If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?
If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?
It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology's problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.
I've seen 'Active / Passive' used, that seems alright. There's plenty of alternative terms to use without borrowing terminology from sexual roleplay.
Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that's actually in control for this kind of thing (otherwise you'd just be in an abusive relationship), so that confuses things when you start trying to applying it elsewhere.
No it doesn't sound bad, words don't need to be thrown away forever just because they've been used to describe unfair treatment. I'm so sick of having to relabel so many things that are so far divorced from the social issues they are used to describe. It's so pointless and has no impact, the code doesn't care which is master and which is the slave for they are simply descriptive labels.
Are we supposed to never use the words master or slave ever again?? What's next?
My dev friends, no matter their race, all say the exact same thing. We still use master over main, come at us I guess.
I remember back in the late 90s being in college. I brought my girlfriend to class one day. She raised her hand after the professer was explaining Master/Slave roles. Keep in mind, I'm white. She's black. She's not enrolle
d in this class AT ALL.
So the professer sees this, and says "Yes, you there, girl I've never seen in 4 months of this class"
And all she said was "Master and Slave drives? That sounds sexy!"
The whole class facepalmed.
I personally think the whole backlash against master/slave in the computing world is people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of "a movement". Even if some mustache twirling racist was the first "computer guy" to come up with the term and meant it to be offensive, that is not how sane people view it today. So some of the advocates for changing it should stop trying to build it up into some Pizzagate-like conspiracy against black/brown people.
Having said that, I also don't have any strong attachments to the phrasing either. Phase it out in favor of something that makes everyone happy if that keeps the peace. It is just a term that made sense at the time to describe something. There is nothing stopping us from changing it to something else now if we so choose. It is not erasing heritage or some such nonsense. If anything, people having strong hangups about it if there are better or equally as good terms out there that doesn't make people uncomfortable is far weirder in my opinion.
The only thing I have somewhat strong opinions about is making it some high priority to go back and erase those terms from solutions that already exist. Change them as you update things, sure, but why create extra work to update something old that is currently working if the only change is not functional and just verbiage. Seems like wasted effort that could be better directed and solving functional issues to me.
Until proven otherwise, I assume either ignorance or malicious intentions by those who want to rename these "problematic" terms. It does nothing to improve the actual issues.
The false pretense of having done something, is worse than doing nothing. It's just noise.
To be clear: I don't mind the changing of terms. I'm too old to care about trivial stuff like
mainvsmaster. But if the reasoning for such a change is dumb and potentially harmful, you've lost my respect.too wordy just make it 😈 and 🥺
I'm a developer. I use main/release/dev for new projects, because it just sounds better and is more intuitive to me honestly. "Master" doesn't make much sense. Like what's so "master" about a "master branch"? It's just the main branch everything gets merged into. It doesn't "control" branches. There's no "master/slave" relationship there. So again, "master" was never really intuitive to me.
Old projects don't get relabeled, they stay master, cause relabeling the main branch could cause potential problems. That's my two cents.
I'm trying to imagine a world where this is a problem, oh, twitter
We've been using Master/Bater down at the church.
With PCBs it’s mother/daughter
If it’s referring to something like a mother/daughter circuitboard, I’ll use that. If it’s a host/client connection, I’ll use that. If it’s a primary/backup redundancy situation, I’ll use that. And those are just a few examples. There is rarely a good reason to use master/slave nowadays, since most situations already have better descriptors to begin with.
A post-doc that occasionally taught one of my electrical engineering classes in the mid-90s liked to call master-slave flip-flops professor-graduate student flip-flops. I later learned he was not making a joke.
Boss/Minion
What's wrong with primary/secondary or main/alternate!?
well, i didn't know that computer hardware could be consenting and engaged with with the BDSM community at large.
Personally i just like master/slave because it's really fucking obvious how things are supposed to work. Outside of that there are some more specific terminologies that work better in specific applications. Leader follower is pretty cringe, but mostly gets the point across. Main and sub is already established lingo in the electrical field from what i understand.
Cargo Mommy module for Rust comes to mind for me.
It is changing, albeit slowly. In git the default branch was changed from master to main.
In high availability we use primary and secondary, or many other versions of the same idea (main/secondary, etc).
Not sure how disks are handled these days but I haven't seen the master/slave terminology in those since my first CD burner
Main/secondary
Prime/secondary/tertiary etc
I prefer to use Main/Sub terminology. It also works without needing to change any acronyms.
Not more wokism! Next they'll be demanding we stop talking about executing a child!
Primary/secondary means they're all doing their thing, but one is preferred. There's no instruction going on between them
If you have a primary and secondary web servers, you'll use the primary first, but the secondary or secondaries are a fallback
If you have a primary and secondary drive, you have two drives, one of which is more important (probably because you booted from it). The secondary could be a copy or just another drive, either way the OS or a raid controller is managing it, one drive doesn't manage another
Similarly, we have dispatch/worker- the difference between that and master/slave is that they're different things. A master should be able to work without a slave, and a slave should be capable of being promoted to master - a dispatcher can't do the work and the worker can't take over if the dispatch goes down
The funny thing is we don't use master/slave much anymore, the whole premise is that the slave doesn't start to do what it does when it starts up. I can't think of any examples of it in the past decade - other paradigms, with a different relationship and a different name, have replaced it
Bypass the whole debate, adopt SVN's 'trunk/branch' terms.
Wait until a child gets killed, reaped or sometimes even sacrificed
Penis / Onahole
Top/Bottom Step/Sibling Pitcher/Catcher Thot/Simp Bull/Cuck
For IDE drives, Master/Slave is both correct and describes properly the functionality.
Only one device can talk on an IDE channel at a time (one IDE ribbon cable is one channel). The Slave Drive requires the Master drive to be able to connect to the controller. If there is only one drive, it must be designated the Master drive.
We don't share multiple devices on a single channel anymore - SATA, PCI-E, these techs have only one device per channel (or only a certain number of channels dedicated per device).
The old Master/Slave system was a hack to get double the IDE devices connected per controller channel.
We're already using that on the org chart.
What the fuck is wrong with computer people?
It’s been primary/secondary and main/secondary in the automotive hydraulics world since at least 2000. I know because my hs car repair class used master/slave and I had to do a double take for a second back in ‘01 looking at the manual before bleeding the brakes on a focus.
Is everything else in the hydraulics world also primary/secondary?
I've seen "Domain Controller" and "Subscriber" for the sake of plausible deniability.
In the case of SPI, they want to keep intact the names MISO (master in, slave out) and MOSI. So they use things like "Main" and "Sub".
I love the idea of this, it's hilarious to me LMAO
I think manger / worker is a pretty easy one. It gets hard though because both of these terms are already used for class names everywhere.
I'm not sure we even need that terminology at this point... I knew it from hard drives but I'm either 1) dealing with way more than two drives, or 2) using Linux which I don't even think of as a master/slave so much as a fuck-you-mount-me-or-not-I-don't-care partitions.
I'm not really sure where else it's used, especially since everything else seems to just be primary/secondary. But I'm no CS major so IDK.
That's all fine and good for computer science, but if Master/Slave terminology is canceled, who's going to tell the philosophy department?
I was just doing client and host but I'm down for some kink in my computers.
I use it if it's already in use, but if I'm starting a new design I try to avoid "Master" and I really try to avoid "Slave"
This also works for binary cable or interface connectors formerly known as "male" and "female".
Funny how people get heated over things that don't matter. OK, it has been one way for a long time. But had it been Parent/Child the same amount of time, would it be any different?
As long as you know the meanings of what is used, it doesn't matter what they are. If someone would rather not use master/slave, let them. No one is stopping you from making a choice to keep using it. You also might have to interact with consequences for that choice, but that's what you get for working with other people. 🫠
Tab A; Slot B
I really hope they adopt this. Not just for tech. To me, the world would become a little bit more interesting with a payment card called a DomCard™ in it.
Token Ring barely avoids copyright/trademark litigation.
Daisy Chain fits with Dom/Sub.
Or we could go full millenial reddit with Bull/Cuck
Or full MAGA with Man/Woman