It makes perfect sense for machines and parts of programs to be in a relationship of extreme power disparity towards each other. Any human analogy of that power disparity is bound to be more or less problematic. Of course we can replace masters and slaves with something that is less problematic, but it won’t be perfect, because it’s rarely a good thing for one human to owe absolute obedience to another.
“Leader” is of course a bad term, it translates to “Führer” (Regular American political discourse on the topic of “strong [political] leaders” quickly sounds sinister when translated to German…).
How about “dom” and “sub”? That’s usually consensual, so it’s the least offensive human relationship that I can think of that matches the technical reality of one machine/component having absolute control over another.
Might make teaching that stuff to kids a bit more interesting, though.
That page is from the uk, but some of the New England states devised similar patterns of exploitation.
But we are talking about abstractions in computer sciences. The terminology is useful only as long as the analogy is apt. If the relationship between two software interfaces isn’t fully explained by a pattern of labor exploitation, why keep it?
Tastes differ. What you find attractive in a dom or sub might be as arousing to me as my computer’s hard drive is to you. This might not be the right forum to compare our preferences.
As for whether the disk drive submits voluntarily… I feel ethically justified in not giving a f*ck what my disk drive thinks about its situation.
P.S.: I did not have sexual relations with my hard disk drive. These allegations are false.
I’ve long instructed my team of writers to use “node” or “secondary” instead of “slave”. Many tech writers have been doing this behind the scenes for quite some time. It just takes large bureaucracies like JP Morgan awhile to catch up.
I have a similar aversion to the word “execute” as in “execute the program” - it makes me think of firing squads every time. Regardless, the simpler and more correct term would be “run”.
I’ve come across the microcode XPI for Execute Programmer Immediately. Good way to handle layoffs. But if we get rid of ‘execute’ then we won’t have executives. Are they now like show runners?
The changing of the term “master drive” for computers is:
not necessary - it’s a term from ATA/PATA/IDE/EIDE drive technology. The technology has been abandoned for the faster, better SATA technology. New ATA drives haven’t been manufactured since 2013 (except for specialty applications). (Source: Wikipedia)
hasn’t anything do do with racism, conscious or unconscious. The master device on a ATA interface is one of two devices (drives) on the interface. It masters the interface, controlling it for required data transmission to and from the master device and surrendering control to the slave device only when the master device doesn’t need data transmitted to or from it.
Slave device IS a somewhat problematic term. Although the term describes the device’s interface behaviour very well, there are other, less charged words that could be used - perhaps serf? But again, the term is from the ATA interface technology which is almost extinct.
Yet you went into great detail about why there’s “master” and “slave” terminology in use. How is that not unconscious racism? Unconscious racism and biases don’t mean you are knowingly racist or a bad person - it means you have some ingrained behaviors that you aren’t aware of that may be hurtful to others. We all have these in one form or another. Once you are made aware of these things, you can try to do better in the future.
Master in all connotations doesn’t necessarily refer to a human chattel context. In git it means “final” like a master recording, but organizations like GitHub are still deprecating the term. Even if it doesn’t mean what people may think it means, it’s not a hill I think is worth dying on to defend it. You can say it’s virtue signaling but it seems more inclusive by getting rid of outdated or easily misinterpreted jargon.
There better terminology that can be used to describe a hierarchical relationship like primary/secondary, parent/child, publisher/subscriber, and others.
When someone tells you something is hurtful, even if you don’t see it, do you continue to do the hurtful thing? Or do you try and change your behavior to be less hurtful?
If that’s the hill you want to die on, you do you. Far be it from me to tell you how to live your life. It just seems like such a strange thing to hold your ground on. Especially when there’s plenty of alternative terminologies to describe these kind of hierarchical relationships that don’t reference human enslavement.
Many of these terms are imperfect analogies. I gather that Ada programs use the term contracts to make sure that functions perform as expected-- and don’t have side effects that are difficult to debug. But if a lawyer tries to use her knowledge of contract law to learn to write an Ada program, the concept breaks down…
Right now, the multiple connotations of “master” and “slave” might well distract from the engineering.
Though, I suppose that thinking up new labels for abstract concepts can be a block to developing new code. Some D&D players start with a name, and develop a character. Me, I roll up a character, and put off naming the character until the very last minute.
I don’t understand how this is a hard point to grok? Language changes all the time, and often it’s because people demand that change to make our society more inclusive. Anyone with any iota of self-awareness about the computing industry knows it has a race and gender problem. It’s a field dominated by white men, and as such the field is going to reflect their ingrained prejudices and their privilege in our society. Given how critical this infrastructure is becoming to our lives, it’s imperative that the field becomes far more inclusive of Black people and women of all races, or it will just continue to perpetuate racism and misogyny.
