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.

433

You are viewing a single comment

We're using server and agent, but im also a proponent of "captain" and "crew"

I mentally replaced cars with boats recently and it's been inducing nautical terminology everywhere I speak. Cap'n and Crew sounds great for this usage, it feels honest without the shock of great grandpa's heavyweight authoritarianism. I usually wind up stepping down to Spongebob or Pirates to filter out seriousness too, as long as the packet arrives and the replicas are jolly.

The thing is that master has a different connotation in IT than server does. Such as in master/slave pairs for fault tolerance.

Fair enough. Im in devops and the first thing I thought about was Jenkins, where "server" and "agent" fit quite well.

I dont think master/slave is that good of a naming scheme for fault tolerance either, since the "slave" doesnt do work so that the master doesnt have to, but it's rather an active/reserve kind of thing.

But I also admit that using different terms that fit best for every usecase would only cause more confusion than good.

I agree that active/reserve is a better way of saying it, and that's the way I've always said it when working with these systems. Honestly I may have never heard master slave in actual use in 15 years of regularly describing such systems.