Hacker News Reader

Comment by thefounder | Hacker News Reader

I guess now the whole master/slave tech should be renamed

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)

I'm a little confused about why GitHub is doing this. The master/slave thing I get - there's a direct link to actual slavery there, and it can be replaced with terms like leader/follower or primary/replica fairly easily.

But the "master" branch in Git doesn't have a slave branch. It's a master from which copies are made (as in a "master recording"), which is a different sense of the word.

Bitkeeper had master/slave repositories, and that's where git's use of the word master came from.

I'm going to need a source for that. I can't find any reference to slave in Bitkeeper documentation.

This tweet seems to have researched otherwise - that master/slave originated from bit keeper: https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21

It's just somebody's opinion. "Probably" is the word that indicates that.

I mean, even if it did originally, I doubt anyone that has worked with git in the past decade thought of a master/slave connection; it just doesn't make sense.

I talked about this today with a black coworker (obviously doesn't represent the feelings of all black people etc), and he actually got quite angry about it - but he was angry at the idea of changing master to main, not the idea of keeping it! From his perspective, it's nothing more than virue signalling, a distraction from real issues. He also thought it risked ridicule, and that things like this risk turning people against real change. He did kind of see the point about the separate blacklist/whitelist debate though.

Personally, instead of "master" I like the word "trunk", as I think it goes well with the branching concept.

Already has been, as the link shows.

A pupil of mine was quite shocked to see an IDE cable labelled as such

I remember as a kid running into that terminology for the first time, as it related to HDDs connected to a motherboard. Didn't like it at first, still strikes me the wrong way, but does seem like the best terminology for the paradigm.

It’s a slightly wrong-headed connotation for drives, in that the metaphor just doesn’t fit well: something called a “slave” should probably be something unwilling, but forced by the master to obey; rather than something that follows the master willingly, or something that takes its cue as to its role from an external third party (i.e. you, the system integrator setting the DIP switches on the drives.)

If you’re already willing to use metaphorical terms with unsettling connotations for things just because they’re fitting, then a more precise pair of terms for the setup on a drive cable would be “dominant” and “submissive”! (It’s not like we don’t already use “dominant” metaphorically in tons of dry ways, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominator_(graph_theory). We tend to avoid “submissive”, though, and that’s a shame; “voluntarily relinquishing control” is a very useful concept to get across in a single word.)

Leader/Follower

Coordinator/Worker

Central/Auxiliary

Conductor/Player

We're making a metaphor here. There are many metaphors one could pick to describe a situation where one unit calls the shots and the others cooperate.

primary/secondary and leader/follower make just as much sense, and avoid any discomfort.

For IDE, not that it's around anymore, primary/secondary works perfectly. For electing something to control your distributed system "leader election" makes just as much sense as "master election". For git, "main" is 2 letters shorter than "master", and makes sense.

All in all, this is good thing.

Slavery is a word for a concept, simply referencing it is not any more offensive than referencing killing. A the master/slave terminology in technology is not asserting that slavery is good, it is using the term to provide context.

Perhaps we should rename "kill" to "terminate" as well, because black people experience killings by police and may see it as offensive? Killings by police seem to be more disturbing to black people at the current time than slavery, or more raw at least. Even "terminate" may still be seen as offensive.

One might argue that slavery is more racially charged, but it's not any more than killing is. Millions of non-blacks were slaves across almost every single culture. If you look up news results for "killing" almost every single article is a bout a black killed by police, similar to how "slavery" would return news results almost entirely consisting of references to black slavery. If the meaning of words are fluid and more impactful to some than others, then "killing" and "slavery" are equally racially charged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com