I feel like I'm in the minority that thinks this is a good idea.
I can easily see how some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording, but more importantly, I can see no downside to changing it.
It will be a very small amount of work for a very small amount of time and then everything will carry on as normal. If this helps make programming more inclusive, even in a small way, then I'm all for it.
Yes there is. If you set a precedent that you're going to cave whenever someone says they are offended, you're going to attract trolls pretending to be offended so they can have a laugh at your expense[1]. The whole master/main controversy might be genuine, but it's only a matter of time before 4chan comes up with another word/phrase for whites to be guilty about, and therefore need to be changed.
Now do a multimillion lines of code, with non-statically checked codebases, multiple kinds of interface technologies and protocols, dynamic languages which can compose variable names, including "yeS_this_is_master", etc.
The downside is this is pretty meaningless. The words "master" and "slave" are not cause of pain and suffering and even erasing them from the vocabulary is not going to change anything.
Never in my life even for a second I had any connotation between words master and slave used in IT and any derogatory meaning for anybody. I don't remember a single instance in the past 20 years when I could possibly link any utterance of these words in IT setting to any kind of discrimination, derogatory meaning.
These words are just statement of facts, describing relationship. If not these, there will be other words to state exact same relationship with exact same meaning. Contrast this with the N word which is clearly derogatory.
Are we going to be renaming colors, too? Am I going to find a new name for the color of my car?
If you care for black lives, cooperating to find and work on an actual solution seems to me much more worth your while and shooting in everything that moves is wasting time at a critical point when time is of the essence.
These kinds of moves are only going to entrench the opposition, giving more arguments against and achieve nothing.
The big companies could instead pay their engineers to tutor underprivileged kids or let the do shadowing. But no, let’s rename everything, and do a press release.
Neither can Master Wayne, according to Alfred, who is as polite as a school master. Of course, the Dark Knight did not have a masters degree, nor the spirituality of a Zen master, nor the concentration of a chess master. I am a certified dive master. I was close friends with several build masters. Of the great masters, Monet is my favorite. I hope to master my fear. Seinfeld fans still joke about being masters of their domain.
No downside indeed. Might as well sail into the sun on a three-master.
Master and Slave Cylinder.. Automotive and Engineering. Will blue collar thought police be as compliant as (ahem) WHITE collar workers?
Uh. "Workers" has slave connotations. Employees. Wards of the State of Private Prisons. Hard Labor = Slave Labor. Are pregnant women now offended? WoMAN. I mean FeMALE. Damn this is hard..
You're right, nothing wrong with it. No more than changing the name of all the nonsense gems and npm modules to something more semantic. However, I think the pushback is that this is the response to becoming "woke", and for those struggling with the issues facing PoCs, it feels like more corporate shallowness.
Okay, then I'll give some: outreach/mentorship/internships of PoC who might never be aware of coding or have a hard time breaking down the early barriers to getting involved.
You act like this type of mentoring isn’t being done. It is. I work for a Fortune 200 company in a city having several Fortune 500 companies and they all do this.
I only see the start of the pipeline. You're right though, it'd be nice to see it all the way through in order to better understand what overall impact we're having, if any.
Additionally I think we all can do grassroots mentoring. I know the challenge is discovering a good candidate, but it's an option. Buy someone a simple laptop, and teach them from first principles. (I've seen at least person I know and respect do this on Twitter)
I'm not sure there have been polls about this exact issue, but I suspect most people either don't care, or as you say feel it's an easy win with no real downside aside from a small amount of effort.
In some sense, it doesn't. But the point of these measures is to be anti-racist. To make the environment more welcoming to people of colour. Maybe the majority of people of colour don't care, but I am sure that some do.
In my own experiences, being actively welcoming provides a level of safety that silence will not, because the status quo is that it is not safe for me to be myself, even if I might plausibly be accepted among my specific peer group.
Overall, these are small changes (what github is doing notwithstanding), and the amount of time
onlookers have spent whinging about them far exceeds the time spent making the changes.
No, this won't address the most pressing systematic abuses by minorities, but it does make one of the most lucrative careers less actively hostile to them.
Even though many (or even most) people probably aren't offended by terms like blacklist or master/slave, there's a non-zero number of people who are. Obviously changing terminology isn't going to end racism, but it will have a small positive impact on some people. Even if 99% of people don't care, they're not harmed as long as the new terminology is clear. IMO there's no semantic loss by going from "master/slave" to "primary/replica" or similar.
I can easily see how some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording, but more importantly, I can see no downside to changing it.
It will be a very small amount of work for a very small amount of time and then everything will carry on as normal. If this helps make programming more inclusive, even in a small way, then I'm all for it.