General > General Technical Chat
'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts
Berni:
Yes the technical reason behind using master/slave is that it is a well established engineering term used for >100 years. When an engineer sees master/slave they instantly know what kind of relationship is used between the two devices.
Okay Primary/Secondary is one alternative but this is also a well established engineering term for a relationship if two devices that do a similar thing but one operating with a higher priority. Often used to describe redundancy.
Retroactively changing naming conventions is expensive both in terms of money and man hours to do it while also costing more man hours in the future due to people having to look up the naming convention or making mistakes when not looking it up and misunderstanding it.
And its not like we have been hugging Master/Slave for everything. For example in communications you usually call it a Server and Client, because its similar, but slightly different than master/slave.
julianhigginson:
I kind of like the BLE language of central and peripheral, though that kind of also implies a one to many relationship... The old client server of classic Bluetooth is ok too...
At the end of the day, you could call it eggnog and telescope and anyone who knows that they are doing will handle it and make things work.
As for SPI... Well, I mean it's not like SPI conventions are even that solid across different manufacturers anyway. Let's add in lawnmower and cupcake as the replacements for master and slave in the data sheets for half the manufacturers. That would be the least of anyone's SPI woes.
As for the whole concept of getting rid of master and slave for other terms, as someone whose life probably isn't really effected either way by slavery, I'm of the opinion that it's not my place to decide either way... If some people with a long history of slavery holding their ancestors back and still seeing strong echoes of that recent past effecting them today want to change it, then that's fine. We can drift across to new terms if that makes a difference... What I'm not fine with is a bunch of fragile, bitter, middle class white guys having apoplexy tantrums over how slavery is totally not a thing and nobody is effected by this language, just because they don't see it.
bd139:
Politicising language idioms is how we end up with burned books.
julianhigginson:
--- Quote from: bd139 on June 11, 2020, 08:47:35 am ---Politicising language idioms is how we end up with burned books.
--- End quote ---
No... I'm pretty sure that fascism is how we end up with burned books........
hans:
--- Quote from: Berni on June 11, 2020, 08:11:16 am ---This is just ridiculous.
But then again it was even controversial that Linux uses the number 0xB16B00B5 as the host id in HyperV. Whats wrong with it? Well it looks like big boobs... :palm: Its not like you even get to see this number anywhere. You only see it in the form of a #define in the source code. Why would you even care?
--- End quote ---
Well we must also start banning all Java applications, as Java .class files uses 0xCAFEBABE as header magic number.
Alternate proposal: we just document the magic number as uint32_t 3199925962, then nobody can be offended, as it's the same bits but a different interpretation.
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