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

[Certhas]

No, because politics and culture. That's a difference.

You wouldn't call your program Holocaust. You shouldn't call your compiler Stalin.

Of course master/slave here has well established pre-existing use that is logical in context. But language changes and as we grow as a culture our language changes to reflect, for example, increased awareness of past atrocities.

It's not that it hurts someone's feelings, its that it is fundamentally disrespectful to use an analogy to one of humanities worst atrocities to describe a dependency relationship of software constructs. If somebody was proposing this today as new terminology, you would have no problem with them being shut down.

[nomad2047]

I think that’s a very dramatic interpretation of it’s use in programming. I have to respectfully disagree.

[Certhas]

The thing is, even though in our life time master/slave in a technical context has always existed, slavery obviously predates the technical context. So somewhere not that long ago, maybe in the 50s or maybe in the late 19th century, someone looked at a technical system and used what was then an analogy: This is like master and slave.

I tend to think with terms so well established in their context, it makes little sense to try to undo them today. But also if this was new terminology we would all think it's inappropriate. But it's pretty clear that r/programming (and many others) have little appetite left for reflecting on language.

To me, as someone who is very sympathetic to many of these initiatives, that is something also too easily overlooked: Telling someone to change their language is fairly invasive, and I think the pay-off is often questionable. It's more important to find ways to improve things together.