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Personally, I don't see what the issue is with master/slave for databases. Of course it's a terrible and immoral relationship to have between two humans, but th

Personally, I don't see what the issue is with master/slave for databases. Of course it's a terrible and immoral relationship to have between two humans, but that doesn't render the words themselves immoral when used descriptively in a completely different context. By the same logic, shouldn't it be offensive to refer to the "owner" of a house? Or the "torturous" path up the mountain? Can we also not "kill" a process? Or run a "headless" browser? Or talk about a project being a "death march"?

awb 6y ago
> Personally, I don't see what the issue is with master/slave for databases. Because there are other words that convey the same programming intent that don’t also personify slavery. I can think of dozens of oppressive human relationships that could also be used to describe a subordinate database architecture, but why? What do we gain by personifying our DBs with terms like “slave”? They’re short words of convenience rather than some malicious intent, I get it, but it’s not hard to name it something just as relevant like “primary/secondary” or “source/replica” and move on to bigger and better things. The other words you mentioned don’t have the same painful historical connotations for a large minority of the population.
- strken 6y ago
  Killing child processes could certainly have painful historical connotations for anyone who's miscarried, had a forced abortion, or is distressed by the historical existence of those events. I'm sure if it becomes politically advantageous to remove the kill command, a community organiser or developer advocate somewhere will immediately start lobbying for it.
  - awb 6y ago
    Ok, fair point about miscarriages / abortions. > I'm sure if it becomes politically advantageous to remove the kill command, a community organiser or developer advocate somewhere will immediately start lobbying for it. Politically advantageous? I’m not sure why social change is assumed to have ulterior motives. If one of my employees said a violent personification of a programming process was distracting or disturbing to them and made their job harder, why not change it? It’s not like these are technical terms. These are words that relate to human interaction that we’ve embedded into a non-human field. There are tons of words throughout history that were accepted by previous generations that aren’t accepted by subsequent ones and vice versa. Language and social norms are always changing. If you can’t speak the truth freely, that’s a huge problem. If you can’t program with others using your preferred personified analogy for a variable name when another variable name will communicate the intent just as well, that doesn’t strike me as quite the same existential threat to society and public discourse.
    - strken 6y ago
      I don't believe that most of the cancelled terms were distracting or disturbing anyone who wasn't a political activist to any significant degree prior to being cancelled. Staking them out as unacceptable terms has brought into existence a battlefield where there didn't need to be one, and caused people to be offended by terms that hadn't offended them before. When I look for reasons why this might have been done, I find a lot of people making careers out of their advocacy, and getting a lot of dopamine hits from social media. It's my impression that there are a lot of people looking for things to cancel, justified by their political beliefs, but motivated by social approval and career-building. If this is the case, it's obvious why we shouldn't change our language to suit those demands: the demands are motivated by a positive feedback loop where cancelling is rewarded, and rewards enable cancellation, and so whether a term is a real problem is irrelevant so long as outrage about it can generate enough income or likes.
      - awb 6y ago
        That’s a pretty pessimistic view. As the programming field becomes more diverse, isn’t it reasonable that some might have a legitimate emotional reaction to the word “slave” especially in the context of a “master/slave” relationship? Or is it more realistic to assume that it’s people on power trips manufacturing outrage for social or physical currency? And that no African American would ever have had a problem with that word pair until a social justice warrior came along and told them to be outraged? The latter is pretty insensitive, but not an uncommon view. > we shouldn't change our language to suit those demands Programmers used an analogy that attempted to change the meaning of the word pair “master/slave”. People are advocating not to change the meaning of our language but to respect the original meaning that is still taught in every school. “Master/slave” has an important historical meaning and isn’t something we should casually co-opt. If someone wrote a script to “genocide” a DB instead of “wiping” it, I’d hope that we could see that co-opting a word that already has important historical meaning doesn’t help anyone, but surely hurts some.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
Counterpoint--the word "slave" does inherently refer to a relationship between humans (i.e. animals or inanimate objects cannot be slaves, as that word is defined). When it is used as a CS analogy, the analogy does refer back to that relationship between humans as its source of meaning. "Owner" is fine because the generic, base meaning is not inherently wrong. Claiming to a person as a slave is one application of that generic meaning (which is ofc very wrong). Owning a record in a database or owning some land is another, distinct case (which is perfectly fine). "Death march" and explicitly militaristic terms are not ideal, although many people do believe in some kind of just war, so theoretically words themselves are not fundamentally immoral, the whole topic is understandably not going to result in any positive feelings so it would be best to avoid it. Likewise, "headless" if we really want to stretch it to a human analogy, would not refer to cutting off someone's head, but rather to a type of creature that doesn't have one in the first place.
- danenania 6y ago
  I understand that these and other terms have historical baggage, but that seems like a property of language in general. If we’re really thorough about this stuff, we’ll probably end up with hundreds of words and phrases that we can’t say because they could remind people of something dark or unjust in our history. Everyone will have to think about it constantly to avoid slipping up. It strikes me as a lot of sound and fury for something that ultimately isn’t going to make a single oppressed person any better off, and that will lead to a lot of conflict and resentment when people feel that innocent patterns of speech are being policed.
  - awb 6y ago
    > It strikes me as a lot of sound and fury for something that ultimately isn’t going to make a single oppressed person any better off It’s not meant to make them better off, it’s meant to not make someone feel worse. > completely innocent patterns of speech are now being policed No one is perfect but if someone’s telling you that a word pair like “master/slave” sucks for them to have to type, why is our response anger and resentment at the “word police” rather than compassion and understanding? If we consider the worst fates for a race or ethnicity we often think about genocide or slavery. Just like we could “genocide” a DB by deleting everything, it would probably suck for many to see that word normalized in a new context. It’s probably good for some words to maintain their strong visceral reactions. I’d say the fact that “slave” feels like an innocent speech pattern is actually a good reason why we should want to move away from using it outside of it’s original historical context. The word “slave” should hopefully elicit fear, sadness and contemplation. Instead it seems it generates confusion as to why anyone would feel negative emotions in response to that word. Just like swear words, they carry weight largely because they’re seldom used and are often attached to emotions. To dilute their potency seems like a mistake to me. In any event you’re not a bad person by any stretch if you use those words innocently. But I personally would rather use a different, less charged word to describe a DB if others were so inclined to indulge me.

awb 6y ago

> Personally, I don't see what the issue is with master/slave for databases. Because there are other words that convey the same programming intent that don’t also personify slavery. I can think of dozens of oppressive human relationships that could also be used to describe a subordinate database architecture, but why? What do we gain by personifying our DBs with terms like “slave”? They’re short words of convenience rather than some malicious intent, I get it, but it’s not hard to name it something just as relevant like “primary/secondary” or “source/replica” and move on to bigger and better things. The other words you mentioned don’t have the same painful historical connotations for a large minority of the population.

strken 6y ago
Killing child processes could certainly have painful historical connotations for anyone who's miscarried, had a forced abortion, or is distressed by the historical existence of those events. I'm sure if it becomes politically advantageous to remove the kill command, a community organiser or developer advocate somewhere will immediately start lobbying for it.
- awb 6y ago
  Ok, fair point about miscarriages / abortions. > I'm sure if it becomes politically advantageous to remove the kill command, a community organiser or developer advocate somewhere will immediately start lobbying for it. Politically advantageous? I’m not sure why social change is assumed to have ulterior motives. If one of my employees said a violent personification of a programming process was distracting or disturbing to them and made their job harder, why not change it? It’s not like these are technical terms. These are words that relate to human interaction that we’ve embedded into a non-human field. There are tons of words throughout history that were accepted by previous generations that aren’t accepted by subsequent ones and vice versa. Language and social norms are always changing. If you can’t speak the truth freely, that’s a huge problem. If you can’t program with others using your preferred personified analogy for a variable name when another variable name will communicate the intent just as well, that doesn’t strike me as quite the same existential threat to society and public discourse.
  - strken 6y ago
    I don't believe that most of the cancelled terms were distracting or disturbing anyone who wasn't a political activist to any significant degree prior to being cancelled. Staking them out as unacceptable terms has brought into existence a battlefield where there didn't need to be one, and caused people to be offended by terms that hadn't offended them before. When I look for reasons why this might have been done, I find a lot of people making careers out of their advocacy, and getting a lot of dopamine hits from social media. It's my impression that there are a lot of people looking for things to cancel, justified by their political beliefs, but motivated by social approval and career-building. If this is the case, it's obvious why we shouldn't change our language to suit those demands: the demands are motivated by a positive feedback loop where cancelling is rewarded, and rewards enable cancellation, and so whether a term is a real problem is irrelevant so long as outrage about it can generate enough income or likes.
    - awb 6y ago
      That’s a pretty pessimistic view. As the programming field becomes more diverse, isn’t it reasonable that some might have a legitimate emotional reaction to the word “slave” especially in the context of a “master/slave” relationship? Or is it more realistic to assume that it’s people on power trips manufacturing outrage for social or physical currency? And that no African American would ever have had a problem with that word pair until a social justice warrior came along and told them to be outraged? The latter is pretty insensitive, but not an uncommon view. > we shouldn't change our language to suit those demands Programmers used an analogy that attempted to change the meaning of the word pair “master/slave”. People are advocating not to change the meaning of our language but to respect the original meaning that is still taught in every school. “Master/slave” has an important historical meaning and isn’t something we should casually co-opt. If someone wrote a script to “genocide” a DB instead of “wiping” it, I’d hope that we could see that co-opting a word that already has important historical meaning doesn’t help anyone, but surely hurts some.

morpheuskafka 6y ago

Counterpoint--the word "slave" does inherently refer to a relationship between humans (i.e. animals or inanimate objects cannot be slaves, as that word is defined). When it is used as a CS analogy, the analogy does refer back to that relationship between humans as its source of meaning. "Owner" is fine because the generic, base meaning is not inherently wrong. Claiming to a person as a slave is one application of that generic meaning (which is ofc very wrong). Owning a record in a database or owning some land is another, distinct case (which is perfectly fine). "Death march" and explicitly militaristic terms are not ideal, although many people do believe in some kind of just war, so theoretically words themselves are not fundamentally immoral, the whole topic is understandably not going to result in any positive feelings so it would be best to avoid it. Likewise, "headless" if we really want to stretch it to a human analogy, would not refer to cutting off someone's head, but rather to a type of creature that doesn't have one in the first place.

danenania 6y ago
I understand that these and other terms have historical baggage, but that seems like a property of language in general. If we’re really thorough about this stuff, we’ll probably end up with hundreds of words and phrases that we can’t say because they could remind people of something dark or unjust in our history. Everyone will have to think about it constantly to avoid slipping up. It strikes me as a lot of sound and fury for something that ultimately isn’t going to make a single oppressed person any better off, and that will lead to a lot of conflict and resentment when people feel that innocent patterns of speech are being policed.
- awb 6y ago
  > It strikes me as a lot of sound and fury for something that ultimately isn’t going to make a single oppressed person any better off It’s not meant to make them better off, it’s meant to not make someone feel worse. > completely innocent patterns of speech are now being policed No one is perfect but if someone’s telling you that a word pair like “master/slave” sucks for them to have to type, why is our response anger and resentment at the “word police” rather than compassion and understanding? If we consider the worst fates for a race or ethnicity we often think about genocide or slavery. Just like we could “genocide” a DB by deleting everything, it would probably suck for many to see that word normalized in a new context. It’s probably good for some words to maintain their strong visceral reactions. I’d say the fact that “slave” feels like an innocent speech pattern is actually a good reason why we should want to move away from using it outside of it’s original historical context. The word “slave” should hopefully elicit fear, sadness and contemplation. Instead it seems it generates confusion as to why anyone would feel negative emotions in response to that word. Just like swear words, they carry weight largely because they’re seldom used and are often attached to emotions. To dilute their potency seems like a mistake to me. In any event you’re not a bad person by any stretch if you use those words innocently. But I personally would rather use a different, less charged word to describe a DB if others were so inclined to indulge me.