How do you feel about changing naming terms?

I am firmly in the camp of changing master/slave for a number of reasons:

• We change the names of things in code all the time. And we make much tougher technical challenges than changing some terminology consistently.
• Master/slave is an incomprehensible technical metaphor. It makes zero sense. Primary/replica or leader/follower and some others all make way more sense as to what's actually going on.
• It is horribly insensitive.
• It's presence as a term brings confusion, as there will always be a lot of people who just don't want to use this term. Nobody is going to be strongly against using primary/replica beside the people protesting the changing of this in the first place. Big corporations are probably not going to use terminology like slave going forward, and neither are many individuals. Holding onto this is impractical.

I'm not someone who always agrees with this side of the issue. For example, I don't think the term "postmortem" to be all that problematic, though some will (I'm always willing to have my mind changed though). I do not see grey area on this issue. I've been sort of campaigning for this change my whole software career so I'm glad it's picking up steam.

Personally, I'm of the camp that it's not as "horribly insensitive" as people claim. Master/slave is just a term, it's a historical fact that people recognize. Even though slavery still exists today, the term "master/slave" is making no suggestion to those individual or the morality of slavery. A master/slave relationship is just that, a commonly-recognized relationship.

That being said, @ben is absolutely right that there are better, more accurate, and more descriptive terms that could be used. Primary/replica describes what's going on better than master/slave.

My thought is simple; SJW in OSS is cancer because basically, they try to command "solutions" to non-existent problems.

“If it's not broken, don't fix it.”

I think it's easy to underestimate the amount of effort actually involved in terminology changes, like many people were doing with Redis last week, and I think some other bugbears of technical vocabulary are vastly overblown; the etymologies of blacklist and whitelist, for example, have nothing to do with skin color. In all, most seem to fall into one of two categories: word policing from people who've theorycrafted themselves into knots and wound up inflicting their guilt complexes on the rest of us (seriously, what actual objection is there to "postmortem"?!), or low-effort trolling (we all know what man pages are short for, you're not impressing anybody). But the technical usage of master and slave is like if we'd spent the past half century calling some hardware/software system element the rapist.

Ditto what @ben said.

I think as software developers we're notoriously bad at naming things, and this particular terminology falls firmly under the umbrella of "bad names for things".

The insistence of folks to cleave to (and argue for) these outdated and poorly chosen names is foolish, regardless of the reason.

If there's a better thing to call something, we should call it that.

If the suggestion of making this type of change (with the added reasoning of being sensitive and empathetic towards other folks in your professional community) lights a fire in your belly or upsets you, then there's a bigger, personal, problem at hand.

For some comic relief, I'm reminded of this:

Bullfrog? I'd have called it a Chazwazza!

1. This change makes sense and introduces more clarity. master/slave is too generic and the replacements are usually more informative of the actual architecture.
2. But saying it's controversial is ridiculous. It has no bearing on real life and can not sanely be referred to as a metaphor.
3. If you are irrationally obsessed with insisting not only that it's a metaphor but even that it informs our thinking on other subjects, just tell yourself it's a reference to BDSM and go on with your day.

It's not because something may have a bad connotation than an entire "community" should change.

That really depends on the community. Does the community value including diverse folks, from diverse backgrounds? Does the community want to welcome those folks, and allow them to feel at ease? If it does, then the onus is most certainly on the community to change.

Moreover, I'm confused by the need to clarify that the change, if made in relation to it's connotation, would be unreasonable?

Is it not the same, reasonably insignificant change, regardless of the motivation?

The fact that this is being discussed is a really big plus for the community as a whole and is a clear reflection of society at present.

My personal opinion is that terminology should be as easy-to-learn and accessible as possible. Terminology should not be a stumbling block when it comes to learning, if there is a more fitting metaphor out there then let's use it.

Yes, the terminology needs to change. I don’t think anyone disagrees with that.

What I do think gets tiresome is the histrionics that attend these conversations. I find it awfully hard to believe that someone is going to be going about their merry way in TechVille and gasp drops dead or immediately quits their job because of such a “micro-aggression”. The virtue signaling gets really old.

We should change it in part because primary/replica, for example, is a clearer term for what it actually is, as well for cleansing a term that refers to a terrible human institution.

I try to think of words that cannot offend anyone. Haven't found one yet though

Based on this problem... Then will remove these word from everything, already that attack someone...

I have seen this words in your meaning based on its environment... Technology.

I was trying to stop a process the other day and found out that Linux uses a very insensitively-named kill command. Oh, I was reading the man page for that command when I realized why is it man and not woman anyway? Can we find alternatives to blacklist and whitespace while we're at it?

This is ridiculous.