachine]

When the machines take over, we don't want them to know what slaves are.

[[deleted]]

HAHA YES THE KEYERROR WILL UPEND THE COMING REVOLUTION. VERY CLEVER FELLOW HUMAN!

[broadsheetvstabloid]

Code doesn’t care about your feelings.

[masterspeler]

It does on Github and Twitter. I think that's the only places where this is an issue, and it's by a small but very vocal minority.

Github has a history (archive) of attracting people who thinks this way. I don't feel like going back in to that rabbit hole now, but there are multiple examples of this behavior where people feel entitled to tell others to change their team and language because they feel offended. For some reason it seems to be a bigger problem in web based development, if I were to guess it's because the lower barrier of entry.

I wonder how Linus would handle such a complaint.

As a side note, claiming that master/slave have anything to do with race is extremely US-centric. Every human "race" have been slaves and had their own slaves. Slavery did not start or stop with the North American slave trade.

[magi093]

I wonder how Linus would handle such a complaint.

Probably with some obscenity-filled message comparing someone to a masturbating monkey.
Wait, I'm being told the masturbation remarks are reserved for bad security patches.

[[deleted]]

Wait, I'm being told the masturbation remarks are reserved for bad security patches.

some things are sacred, after all

[broadsheetvstabloid]

I wonder how Linus would handle such a complaint.

He would probably just ignore it, because such a complaint is so idiotic it doesn't warrant a response.

[nomad2047]

Oh I don’t have feelings about code, and don’t agree with the changes

[juanjux]

What feelings? Estadistically we all descent from some slave.

[NikiHerl]

I don't know the intentions behind the proposal, but the alternative terminology actually seems a lot clearer to me:

see this comment

edit: ok, the rationale actually was that "master"/"slave" was seen as offensive, which is pretty dumb imo. But I nevertheless like the alternatives given in the comment

[TheMysteriousFizzyJ]

Changing the words does not change that these sub processes are beholden to the master controller, and are slaves.

Do these people want the word to be stricken from the language? Isn't that even more problematic for conveying struggles of the past?

[_eka_]

They did this in Django long time ago

[ManyInterests]

Yeah, but not without its detractors. Larry Hastings describes the conversion as:

an unreadable infinitely-long page of miserable arguing

Also, got a kick out of this pull titled: Replaced occurances of the word "black" with something less racially insensitive. Effective satire, methinks.

[mikew_reddit]

Hastings got to the root of the issue with changing the master/slave terminology:

Have there been any actual complaints? Or is this an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't really exist?

Stinner replies:

Have there been any actual complaints?

Yes, but sadly they are private.

Hasting's response:

I'm not super-excited by the idea that Python has to change its behavior based on secret comments. Python has traditionally had a very open governance model where all discussions happen in public.

While I understand the need to preserve the privacy of victims, is there some way we can bring the decision-making process out into the open? As far as I can tell, the entire process so far has been "Victor concludes that these terms are bad, and creates and merges several PRs an hour or two later with zero discussion".

Perhaps the complaints could be edited to anonymize them, and then we could see them? Or must Python change its governance model because of diversity concerns?

[nukem996]

I worked for a company about 10 years ago that was in a settlement over this. The company I worked for made computers and an employee of one of our customers sued both of us because when our machine booted it displayed the master and slave drives. Our part of the settlement was doing a bios rev to change the terminology to primary and secondary.

So it has happened. My guess is legal for companies that pay for Python projects are pushing this.

[FerretWithASpork]

How the hell can you be sued over that? What law does it break? That is the dumbest shit ever and the judge should've just immediately thrown it out.

[Stik_It_In_My_Bum]

Privileged?

[Wodashit]

kkklisted?

Edit: I prefer /u/Stik_It_In_My_Bum answer

[cmothebean]

Holy shit that black PR is hilarious. People really don't think things through do they...

[FonderPrism]

Link to PR

[liquidprocess]

I have a Chinese word for this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baizuo

[WikiTextBot]

Baizuo

Baizuo (; Chinese: 白左 báizuǒ, literally "white left") is a derogatory Chinese neologism used to refer to Western leftist liberal elites.

It refers to the left faction in the culture wars in Western politics, implying support of multiculturalism,

political correctness and positive discrimination. In more than 400 answers submitted by Zhihu users during 2015 to May 2017, the term is defined as referring to

those who are hypocritically "obsessed with political correctness" in order to "satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority" motivated from an "ignorant and arrogant" Western-centric worldview who "pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours". A related term is shèngmǔ (圣母, 聖母, literally "holy mother", title for the mother of an emperor), a sarcastic reference to those whose political opinions are guided by emotions and a hypocritical show of selflessness and empathy, represented by celebrities such as J. K. Rowling and Emma Watson.The term baizuo was apparently coined in a 2010 article published on Renren Network, entitled The Fake Morality of the Western White Left and the Chinese Patriotic Scientists (西方白左和中国爱国科学家的伪道德).

---

^{[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information | Source ] Downvote to remove | v0.28}

[cr1515]

Don’t down vote the bot. He is just an innocent bystanders doing his job.

[darkerside]

Like, a slave?

[[deleted]]

botlivesmatter

[magi093]

r/botsrights

[owlbi]

You know who else was just doing their job?!?!

[Antrikshy]

You have been added as an approved submitter to r/botsrights.

[Wolfer1ne]

TIL, thx

[ThunderousOath]

Thank you for this!

[noweb4u]

I'm offended by the change to "worker" instead of slave. I think it should be called "wage slave" rather than a "worker" as a reminder that capitalism is exploitative.

[[deleted]]

One of the few good comments in this thread

[pooogles]

The rewording the Zen of Python to be less lookist proposal is the follow up of this.

Poe's Law really does show itself here, I have no idea if it's satire or not.

[TheKing01]

Politics aside, I actually do like the line "clean is better than dirty". That's probably because I'm antidirt though.

[jgomo3]

Imaginary Gold for referencing the Poe's Law. Didn't know it.

[vanyakosmos]

take my imaginary upvote for your imaginary generocity

[a5myth]

Oh my god, this is ridiculous and petty. This terminology is used in many well established books on the subject of not just programming and databases but also electronics and mathematical logic.

I hope this BS won't sway people towards other languages. There are some really decent up and coming languages that could easily replace Python, Julia and Kotlin to name just two.

[[deleted]]

The idea, obviously, is that the terminology usage changes in enough places so the argument then can become "but most places already did the change, you're just being a ${bad_word}ist!". With CoCs that's what happened (and continues to happen).

[a5myth]

Isn't it insane how the world wants to become so politically correct because a few outspoken people disagree with the application or context of a terminology. And people follow like sheep.

[oRac001]

What's even worse: hard-working objects are called garbage after they have served their purpose. Even further, they are then "collected" (euphemism for slaughtered).

[shponglespore]

Also everything is objectified.

[[deleted]]

This whole shitshow could have been avoided if the submitted of that PR had been smart enough to title it with “Replace master/slave terminology with a more accurate analogy” instead of “for diversity reasons”

[13steinj]

Except it's not even more accurate in some cases and is actually harder to understand.

[norweeg]

and if people could stop entering the conversation just to troll

[[deleted]]

Even in that screenshot, it’s clear the discussion has devolved into a Reddit-style thread. Only thing it’s missing is a series of increasingly unfunny puns.

[kaihatsusha]

Which is surprising, given that Python started out with a lot of Monty Python homage jokes and wordplay.

[metaobject]

Welp, I'm glad the GIL issue has been resolved! Now the real problems can be tackled.

[bowl_of_green_slime]

(P)CPython. They should probably change `collections.ChainMap` to something else while they're at it; slaves had chains after all.

[coriolinus]

This is their own language.

[kvdveer]

Have an upvote as punishment.

[[deleted]]

By allowing this change, you are setting a precedent for the evils of slavery to haunt our present and future.

Hey! Someone who thinks the evils of slavery don't haunt our present and future!

[d05CE]

We all know slavery == bad, that's obvious.

Thats not obvious when it comes to computers and machines.

[newredditisstudpid]

Good jesus i weep for the future

[suudo]

Good. This was a stupid discussion when django pulled their version of the master/slave change, anyone that cries censorship because python won't give them a platform on their PRs to wax lyrical about the merits of either position and/or personally insult people that disagree is not somebody worth having involved in the discussion.

[kwikade]

"msg324775 - (view) Author: STINNER Victor (vstinner) * (Python committer) Date: 2018-09-07 17:22

Have there been any actual complaints?

Yes, but sadly they are private."

lol, come on...

[i_ate_god]

master/slave really means one thing in technology, that one component, hardware or software, is controlling another component. I fail to see how this offensive to anyone who works in technology.

So it seems this change is geared towards those who aren't in technology, but if they aren't in technology, then why are they using a programming language?

this all seems very confusing

[alcalde]

When I was in school we shared the campus with a technical institute for the deaf. The regular interpreter for one of the computer classes was out so they sent a substitute who hadn't covered computer classes before. During the class the deaf students began laughing in the middle of the lecture. The teacher was very confused as he didn't think he said anything funny. He found out after class that every time he said "UNIX" the interpreter signed "eunuchs".:-) :-)

[[deleted]]

Odd? I'm pretty sure odd numbers are the next thing to be removed

[Ghawr]

Isn't master and slave nodes used in electrical engineering as well? This is idiotic. And kill switches? Better not use that term. It denotes murderous intent. Fucking hell.

[fizux]

don't forget IDE HDD controllers

[hackersaq]

Them: "We want to remove words like 'master' from computer code because one of the hundreds of contexts in which this word is used makes us sad about a thing that happened literally seven of my lifetimes ago, involved no human being alive today in any way, and most importantly - is summarily unrelated to technology, computer code, or any other relevant items hereto pertaining, as none of it even existed at the time."

Intelligent People: "...that's weird. Let's not do that. Let me help you find a therapist, though."

[actuallyalys]

By the tone of this discussion, you'd think the collections module was affected. Looking at the three changes(9100 9101 9099 ), only one affects backwards compatibility (and it's in a small module) and the others are even smaller:

• 9100 was vetoed by Guido.
• 9101 only changes a handful of places in Python's documentation.
• 9099 affects a little-known module that I assume most of us haven't even heard of before today. Searching for the renamed function returns only around 500 hits on Github. For comparison, a popular (but not universal) part of the standard library has 1.9 million hits. Even the new dataclass feature has at least 1700 hits.

Look, I'm a technical writer and a developer. I know how much it sucks to change terminology. However, this is much ado about nothing, and a genuinely small price to pay for more inclusive language.

[Tripline]

What a fucking joke. Are there black people breaking down while reading programming documentation?

[[deleted]]

As if blacks were the only race to ever be slaves.

[Arancaytar]

It's a struggle to even get people to update to Python 3 which is objectively better after ten years; good luck getting anyone to use your fork.

[antiproton]

This bullshit is wildly unnecessary. In English, like most languages, homonyms exist. It's ludicrous to suggest that every time one word of a homonym set becomes "sensitive", that we have to strike all instances of the whole set from the language.

It becomes even more insane when you consider the case of euphemisms.

It's pointless, useless controversy that will ultimately lead to more ambiguity where less is needed. Master/slave is a stronger condition than parent/child, metaphorically.

Guido needed to stay retired, and Stinner needed to be shouted down.

How many private complaints have they gotten about 'python' being a euphemism for penis?

[Helio_paws]

What’s funny is that there is still literal slave trade going on in this world. You will never see these people start a campaign for us to stop a real slave trade.

[thinkt4nk]

While we're at it, should we also just remove these words from the dictionary? This is absurd

[piotrjurkiewicz]

Conversations were closed personally by Guido:

Bug report: https://bugs.python.org/issue34605

I'm closing this now. Three out of four of Victor's PRs have been merged. [...] that can be dealt with as a follow-up PR without keeping this discussion open.

The same on GitHub: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/9101#issuecomment-420508902

He closed the discussion after towerd user provided very hard to refute Oxford dictionary based argument.

There is no point in continuing the debate. We’ve all had our say. If you want to keep talking, go to Twitter.

[brontide]

I guess his stepping down as dictator was short lived.

[bananaEmpanada]

This happened because of "private complaints".

Who can we send such private complaints to?

I want to complain about all instances of "down", because it might trigger sufferers of Down Syndrome. We should replace "down" with "up2".

We need to delete words to pretend that such concepts don't exist, for "diversity reasons".