If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?

Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 609 points –

It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology's problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.

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Can't we just change "slave" to "servant" and carry on?

You could but he has a point. The last time I used master/slave was for IDE drives which was 15+ years ago, and even then only because I happened upon a really old system using IDE drives.

The only thing I see left is "Master" by itself, like master branch. But that makes me think of like a jujitsu master which sounds really cool lol.

Yeah, that definition of "master" is different than master/slave from what I can tell. Think the master copy of an audio recording. There are plenty of perfectly legit uses of "master," but there's no reason to use master/slave in this day and age. It was stupid to start doing so to begin with.

Especially with how we say releases are "cut" from the master branch, it makes a ton of sense.

Why retcon something that hasn't been used in over a decade? ATA is dead.

you could, but the connotations of master/slave have been integrated heavily over the years, and changing it willy nilly doesn't really accomplish much since we're talking about moving electrons through wires, or light through glass. So i don't think anybody really cares about it at the end of the day.

Realistically though, very little designed architectures these days operate on a master slave meta. At best there's one "primary" and several "secondary" or "follower" nodes behind it. Or some kind of democratically elected process for handling that.