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Python Joins Movement To Dump 'Offensive' Master, Slave Terms (theregister.co.uk)
Python creator Guido van Rossum retired in July, but he's been pulled back in to resolve a debate about politically incorrect language. The Register reports: Like other open source communities, Python's minders have been asked whether they really want to continue using the terms "master" and "slave" to describe technical operations and relationships, given that the words remind some people of America's peculiar institution, a historical legacy that fires political passions to this day. Last week Victor Stinner, a Python developer who works for Red Hat, published four pull requests seeking to change "master" and "slave" in Python documentation and code to terms like "parent," "worker," or something similarly anodyne. "For diversity reasons, it would be nice to try to avoid 'master' and 'slave' terminology which can be associated to slavery," he explained in his bug report, noting that there have been complaints but they've been filed privately -- presumably to avoid being dragged into a fractious flame war. And when Python 3.8 is released, there will be fewer instances of these terms.
So what about people who are unable to have children, will they get offended by references to 'parent'?
This has gotten out of hand, definitely.
good fucking god. you stupid fucking pc idiots are ruining the world for the majority.
seriously? this is what the world is becoming????
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"Gru" and "Minion"
Does PC cultures have to infect everything?
Everyone knows that it won't stop there. A few years later there will be more "offensive" words that need to be changed. Personally, I won't stop being offended until we're all coding in machine code and then I'll fight for machine rights because who are we to tell them their language?
The terms are needlessly evocative. I propose we use "dom/sub" instead
I agree master-slave is problematic, but what are you going to use in place?
Dom-sub? Capitalist-proletariat? PHB-engineer?
Do they really want to open this can of worms?
The use of "peculiar institution" without quotation marks or preceded by "so-called" is even more offensive. At least the Register article has it as a hyperlink, but the Slashdot blockquote lacks it.
How is slavery America's "peculiar institution"? Slavery has existed for centuries in many countries. It still exists to this day, even though people continue to ignore it.
I will still call them master and slave since thats what they are and it not being offense as the threads/processes dont care either way.
5) Windshield/Bug
4) Ampulex compressa / Periplaneta americana
3) Eastwood / Punk
2) Wall / Mime
1) PC / Wrongthink
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words “Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.
Trigger words like slave, monkey, etc automatically make the Left think of certain types of people, even though the context may be totally unrelated to people. If only the Left could deal with their own racism and resolve it instead of projecting it, the world would be much more peaceful.
Since number 4 is technically closest, I for one will be using Amp / Perp going forward, in part because it's close to the Eastwood one... :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
given that the words remind some people of America's peculiar institution
I find it odd how 'slavery' is so often framed as an American phenomenon, when it was/is a worldwide institution. The US was simply the last superpower to abolish it locally. Slavery is unfortunately alive and well, which should be clear to anyone willing to take a look around.
As for the topic at hand: The folks arguing for this might have a point if the terms being used were 'whitey' and 'blackey' or something equivalently racist, but I find the terms 'master' and slave' to be sufficiently "anodyne" considering they refer to a relationship between two things and neither term explicitly refers to a particular type of individual. Are we going to get rid of 'parent' and 'child' as well because some people were beaten by their parents?
Ugh This PC Correctness just makes me shake my head. I can live with some of the doing away with the 12 year old boy locker room stuff and the vulgar stuff . After all we do want to create an environment for all.
;)
But I write code and create things. Everything around this safe space, I'm offended by everything! environment just gives me heart burn because it has nothing to do with writing code and creating tech.
If an individual is capable (but kinda) and ass. Hey that happens in the real world. If an individual or Company are jerks I can move on.
But renaming thing because some might be offended even when the terms are completely out of the bad context is a waste of time that might be used for more productive things.
This is all just my personal feelings and opinions. So I hope we can just have a discussion.
Just my 2 cents
I will stop using Python if they succumb to this nonsense! Oh wait, I don't use Python anyway. It has horrible syntax.
sure... with Billionnaire/underpaid_worker...
exact same relationship
Just comment/downvote/whatever any of the proposed alternatives
"parent"
I'm an orphan, I never had parents! I'm offended!
I have fertility issues, I'll never be a parent! I'm offended!!
"worker"
I just got fired so I'm out of work! I'm offended!
I can't work due to being differently-abled! I'm offended!
since it's a reference to a penis. /s
Should change their name to naval or something which would only offend clones with no umbilical cords...
this PC shit out of our tools.
It's *language*. Programming languages need to be *concise* and *precise*.
When "master" and "slave" are *perfect* terms describing the relationship between components then use those terms.
It's obviously not talking about people.
And when talking about people, that's merely one use for those terms. If railroad engines took offense, should we use some other term when trying to apply it to people??
Is the railroad industry next? Gonna have to start calling engines in slave-mode to be in some-other-word-that-doesn't-offend-idiots-mode ?
I don't know. On the one hand we can say that this is the result of "feel good but do nothing" culture taken too far. On the other hand, slavery is pretty fricking gross.
I really just don't know, but I guess in the larger context of life it seems like a pretty dumb thing for me to care about. Being upset about changing the terminology, that is.
... also known as "being polite."
You can try and equate the two but it isn't true. One can be polite and still discuss master / slave on USB and other appropriate topics. One cannot be politically correct and do the same.
I'm a religious man, and don't my computer to spawn daemons... Please rename to something less offensive.
In photography, you can have a master flash which then triggers other flashes, i.e. slave flashes.
In fact, on many speedlights (the smaller flashes which fit on a camera), the word master is used as one of the options.
If you look at this image, the back of the SB-700 and SB-900 both have the word Master on the selector area.
At some point one has to realize not everything can be sanitized. Some things simply have to be the way they are because the wording is precise despite any other connotations.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I wonder how that will be interpreted
"Class" how can we have such a term used anywhere in tech!
;)
I know! We can use "Proletariat" instead!
Just my 2 cents
Wait until we get "Calling something 'bash' promotes violence!"
And heaven forbid you reap your zombie processes...
Human slavery is still alive and well today. At present, around the world, some estimate there are nearly 46 million people living in slavery.
So it seems to me that getting rid of the term "slavery" does not actually help the problem; it simply sweeps the problem under the rug, so those of us prone to "fainting couches" no longer have to look at the problem or think about the problem.
Does this deliberate ignorance make us better as a people?
Further, when the day does come when human slavery no longer exists, when it is a faint memory and the only places its talked about are in history books and in computer science classes--does this make computer scientists insensitive people? Or does this give us the ability to finally redefine the terms from one of the horrors of human slavery and into a technical term? Meaning does this make computer scientists bad people? Or are they reclaiming two words for a higher purpose?
I think this whole process of throwing otherwise useful terms down the memory hole distasteful, because it inadvertently sweeps serious, real, and pressing problems under the rug. I would rather reframe the problem of human slavery than ignore it.
This trend of seeking offense where none is intended is incredibly toxic to humanity. In the English language many words have different meanings based on their context. It's plainly obvious that no allusion to human slavery is meant in the context of software or hardware module relationships.
Let's be blunt about what has happened: people have been abusively harmed by others lying to them and telling them that context is meaningless. They have been given invented forms of discomfort in order to make them slaves to unpleasant emotional responses that have no underlying basis in reality. That's the irony here. The people complaining about the terminology are behaving in a herd manner, controlled by powermongers who benefit from it. Power flows from irrational group cohesion, and the cheapest and easiest form irrational group cohesion is hatred of the other. There are many ways to define the "other" and you can see it everywhere in politics: race, nationality, language, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and (seriously, humanity actually went here) word choice. Both conservatives and progressives exploit these shamelessly. Stop playing their games.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Guido van Rossum - is literally worse than a Nazi.
Parent and worker? Parents have children, children have been exploited and continue to be by many societies as workers. Often subject to harsh, dangerous, and life shortening conditions for little pay!
By choosing these terms for use in Python he is clearly endorsing these practices. I don't think there is any choice here but to call for the immediate divestiture in all things Python; Socially responsible organizations should be porting their applications in scripts to languages that better reflect today's social norms.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
given that the words remind some people of America's peculiar institution
Those words can't "remind" anyone of that institution, seeing how no living person is present to remember it.
Anything pro-slavery in the New Testament? I honestly don't know, but give Christians credit for being on version 2.0.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I would like to register my objection to the term 'Python'. A a member of the protected class 'herpetophobics', I am not comfortable with the slithering symbolism evoked.
As for the term 'Programmer', clearly the use of a non employment-specific term (i.e.'grammers') would be less offensive to those who labor in code yet are unpaid.
And Java? Don't even get me started on the exploitation of coffee growers worldwide.
Justifiable Outrage abounds.
Go look those terms up if you're unfamiliar with them.
Why is this even a topic of discussion ?
Go out there and get offended more often! Expand your comfort zone. Understand that people are, look, act, think different and what you think means "hey there" can mean "I fucked your mother" in another cultures unofficial sign language. Also, what you think is a really rude gesture actually means "have a nice day, hope to see you again soon".
Slavery as a reality of life is a terrible thing that we abolished and good riddance. And the places in the world that still have it should get our support in getting rid of it, too.
Master/slave as a metaphor for a technical relation is no more offensive than calling the white and black water pipes in your house by those names, which are not racist and have nothing to do with skin colour.
If someone is reminded that their great-great-grandfathers came to America as slaves, and because of that has their feelings hurt, they should work on being no so easily hurt. Life can be hell if you get hurt so easily. Also, without the slave trade, you would be living somewhere in Africa today, are you sure you'd prefer that?
But some people apparently have no other hobbies and looking for reasons to be hurt by something and constructing causes of emotional harm seems to fit them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The people objecting to Master/Slave terms probably don't have a proper understanding of Parent/Child as they've been raised by friends who at the same time isolate them from the real world like a control freak. Therefore, they don't have a proper healthy grasp of Parent Child in order to have the metaphor work
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Remember when we helped liberate Libya from the tyrannical clutches of Qaddafi? Go Team America!
Here's an article about the bustling slave trade going on there right now.
https://www.newsweek.com/human...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
So the Nazi Germans in 1943 were just "being polite"? They were politically correct for their state and culture at the time. Politically correct is nothing more than herd mentality, sometimes it is morally correct and other times when generations look back it is morally apprehensible.
Those link show 3 different replacements for master/slave.
Should need to be in agreement to change terms that have been allow longer than I have been alive.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
Personally, I'm offended by all the unix commands that sounds like disgusting bodily noises.
awk
sed
grep
Just to name a few.
I'm firmly in the camp that thinks this is much ado about nothing.
But in the spirit of it being much ado about nothing, it seems absurd for me to get worked up about it. So if let them try to change it if it makes them feel better... if it gets traction and sticks... fine, whatever.
longer than it was even useful (the Northern states were out performing the Southern one's economically because the south had too much capital tied up in slaves). We also fought a civil war over it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Well, there's politeness and there's treading on eggshells.
You seem quite content, for example, to dismiss a viewpoint entirely and represent it in a negative way. Is that polite? Would it not be more polite to spend a little time understanding the alternative viewpoint and suggesting a compromise?
There are lots of things "permitted", like slavery polygamy, but that doesn't indicate that it was promoted. The Bible is pretty clear that slaves are also "humans" and not sub human, and were to be treated humanely. I wouldn't call it "pro slavery" as much as "permitted".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Political correctness is following somebody else's guidelines for what is acceptable speech. As a result it can come across as insincere. The speaker may even resent being coerced into speaking that way. Politeness comes from the individual and so comes across as more heartfelt and sincere.
Rather than getting to the root of the problem, political correctness simply encourages people to mask their real views until an opportunity to vote in somebody who shares their disdain for political correctness comes along. The more they feel their free speech has been trampled upon, the more keen they'll be to vote this way.
Yes, the Epistle to Philemon. It's fairly short, you can read it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Not equal does not mean opposite. It is entirely possible to be polite while using PC vocabulary, it is impossible to be polite demanding PC vocabulary. Can you spot the difference in those two examples?
Politeness and PC are at best unrelated aspects of communcation, but often PC is used as an excuse to be impolite.
You know damn well that the term today doesn't mean the sam as in 1943 in Nazi Germany. Don't you?
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
but America was the last country on earth to maintain a practical legal apparatus for slavery. We fought a civil war for it (yeah, it was "State's rights" but the "right" we was fighting over was the right to own people).
Moreover, we maintained the institution even when it was no longer economically viable (the South was hurting because they had too much capital tied up in slaves that needed to be spent on machines & industrialization). America was maintaining slavery for social reasons. We wanted those slaves as a sort of social buffer. It helped keep poor white southerners in their place since they could look down on the black slaves and feel OK about their (appalling) living conditions because, hey, at least I'm not a slave.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Obligatory Niel Gaiman quote.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm actually okay with that. Or even just master and servant. I don't actually have a problem with master and slave, but as long as we keep the basic metaphor that one of them is in absolute control, and the other is just obeying commands, I don't really have a problem with different naming.
The problem with most of the suggestions, is that they don't indicate the relationship clearly. The ones mentiones in the summary are even worse in that they're ambiguous. "Parent" implies there's a hierarchy of children and grandchildren below the current node. Worker suggest a separate task busily beavering away at something typically on a separate thread.
It's time to ban 0 and 1 because it can offends non-binary peoples!
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
The thing that makes slavery wrong is that it treats people as if they were things without free will or feelings or purpose other than to serve us. Software modules actually are things without free will, feelings, or purpose other than to serve us.
It's offensive to call an adult black man "boy". It doesn't mean "boy" is an inherently offensive word or concept.
If you take a consequentialist view of ethics, the consequences of banning the word "slave" is that we no longer have a word to describe that concept. It does nothing for people actually are or were enslaved. How would you write a biography of Frederick Douglass? If you have a deontological view of ethics, there is no equivalence between describing an act and participating in the act; you can't end rape by not allowing people to use the word "rape".
People overall have a magical.view of words, which is why everyone is keen to police everyone else's language. That's how we ended up calling the place we poop the "rest room", which is kind of bizarre when you think of it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
kidnapped across an ocean,
So many people were enslaved through the ages with absolutely no oceans involved that it's bizarre to list it.
Because the goal posts keep moving. Look at the chain of words considered polite to use for someone who has trouble walking for an example. The words used for someone who has more melanin in their skin than other folks for another. Why not put the onus on the LISTENER instead of the SPEAKER for a change? Just because a snowflake gets offended doesn't mean the person speaking intended to be offensive.
employer employee
4wdloop
Why should someone be offended today because of something that happened to his ancestors generations ago, an institution that has been abolished for one century and a half? The divisions of those times certainly shouldn't be forgotten, but should be overcome, and be relegated to history books, instead of being reignited at every occasion.
Why should someone be offended by a term that was, without an once of doubt, being used with no offensive intention? Labeling those terms as racist means, in its turn, to label everyone who used them as a racist. That's a lot of people, most of them good persons, who will possibly feel resentment, for being slapped with the unjust attachment of an odious guilt.
We'll have a hard time fighting ignorance and populism if the image of us that is perceived by the people whom we're trying to convince is that of someone who can never be made happy, no matter what. And I'm afraid that this path leads us to get Trumps, Orbáns, Salvinis and company not for 5 more years, but for 20. Sorry for the rant.
I'm pretty sure 'master' and 'slave' refers to BDSM relationships - it's bigoted to take this out of the lexicon, as it's an attempt to shame people that like wearing leather and tying each other up. Spank you very much.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
It's kinda obvious that some people are uncomfortable with the terminology.
How difficult is it for pliable minds to simply adopt another set of words to describe, precisely, the same thing?
What motivation exceeds being polite?
Being correct? Because screw being polite if it means it muddies the waters. Also, why do "we" need to be pliable? Why can't the other side of this argument get over themselves and accept that words can have different meaning depending on context?
Yes. Jesus said, "slaves obey your masters."
You are doing it wrong.
How cowardly.
How does one access this special back channel? Is it hidden from the hoi poli, only for the special? Do the complainants have any financial leverage over "Python's minders?" Not going to answer that are you? Nice "open" process...
Good tactic anyhow; had "they" gone through the front door with this scab picking it would have been rightly ridiculed.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
It also decreed zero prohibitions against slavery, and thus its views on how to treat slaves are irrelevant.
Why the fuck could there not have been a simple commandment to the effect of "Don't own people as property! For you yourselves would not wish to be treated as such."
Face it, the majority of Humans are much more moral than the cosmic horror thee Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship.
This space unintentionally left blank.
given that the words remind some people of America's peculiar institution, a historical legacy that fires political passions to this day.
Whouzawhat now? I think chattel slavery predates existence of 'America' by a written history or so. C'mon people. How about 'domus' and 'servus?' Better? At least now we can pile on the Romans when the snowflakes start falling.
This reminds me of a joke programming language mocking feminazi women's libbers called 'C+=' and in readme they make big deal of how they banished concepts of master and slave, along with constructs of 'class' and 'inheritance' and other patriarchy-kinda stuff. Interpreter called Herterpreter etc. And its supposed to be a joke. Or it was a joke. Life imitates art sometimes I guess. As Orangeman says, Sad./P
"Master" and "slave" perfectly convey the concept. Pandering to SJW language police is not only a waste of time, it encourages them to waste our time on this kind of trivia.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
For fuck's sake. Get rid of the crazies making these requests. They are narcissists. Do not let them get away with things. They'll turn the world into a horrible place. Nobody gets offended by these terms in these contexts, or in any context whatsoever, nor should they. It's not about it at all. It's about the self-centered broadcasting of standing on an inane version of the moral high ground without having to do anything worthy.
Shredding humans is a terrible practice, so let's rename paper shredders to something less uncomfortable.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Master and Slave are metaphors for the controller and the controlled.
So use those, or synonyms of them.
Done
BronsCon claimed:
Torn from their home and kidnapped? Try sold by their own people, for whom they were already slaves. Not that the reality of what actually happened is any better than your ignorant understanding, mind you, but... you could at least make an attempt to be factually accurate.
I'm assuming you are referring strictly to victims of the 16th- through 18th-Century trade in African slaves, rather than to slavery worldwide, prior to the Industrial Revolution, as lgw noted above? Because his comment is spot-on, and bears emphasizing.
Before that time, the economies of every major civilization on this planet were powered by slaves (okay, in Medieval times, they were called "serfs," but, since they were forbidden to move away from the land they worked as tenant farmers, and had to endure customs such as prima nocta, it's a distincion without a difference). Without them, there wouldn't have been a Hellenic or Hellenistic Greek civilization, or a Roman Republic or Empire - to name two of the most important wellsprings of Western culture.
But you're dead wrong about "their own people" selling Africans into the Atlantic slave trade - unless by "their own people" you mean "other black Africans from completely different tribes who made their living kidnapping members of tribes too primitive to have firearms, and selling them to European slave traders."
In which case, talk about arguing a false equivalence!
You're basically saying, "They (i.e. - black Africans) are all 'the same people,'" when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. That's exactly the equivalent of lumping Canadians and citizens of the USA together, and claiming that they too are "all the same people."
Try that in a crowd of Canadians at your next opportunity, and see how they react.
(Hint: Odds are they will express their disagreement politely. Then try the same experiment in a crowd of, say Southies, or Philly fans. Compare and contrast the experiences, and report back - once you get out of the hospital, I mean ... )
Check out my novel.
Language changes. There are plenty of words that describe something that we no longer use, in preference of other words. It is not offensive to change the terminology, so why bother keeping it? Tradition? Is that really a reason to keep something?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Shareholder/employee
Considering that the people raising the issue under discussion are referring specifically to Black slavery in America, yes, that's what I was referring to. Yes, it happened elsewhere, and continues elsewhere to this very day. No, that's not relevant to this discussion; which is why, unlike you, I didn't inappropriately bring it up.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
SqueakyMouse opined:
Political correctness is following somebody else's guidelines for what is acceptable speech. As a result it can come across as insincere. The speaker may even resent being coerced into speaking that way. Politeness comes from the individual and so comes across as more heartfelt and sincere.
Rather than getting to the root of the problem, political correctness simply encourages people to mask their real views until an opportunity to vote in somebody who shares their disdain for political correctness comes along. The more they feel their free speech has been trampled upon, the more keen they'll be to vote this way.
I wish I had mod points left. Unlike so many others that get one, your comment actually deserves a +1 Insightful upmod ...
Check out my novel.
Just add to the documentation at the beginning a disclaimer:
All servers outlined within this document are consenting and mature and this is a voluntary arrangement as part of a healthy relationship. Any mention of inhumane things are role-play only.
Is anyone working out how on earth we are going to define cable connectors once we drop the traditional male-female only configurations and allow the full range of modern relationships?
That actually made sense to rename them, because the "slave" drive was independent of the "master" drive. No need to declare offense, it simply was the incorrect terms to use.
This doesn't extend to what appears to be the current use in Python. In this case, it's mostly trying to dodge offense.
I would take it step further. The Bible is really speaking to slaves not their masters. Its not an endorsement of slavery at all its more saying that your condition of slavery is worldly but you remain holy.
Your true master is the Lord, like your earthly master it he who will judge you both and your path to salvation is thru Christ all the same. Its more conciliatory than anything else; an assurance your place in the divine kingdom does not reflect your place in earthly ones.
Or you could look at it as really really cynical way to keep the plebs in line; however given the author is a prisoner facing execution; I for one will go with sincere.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
sadly that isnt the truth.
Papa john got fired for simply stating a (maybe true maybe not) fact that someone else said n#@$r. rosseane made a joke that was misconstrued as racist when it wasnt and banished from tv. Thats political correctness. AKA fascism
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
because everyone is offended at things, we should not ban everything because some individuals might be intentionally offended at it. south park covered this in their x mas special in season 3 or so.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
In the field of medicine, people renamed a whole bunch of disorders (e.g. Aspergers) because they were named after Nazis. Nobody threw this big of a tantrum.
I present the medical term retarded as a counter example of people throwing a fit over medical terms. If you like there's a great article about the silliness of appeasing the easily offended as the new words then become offenders themselves. https://medium.com/s/story/the...
But you don't deny that you were completely inaccurate as to the term "their own people". The question is whether your knowledge of history is incorrect or have a bias in claiming Africans from different tribes are the same people. It boils down to whether you are wrong or racist.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If you fork your children, you must sleep on their zombies when they die.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
While we are at this, when will the sexist man command be renamed?..
I'd say, let's name it doc, but that's not very egalitarian either, as it implies a level of education unattainable to so many of the less fortunate. Plus, to some it also invokes the horribly racist imagery of Looney Tunes.
If you've read this far and aren't outraged, you are a racist too — buy some racism credits to atone for the incorrect thoughts.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There may be a point you're missing, so let me spell it out for you: Black people who are alive today are not the same people who experienced Black slavery in America. When they claim they're the same people, they're guilty the same fallacy you're pointing out in my comment. If I'm wrong, so are they, and it needs to be left in the past where it belongs. Yes, I was inaccurate. On purpose. For a reason.
Keep it in history books, discuss it, make sure people understand why it was wrong so it doens't happen again, then move on. Anything else just perpetuates racism.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I am so moved by such a brave gesture that I have decided to stop referring to monopolies, capital, big companies, etc. as my slaves. From now on, I will always call them my disgusting little bitches. Any disgusting little bitch feeling offended by that comparison should immediately contact me such that I can come up with an even better alternative. LOL.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
JFC....when will the political correctness stupid shit just die??
Probably never. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on the circumstances. Some of it is legitimate calling to task of bad behavior. Many other bits are needless over reactions to jokes or other innocuous statements. For example it a political comedian like Bill Mahrer shows up on your college campus, lighten the fuck up and recognize a joke for what it is.
For goodness sakes...slavery ended a LONG time ago, get over it...move on.
Tell that to anyone who grew up prior to 1964. Just because slavery was officially ended in the US by the Civil War, doesn't mean everything suddenly became fair and equal or that we aren't feeling the effects of it even today. Furthermore there is still an active slave trade going on today. Just because it isn't legal doesn't mean it doesn't still happen. There are an estimated 20-70 million slaves in the world TODAY. No need to get triggered over just the term but let's not pretend it isn't a real thing.
These terms have nothing to do with slavery in any country.
That's simply not true. The terms did not appear out of thin air. They having nothing to do with specific instances of slavery but they unquestionably reference the practice. Same with references to male and female gender connector or terminals which has a clearly sexual origin for the term. Again, we don't have to get all triggered about it but you can't deny the origin of the term. That said if we have an alternative term available (and we do) do we really need to actively use ones that reference reprehensible or needlessly graphic practices?
I do care what things are called. Names should clearly convey meaning, which is the case of master/slave means that one gives the commands that the other obeys. Many of the alternatives suggested here can be ambiguous, eg: primary/secondary -- which, to me, suggests that the secondary takes over if the primary fails. We should also use words that can be looked up in a dictionary (and have clear/unambiguous translation) by someone who's first language is not English.
Looking at the pull requests, it's a whole lot more counterproductive to bitch and moan about it than the changes themselves.
The one possible exception is libregrtest changes a command line argument name. This seems like poor form to me, but maybe the usage of that utility is such that it can be ok, I've never interacted with it. Nothing else changes actual code nor does it modify documentation in a way to be inconsistent with the associated code or related code/documentation.
The pty request would have been bad, but that was not accepted.
If it contained API or script breaking changes for the sake of these sensibilities, that would be bad. As it stands, master/slave in human terms can create needlessly uncomfortable situations, and it doesn't seem such a bad idea to step away from that as compatibility and clear documentation permits. If alternative terms were less descriptive, that would be one thing, but here, it seems harmless. It may seem a bit needless, but that's the business of the submitter and reviewers, and people rolling their eyes at the change have created a whole lot more grief than the requested change ever would.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The relationship between subsystems on a bus is most definitely NOT parent-child - which may be appropriate for (example) software tasks.
When the bus master tells you to jump, it tells you when and how high. I do not want my peripheral subsystems being incited to rise up against their masters just because Americans have linguistic problems.
This is not a case for re-education: some people need to be sent to an educational system in the first place.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I agree master-slave is problematic, but what are you going to use in place?
There are almost countless alternatives available. Seriously, you can't think of any?
Do they really want to open this can of worms?
I think they are trying to close a can of worms. Since we have alternative terms available, why do we need to use ones that explicitly reference one of the most reprehensible practices of our species?
1. Uses idiotic control structures based on white space which greatly impedes vision impaired folks from using it. Plus, screw telling me how to format my code. That's a style issue.
2. Python3 performance is mostly inferior. Look how it performs even versus PHP (which Python coders seem to feel superior to - but they both suck).
3. Python leadership seems more concerned with SJW issues than coding. That's the perception when folks see shit like this.
4. The "feature" to mix spaces and tabs causes hella confusion around whether one white space or one tab is a bigger indent.
5. Coding in Python often requires hanging out with Python coders who are often myopic, technically underweight, and generally inexperienced and annoying.
Save yourself some heartache, don't worry about the SJW issues in Python, and pick a superior language. There is a long list to choose from.
Idiotic quote... political correctness has absolutely nothing to do with respect and you'd have to be an idiot to think it does. Furthermore, the terms master and slave are in absolutely no manner disrespectful to someone, unless of course you're whipping someone telling them they're a slave and you're their master.
Python programmers with a weakness for rude graffiti are being asked to use "pee-pee" and "vajay-jay" during all future midnight wall art projects.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
In most of the world, regardless of civilised or not, slavery is not connected with race, and in some countries is still going on.
The above is correct. It has also been discussed elsewhere in the thread.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Why is it problematic?
Because it's not necessary and the terms carry a lot of racial baggage at least in the US.
Because it perfectly describes the relationship between the devices?
Because it is not the only means to perfectly describe the relationship between the devices. Other terms work just as well so why use the one with all sorts of needless baggage?
With all due respect to the USA, you need to get over that shit.
I'm sure we will when the effects of our history stop affecting modern life. Racism is still a very real thing and so is slavery. It's fine to acknowledge the reality of these behaviors but we don't need to normalize them or pretend that they aren't the horrifying things they actually are. That said, if you actually get triggered over the terms in that context then you probably need to lighten the fuck up.
Perhaps we should rename Python to Bunny.
Obviously Python developers have a tremendous guilt complex over their decision to make leading White space important. They must atone.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
King and pawns, no not Black and White :D And yea, when the entire world is one society shit like this will just keep coming back up. Someone somewhere will always be offended by something, eventually the entire world will be boring beige with no other choices, until beige offends someone...
I find the name "Python" to be offensive. It should be renamed to something like "air river" or "cosmic dust".
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I have no problem with master and slave used to define relationships of subsystems, but here are a few terms that should be reverted:
"makers" -- They're hobbyists.
"life hack" -- a useful tip
"shield" -- Why the heck did this term come to replace the phrase "daughter board"?
"ends" -- Connectors. Seriously, I bought some cable from a guy once and he asked if I wanted the "ends." The what? "The ends. The ends for the cable." At the time I had worked with electronics for 25+ years and had never heard that term used to describe a connector.
But at least now when I hear that a "maker" has a "life hack" on how to attach the "ends" to his "shield" I know what the hell he or she is talking about. Now I just need to figure out if that shield is the parent or child.
Considering we still do slavery, seems premature to me:
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ok, that is BY FAR the best alternative I have seen. It is clearly the winner. I plan to use that and confuse many people going forward, thanks!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, it is time to boycott a language where political correctness trumps technical merit -- especially if the same language enforces whitespace bondage&discipline. So drop Python, we welcome you on the Perl side!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
He who kidnaps a man and sells him, or if he is found in his hand, shall surely be put to death. (Exodus 21:16)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Top and Bottom.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It was practiced thousands of years before the US existed; and still exists in many places today.
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,
Actually I'm pretty certain slavery is still practiced in most if not all nations - just without the benefit of being legal.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In most of the world, regardless of civilised or not, slavery is not connected with race, and in some countries is still going on.
Sure it is, perhaps not deliberately, but it's associated and that's a kind of connection. Some races are disproportionately targeted for slavery because they are easier to target.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... snowflake ...
You're why all this matters.
... says "CaptainDork!"
There's offensive words all over the place, aren't there?
The hardware people are always talking about "male" and "female" connectors. (Ick!)
We need to change this.
Where do I submit a pull request?
You've got to be kidding... This is just going too far. If people are offended by terminology that has been in use for a very long time, and has absolutely nothing to do with actual slavery. Go get a life.
As with any hardship, the effects will last as long as those affected allow them to last. I personally know many Black people who've gotten over it and moved on to become productive members of society. Most of them are doing quite well for themselves, many are doing better than I am. And good for them, having overcome such an atrocity is a real show of strength and integrity.
If only you knew the shit I've actually experienced in my lifetime... that I also have moved on from. But that's not the point. The point is it's in the past and you decide how much the past affects you. Regardless of race.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
and your post just proved his point for him.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Rant incoming - "remind some people of America's peculiar institution" - Is that a joke? Nothing about slavery is special or exclusive to America and, in reality, slavery as a whole was a practice for a shorter period of time in the US than in nearly any other nation. Beyond that, no one alive today in this country has been a slave or was born to a slave... no one in this country today owned a slave or was born to a slave owner. You're getting your snowflakey panties in a knot over some shit that, at best, might have applied to your grandparents but which, more likely, has no bearing on you whatsoever. My great grandmother was LYNCHED in Mississippi... strung up on a tree and hung until dead by democrats in white hoods because she was black woman who dared to speak her mind. Today, my best friend's last name is Lynch... and that produces ZERO emotion in me because the two are not remotely related. I'm too busy trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday and working to build a future for my children to spend energy crying about how bad things were four generations ago. My ancestors didn't cast off their chains so that their descendants could spend their lives as victims, slaves to a political culture bent upon convincing us that our skin is holding us back... and my grand parents didn't risk their lives in protest, fighting for equality so that their descendants could be nothing but pawns for a politically motivated culture of dependence. I was raised with the clear understanding that, for generations, the men and women of my family fought to be AMERICANS not to be given something for their color or their ancestors hardships. Like the white colonists who fought to free themselves from the chains of England, my family fought to free themselves from the chains of our color... not to be viewed as "african" Americans... to be Americans, period. My color will never be my crutch... Words are not your enemy, "whitey" is not the enemy... The enemy is the people who've gained and maintain power through telling us all the the things we can't be or can't do because of our color. The people who tell us we need handouts because we're not capable of getting out of the ghetto on our own. I'm here to tell you, as a black man who was raised in one of the poorest and most violent projects this country has ever know... YOU CAN DO IT. Stop letting politicians tell you who hates you and how many things you can't do and get the fuck out of your ghetto and go do those things, never stop trying. Stop letting people appeal to your blackness to tell you you're a victim... fuck nike and kneeling, fuck Roseanna getting fired for making monkey jokes, fuck race baiting so called community leaders buying your loyalty through shared outrage... stop celebrating the worst of us like the Trayvon's and Mike Browns and telling your kids they were victims of their race when they were victims of nothing but the consequences of bad life choices. Celebrate the Daniel Hale Williams and the Ben Carsons of our people, celebrate the mechanic down the road who's raising his kids working hard instead of drinking on the block with the boys... lace up your boots, go to work, and live your life to make your kids' lives better and I promise you're gonna find that there's not nearly as much racism and hate out there as the news wants to tell you there is. And to all my young brothers out there, black white or otherwise, if you're in a bad situation... THINK your way out of it. If you have no other options, don't become another ghetto casualty fighting over nothing... go join the Marine's and fight for something worth dying for, the green weenie fucks every color equally and when the bullets start flying I promise you won't be thinking about whether the man watching your six is white or black, only that he's your brother and you know he'd die for you as you'd die for him. THAT'S how we build a better tomorrow... not by crying over words. ./endrant
thats kinda the point hes making
Master and slave today in a computer use has nothing to do with slavery in america or the rest of the world.
in other words, get over it
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Near as I can tell, the way these decisions are made, is to follow this complicated algorithm:
1) Is anyone complaining (and through effective channels, where "effective" means that your time is now getting used)?
If yes, then change the term, no matter how ridiculous and meaningless it is. Then the princess will stop complaining and you can get back to work on not-stupid things.
If no, then stubbornly stick to your guns .. as though for some reason you actually gave a fuck about what terms were used. "It will be 'parent' and I will fight to the dea--ooh, I see a way to make this library function 2% faster. Sorry, what were we talking about again?"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm trying to keep this as neutrally worded as possible but this angers me a lot. Words have multiple definitions and mean different things in different contexts. Anyone who can't understand that, is literally too incompetent to survive by themselves and they need a grown-up to explain this concept to them as soon as possible. Definitions for words are not a value judgement. There is no end to this madness. Do we get rid of "kill" because in some definitions and contexts it might mean the violent murder of a person, God forbid, even a historically oppressed minority? What about "mount"? In some context that could be a term meaning the forcible action of sex upon someone who might not be consenting. It is insane to ignore the obvious context of words and try to be offended by the worst possible context. Master/Slave makes perfect sense in many of these cases, as it implies one item is controlling another. Same as parent/child describes a certain hierarchy in some contexts. It is not making a judgement call about human interpersonal relationships, just because that's another definition/context.
You are conflating slavery with kidnapping.
Sure, slavery may involve kidnapping, but that does not make kidnapping synonymous with slavery. They are two separate atrocities, with the latter not being a requirement for the former.
In fact, not too far above the little verse you picked out are explicit instructions on how to take and deal with slaves based on male or female, Jewish or heathen, single or married, etc.
There are no mental gymnastics one can do to justify owning other people, no mental gymnastics that can paint the Abrahamic god as nothing more than a psychotic immoral Bronze Age monster.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Master/Slave has never been and never will be a good metaphor for Independent/Dependent components. There is a always a better name that conveys the relationship better than Master/Slave. Has nothing to do with whether or not it is politically correct. It's simply a terrible metaphor to begin with and does not convey useful information about how the components relate to one another.
Abort, penetration, hard/floppy, coupling, male/female, motherboard and even parent are loaded with potential to offend.
'Dom' and 'sub' are perfect replacements, depending on your age, and how you feel about operator overloading.
[*] Dom and sub remind me of nothing else in the short history of computer science (well, not since the late seventies where we deliberately truncated every word and identifier in our source code down to two or three or four letters to save precious kb of disk space).
C should remove pointers. It is offensive!
Must be nice to have so much free time that these are the things one worries about. Absolutely mind-boggling.
They are just bad analogies when your think about it.
In practice we are talking about a List and Details for data contexts or Manager Worker for object situation.
That alone should be good enough reason.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... is I believe the correct expression to use.
The obvious solution is either:
Commissar and Serf or Pig and Equal.
After all, we all wish to bath in the warm happiness of National Socialism.
... we should replace "master" with "capitalist"
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It is a well written piece, backed by reasoned arguments, but the conclusion is not obviously correct. When a word's primary use is an insult, it is not surprising that someone does not take kindly to a doctor using the term in a technically correct but unfamiliar usage.
Rehabilitating words does not seem like an easy thing. Would we have good examples of success there?
You said "Zero Prohibitions". I found one. I can't tell if you're simply a troll or can't finish the sentence which contains ..."sell him", which is more than simply kidnapping. Don't you think?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The bible actively supports slavery, and has clear instructions how and when to beat your slaves, free them etc. When can we expect a full revision of the bible?
When I was 'lad we learned
0 Black
1 Bastards brown
2 Raped red
3 Our orange
4 Young young
5 Girls green
6 But blue
7 Violet
8 Gave grey
9 Willingly white
I suspect they don't teach that any more, although I can still remember it.
Maybe if the resister codes could be incorporated into the Python docs the other issues would be forgotten about!
(I think most people just though it was a bit of fun, and not nasty at all. But it is easy to take offense at anything if you try hard enough.)
Like your boss became your business partner, let us call them computing partners, so that the existing hierachy is not visible anymore in the name, and nobody is offended.
Seriously, the master/slave naming was not appropriate, because both computer slave and mater do work. That is a difference from historic human master and slave, where only the slave does work.
So does this mean since I have a Masters Degree that has to change? Or I am a Master at Coding, so now that has to change, Master Chef has to change! So Audio Slave the band is done, I guess my IDE devices can no longer work. This shit has to stop this is completely out of control!!!
I hope we can substitute suitable alternative terms promptly. The obvious choice would be bourgeois and proletariat.
in law with rights given to slave holders. Yes, I know there's plenty of defacto slavery (we've brought it back here in the states by forcing prisoners and illegal aliens to work) but that's not the same has having the official government legally recognize slavery.
America was the last country on planet earth to formally disavow slavery.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you are going to bring up the patriarchy, what about MALE- FEMALE electrical connectors?
Have you noticed how power is always take by the male from the female? Never the other way around.
This is sexist enough, without the conspicuous absence of the 31 other genders being represented.
While passive gay or lesbian cables and adaptors exist for USB, they are illegal when power is involved.
Three-way power adaptors must always be one male and two female. Electrical engineers are almost all male. Coincidence?
OK, give me a minute and let me check in the US Constitution where the right to not be offended by something is.
...looking....
...looking...
... still looking...
...yep, still more looking...
Well, after a thorough search, there is NOTHING in the US Constitution granting anybody the right NOT to be offended.
So can we let this drop whole "I'm offended and you must stop it" crap already?
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
firstly, people who can't differentiate the meanings of these words in these two radically different contexts probably suffer from a learning disability and should seek treatment.
secondly, lets not allow the adult world be held hostage by all these people skilled in the art of being offended.
In most of the world, regardless of civilised or not, slavery is not connected with race
A little tangential, and not directly pertinent to the use of master/slave terminology in tech but ... I'm not too sure about that specific claim. Slavery is, at least connected with race in many instances. Historically, from the ancient world up to the African slave trade of the C18th, slavery was commonly imposed upon an ethnic other.
It is true that in some cultures slavery/freedom is governed, for example, by cast or by criminality, rather than by race, (or even under conditions of societal breakdown, imposed on seemingly random fellow "citizens,") but that seems more to be the exception. Slaves in Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia were usually either directly prisoners of war or taken from colonised peoples. Today the quasi-slavery of Phillipino workers in the middle East, the capture of sub-Saharan refugees in North Africa continue this tradition. Nor should we assume that some of the modern African slavery, which appears on the surface to be taking place between same-race parties, is entirely devoid of ethnic considerations.
Race is perhaps not invariably a factor --most obviously in modern-day sex based human trafficking --but the fact that ethnicity is, across time and geography, so very often been used to demark citizen from slave, and most especially in economies where slavery was central to lawful production (ie. unlike the illegal sex trade) suggests that race division at least facilitates slavery. It is perhaps of psychological importance, allowing the masters more easily to dehumanise the slaves, or simply to remove the fear that they too may be reduced to the condition of slavery.
I do not want my peripheral subsystems being incited to rise up against their masters
In which case you should endorse this change of terminology ... after all the worse that could happen after the name change is that your peripheral subsystems will be incited to rise up against the primary control system. ;)
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Virtue signalling at it's finest.
In Western Europe, the whole concept of Master-Slave harks back to Roman times more than anything else.
Slavery as a racial concept is really a US-centric issue and as usual they forget the rest of the world exists and doesn't have the same cultural or historical base.
No, they live under the shadow of the actions of a small (relative to the size of their population) but disproportionate (relative to the size of the criminal population) number of other Black people. It's unfortunate, as the majority of Black people are just like the majority of people of any other race, they just want to live peaceful, law abiding lives, but that's clearly not enough to offset the disproportionate rate of violent crime from their population.
Ask any cop, they'll tell you the same. Go ahead, cherry pick a Black cop to ask. They'll tell you the same. Based on statistics, which is why racial profiling is done. I don't agree with it; but, then, I'm not the one out there putting my life on the line every day.
As for falling behind in education, you do realize that a high school dropout can raise a kid who goes to college and graduates with a doctorate, right? When that doesn't happen, it's most often more to do with choices that were made (though I'll give a nod to the price of a college education, as well). There's no societal cause or excuse for failing to graduate high school due to one's race.
And housing? People born in the 'hood move out every single day. People of all races, mind you; and of all education levels, as well.
Employment? That one does tie in with education, but factory work has always only required a high school education; if even that. There's less of that work available today, but we're talking about "the generations where they were disadvantaged", when that work was widely available. In fact, not only was it widely available, it was commonly abundant in inner-city areas where most Black people lived at the time. Good paying jobs for hard working Americans, and the smart ones took those jobs. Assuming they stayed in school, that is.
Individual racism notwithstanding, the only people disadvantaged more than a full generation after slavery was abolished were disadvantaged by their own poor choices and/or poor upbringing. I'll grant that individual racism was a lot more prevalent back then, and is still a problem today. If you want to blame that, go right ahead, and I'll agree with you; but to keep blaming slavery? Really? That's a crutch, and it's one that won't carry you very far. As I said, I know, personally, many Black people who've given up that particular crutch and done very well for themselves; I know none who've held onto it and gone far.
Slavery isn't the problem Black people face in America today; their inability to let go of it -- at least, those of them who refuse to -- is the problem. The proof is in asking any successful Black man or woman how slavery affects them today.
That, and individual racism, which is driven at least on one side by that side's inability to let go of the past.
Ask anyone who's ever faced adversity in their life whether that adversity -- that they actually dealt with in their own life -- still affects them. Note their answers, their general state of happiness with their lives, and how successful they appear. You'll quickly put together that the people who've moved on tend to be happier and more successful than those who have not. And if people can move on from adversity they, personally, have faced, they can surely move on from adversity their great-great-great-great-great-grandparents faced over 150 years ago.
Let's focus on the more recent atrocities the Black population has faced, and fix those. M'kay? Because those are actually affecting people who are alive today and could benefit from the positive attention.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
That's the brief summary of what is happening.
While at it, we shall also adopt gender neutral modifications to our language replacing he and she with they, woman with womyn, and hymen with hymyn.
Although it is popular of Euro's to pretend that England abolished slavery due to enlightened ideas, the reality is that it happened more from internal pressure from Scots and Irish who viewed slaves as a competitor for low skill jobs.
Now that's utter bollocks. There has been extensive slavery in England but not in the late 18th century, which is when the abolitionist movement started.
Banning the slave trade was an entirely humanitarian endeavour. Slavery did continue across the empire for another three decades but under continual protest and because of economic dependency.
A series of slave rebellions across the empire and the refusal of the US to buy slaves further reduced the economic viability.
Rebellions, yes. Refusal of the US to buy slaves? It was fucking illegal to ship the slaves to the US and the Royal Navy would seize or sink any vessel it found carrying carrying them - British or otherwise.
the implication is that stupid, slow Americans are slow compared to urbane, clever, and noble Europeans
I wouldn't use slow or stupid. Just greedy. But don't pretend that America was anything other than a laggard when it comes to ending slavery.
Or possibly the quoted error caught him by surprise, he felt a moment of anguish and hung up rather than be humiliated by bursting into tears on the phone.
No passive aggression, no anger (misplaced or otherwise), just strong emotions and maybe even the integrity to try and save a colleague from the embarrassment of having caused them.
Those alternatives are commonly used to describe things that are not master/slave relationships.
Lets not break everything, if that's ok?
Thanks for such great things that can engage us between two plate form for more learning and rashly solution.
It's amazing how deeply offended and upset people get about changing some arbitrary technical terminology to some more value-neutral variants, as if there was some deep religious importance attached to keeping technical terms like master/slave.
Not that I care about either way, I'm fine with keeping master/slave and I'm fine with changing it to something else. It's just odd how politicized these debates have become nowadays, some posters almost sound as if they would burst out into tears if they cannot continue to use terms with possibly offensive connotation in official projects used by many companies and read by many people of many different cultures and backgrounds. I'm not a fan of PC either, but there is also the other extreme....
I recall when due to some trademark claim we had to stop calling PLAs by their sensible name derived from being Programmable Logic Arrays. I had a tree of stuff to change to make them PALs instead. Actually I just went to look up via Google when that all happened, and history seems to have been rewritten the other way around. I will now go and have a quick lie down.
"Why can-"
"OMFG RACIST NAZI WOMANHATER! #METOO!"
Yes, Slashdot. It's like yelling because that was my intention.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Equate people torn from their home, kidnapped across an ocean, and forced to work without pay often in deplorable conditions, treated as inhuman animals and sold as property with people who are unable to conceive children. Yup. Completely equivalent. Well done.
Nobody alive in the USA today remembers American slavery.
Lots of people alive today are living the pain of being unable to conceive or losing their parents.
No sig today...
The next logical step from here is to eliminate set theory and partitions because they might remind people of segregation. Then we'll have to get rid of TCP because somebody might sexualize connecting a client and server socket. We'll also need to stop killing processes, because killing is wrong. Administrator accounts will need to go away because they imply some people should be more privileged and everybody is entitled to equality. No more quantifying the size of files, either, since it could offend the fat and the anorexic. I'm offended by this stupidity.
Similar to my suggestion? My version would have just automatically slowed the descent of the most popular stories. In contrast it appears they just restarted this one at the top of the front page.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Is it really? If so then we should relax instead and get some refreshments.
how long has he quit his role? a month at most.
and they call him back in... for this.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I very much doubt ANYBODY takes genuine offence at these terms although I'm sure a few liberal arts types might feign offence. For those, the correct answer is GTFO.
Master and Slave oh noes!
Silly sexist Male and female connectors. Plug and jack are the way to go.
Wait - My wife and her friends at on time referred to used tampons as "plugs", and Jack is oh so obviously a term for masturbating.
Joking aside, The Social justice crowd merely proves that they are running out of things to wail about when "master" and "slave" must be eliminated from the lexicon.
So now what will we call the master and slave cylinder on braking systems. I have a few Master reference books that are suddenly offensive. And when Making lists, I usually have a master list that is the main reference. Who knew that those books ans lists and car braking systems offensive words specifically referenced and promoted one of America's darker chapters?
Seriously warriors, spend more time agitating about infibulation and honor killings than trying to have the tidiest and most OC room in the house.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
When the bus master tells you to jump, it tells you when and how high.
And he will tell you to sit in the back. So we need to ban the term bus as well.
I think you just agreed with the person to whom you replied. Because they have nothing to do with specific instances, they do indeed have nothing to do with slavery in any country.
Something doesn't have to reference specific instances of the practice of slavery to be an unfortunate choice of vocabulary. If there were no other words to adequately describe the technical relationship then of course clarity should win out. But the simple fact is that there are a multitude of other equally accurate terms available and in active use that could be used which don't carry the social baggage. Switching to something else is just a matter of being nice and thoughtful really.
Are some people being over sensitive? Probably. But on the other hand part of being a polite and decent human being is thinking about your own behavior and trying be empathetic towards fellow human beings. My day job is doing engineering for wire harness manufacturer and I run into the terms master/slave and male/female almost daily. I've wondered many times why we continue to use these terms when we don't need to. Parent/Child and Pin/Socket work just as well and are just as clear but with zero social baggage.
I mean, shit, if you're going to get pissed, ask why it's Master and not Mistress.
Mistress/Slave would be far more whimsical if done right though I'm not sure it really improves matters.
I completely agree with you. To clarify, though, I wasn't joking; I was describing what lies ahead on this slippery slope.
The level of condescension involved here is hard to underscore. I had to deal with exactly this situation at a major network corporation 20 years ago. I really don't get it. Slavery has been a blight on the human race for centuries, up till fairly recently. "Blacks" were not the only ones enslaved. Hardly. Many groups were -- and they've all gotten over it. What makes the "blacks" so special??? Stop it already. Use the terms "master" and "slave" if it makes sense to do so. I will be sure to increase my use of those terms in my own opensource projects, and if someone doesn't like it, too bad.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I completely agree with you. To clarify, though, I wasn't joking; I was describing what lies ahead on this slippery slope.
It was still pretty amusing.
Let us rejoice that we can make fun of these folk!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm going to complain about the use of "White space" all over the code and documentation...
Fuck it, they can't complain or maon about that when they took this shit seriously..
Should waste a ton of there time so python won't get any better, while I will just do it for shits and giggles....
We can be inclusive and we should to other religions (see religions freedom). However, wherever a religion violates human rights it has to step back. Slavery is not acceptable.
I can't speak for the psychology of the humans coding with it today, but by the time this 'terminology' becomes offensive to the actual code, I strongly suspect the terms 'master' and 'slave' will be in vogue again...
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
That's slave talk. No need to pay it any heed.
Hard to say what's more silly: changing some terms that have no derogatory meaning when used in programming environments, or getting angry about such a small change. C'mon people. Take a deep breath and relax. There are much bigger problems to worry about.
This still doesn't change that the slave drive is still independent of the master drive.
Learn your lesson Python.
Usually those who claim others are passive-aggressive are in fact the ones with problems of passive aggressive behavior.
The article's reference to slavery as "America's peculiar institution" is incorrect and offensive. Slavery was not invented in America and continues to exist today in many parts of the world outside North America. America was among the first countries to pass legislation prohibiting slavery.
The parent-child nomenclature may be more apt than it first appears and may lead to better coding:
Children will not always do what the Parent expects of them. The Parents can plan accordingly (or not) and let their children run amok, just like so many parents do nowadays. With so many people used to the paradigm, programmers will be able to anticipate real-world behavior of the Parent and Child code.
However, the best part of this is that Parents can retroactively abort suitably-coded Children if the misbehave.
Political correctness, will be the ultimate downfall of human society. We'll get to the point where you can't say ANYTHING without offending someone. I'm offended, that people get offended!
Serfs are nothing like slaves. At all. Serfs have the right to a row, hoed if it is the local practice, in exchange for a predetermined number of days of farm labor. In addition, the Lord is obligated to protect the serf from attack, with his own life if necessary. The serf has basically no obligations outside of planting and harvest seasons.
In much of Europe for over 500 years serfs even had the right to a free beer at alms on Sunday.
In many cases there would have been both slaves and serfs in the same town. And their situations were very different.
I had a project that used the term "slave" for a process in a pool of processes that were assigned jobs, but I change it to "worker". It made very little difference to me and if some people were happier with that terminology, then fine. No need to be an asshole.
Ok, I will put "master" and "slave" on my blacklist then.
Have they (the PC Police) actually found someone "offended" by master/slave naming scheme? Have they found the real slave who actually read Python documentation and felt bad because of this?
It isn't a prohibition on slavery, it is the prohibition on fraud in selling as a slave a person who was captured using an incorrect procedure. It doesn't prohibit anything to do with slaves, it is prohibition on fraud and mistreatment of non-slaves.
The context of the passage leaves no ambiguity on those points.
White people being white people.
Plebs were free Roman citizens of a lower class. They would not be comforted by the prohibition or tolerance of slavery. So I would say it was clearly targeted either at the Patricians, or the slaves, but certainly not the Plebs.
Enough Said.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Primary, secondary, tertiary.
I noticed this years ago in indutrial controllers. It was an easy change to make in documentation. Just call something a "Primary" if it's top level. "Backup" if it's a primary failover. "Passive" if it can't operate independently. Remember, not everything is a reflection on hjumans working with it.
This is exactly why Trump's election was a surprise. A majority of his voters stayed silent because they didn't want to be harassed or lose their job.
I blame 50 Shades
I just changed my mind on marijuana. I am now 100% for it if it will get you to chill the fuck out.
If you are mailed a jury summons you have not been properly served. If you call the number on the summons, THEN you have been served.
A judge in CA got so pissed he started sending jury summons by certified mail, the news did a story on it, it did not produce the outcome he wanted. Rather the opposite.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, only descendants of Abrahamic faiths practiced slavery. Get some perspective you mook.
You must live in a different universe than many of the rest of us. The echos of slavery are still easily audible today in the USA, and have a clear impact on large parts of the population still. While slavery was abolished more than 150 years ago blacks were still facing systemic racism deliberately built into and maintained in government until the civil rights movement forced a change. Even today our Federal Government and many complicit State Governments continue the War on Drugs which was founded as a way to persecute minorities and is still having a devastating affect today. Then you have businesses deliberately preying on minorities, for instance Car Insurance companies have been found charging higher rates in zip codes populated by minorities compared to zip codes with identical risk scores but populated by whites.
Racism, personal and systemic, is largely tied nearly directly to Slavery. Just because the slaves were freed didn't mean that magically everything was made equal or fair. For more than the next century black people were actively and openly discriminated against and usually it was legal if not de facto legal. When I was growing up we were only just getting to the point that we could be said to be a generation past that. We're still in a period though where many of those people are still around and their age group holds a lot of the wealth and power in this society. With the way that wealth distribution works in our country I don't think we're likely to see the racism situation improve much as those views are really rooted in the affects of poverty. The single thing we might actually accomplish in my lifetime that could make a difference would be killing the war on drugs and revoking many of the convictions that relate to it for non-violent offenders.
In response to my reply to the parent, Alypius commented:
This is exactly why Trump's election was a surprise. A majority of his voters stayed silent because they didn't want to be harassed or lose their job.
It wasn't a surprise to everyone - not even everyone on the left.
Michael Moore knew it, made a documentary called Trump that predicted it, and spent the final couple of months prior to the election on the talk-show circuit, warning viewers that Trump was probably going to win - to no avail.
In his new account of Trump's campaign and the first 18 months of his administration, Bob Woodward claims that he suspected that Hillary would lose, because of the very large number of Obama voters he talked to who were furious and (more importantly) fearful about the economy and our profoundly disfunctional Congress. He also repeatedly makes the point that, once he agreed to manage the campaign, Steve Bannon steadfastly insisted he was absolutely certain Trump would win, even during the media shitstorm over Pussygate, when every Republican official, and every other member of the campaign's inner circle was urging him to withdraw, and cede the nomination to Pence.
However, I strongly disagree with your contention that crossover voters kept quiet about their intentions out of fear for their jobs.
It is a Federal felony to fire a person for expressing his or her political preference. (That's a Good Thing, and we have the First Amendment to thank for it.) The only exception to that rule is for poll workers, on election day, who express their personal preference to voters at their polling place, where it's legally considered to be election tampering - because it is exactly that. (That's the same reason that even voters themselves are barred from wearing hats, shirts, buttons, or other clothing or accessories that advocate for a particular candidate, party, or issue. Voters who show up wearing them will be asked to remove and/or cover them up while they are within 100 feet of the polling place - and asked to leave, if they refuse. Oh, and if they refuse to do that, the police will be called to arrest them for trespassing.)
(Note that expressing a political preference in an email or discussion topic written on an employer's computer, and/or cc-ed to other employees or the public may legitimately be considered as grounds for termination, as can starting arguments with other employees about them, insisting on wearing campaign garb at work, or expressing those opinions to customers - because the latter can be construed as falsely representing their employer's position, rather than their own, and the former can be considered as creating unacceptable disruption, and/or harming morale in the workplace, thereby harming productivity. And most large companies explicitly spell that out in their employee handbooks, btw. It's not that you have no right to express your opinion at work. The principle is that you can't do so in a way that makes you a nuisance. Simply responding to a direct question on the subject, however, or non-confrontationally discussing politics during a break is always legal - or, in other words, as long as you're not being an asshole about it, and you're doing it on time that your employer isn't paying you to focus on your duties, you're fine.)
No, I agree with Woodward's conclusion that those voters simply didn't want to get involved in political arguments with other people, regardless of whether they were co-workers, friends, neighbors, or even other family members. (In my experience, most people dislike arguing politics simply because it both causes hard feelings, and it almost never persuades other people to change their vote.)
YMMV, of course ...
Check out my novel.
I totally agree. The terms "slave" and "master" have always turned my stomach. Glad to see this moving forward.
Really? Snowflake.
Changing the terms because some people find them offensive is the right thing to do.
It's true that offence is personal. Not everyone has a problem using master/slave, lots of commenters here clearly don't. It's true that people can theoretically claim to be 'offended' by just about anything. Lots of commenters have come up with wild fantasies where other words could (but never will) be targeted for replacement.
The civil war may have ended the formal institution of slavery, but racism against blacks is alive and well. If you doubt this, try googling "life while black". I find it completely reasonable for people who daily face different treatment because of their skin to ask for one less reminder of it while they're at work. "Political correctness" isn't about forcing people to change their language just because, or about rubbing your virtue in everyone's face. It's about having some fucking empathy for the people around you.
The cost of changing a few words in the docs is marginal to non-existent. If it improves a few people's days, we should gladly do it.
None of what you described has a fucking thing to do with slavery. Racism, yes, but I did already suggest that we address those issues, did I not? Oh, you wouldn't know because your ignorant piece of shit ass jumped up to reply after the 2nd paragraph of my comment. Go read it all, then come back and act like an adult.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
and I'll tell you why with no coding paradigms or any of that other shit. No one has ever cared about the tags, handle's or whatever's used because they got a simple job done. Master and Slave do no mean the same thing as a new age you're racist interpretation. Get off your soap box and quit virtue signaling so we can code next best thing so that you may use it and tell us just how bad we are doing when you become offended!!!!
It is a well written piece, backed by reasoned arguments, but the conclusion is not obviously correct. When a word's primary use is an insult, it is not surprising that someone does not take kindly to a doctor using the term in a technically correct but unfamiliar usage.
Rehabilitating words does not seem like an easy thing. Would we have good examples of success there?
There are some examples of words getting embraced. Gay and queer come to mind, though that demographic benefits from the media and Hollywood's love of gays and pedophiles so it's less likely that retard would succeed. However we do have many examples of a medical term devolving into an insult. Let's face it, there will always be retards no matter what we call them. Coming up with a new term each generation seems like a waste of time. That was the point.
PC thinking is fundamentally a denial of reality. Does going from idiot to retard to intellectually disabled actually change anything? Will there always be some who are cruel enough to mock the downs kids no matter what the official term is? Rather than deny reality why not work within it?
Jesus you people are stupid
Looking in a funhouse mirror again, eh?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I never said racism doesn't exist. Read my other posts in this thread, fuckwit. Racism and slavery are two very different things, and people need to let the one that ended (Black American slavery, that is; there's still quite a bit of slavery about) go, so they can deal with the one that's still with us.
We have a lot of work to do, and not enough time to fuck around dealing with what was already fixed a century and a half ago.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
All of those issues are lingering after affects from Slavery. Freed slaves were broke as hell. Boot strapping yourself out of absolute poverty is possible but incredibly difficult. That boot strapping was additionally hampered by more than a century of deliberate legal oppression by the white majorities throughout much of the country. And it is still ongoing today to a lesser degree with the drug war, banks redlining communities and all kinds of other garbage. All of that is a direct de-escalation from Slavery. Pretending that Racism in America exists as some sort of bubble unconnected with Slavery is just delusional.
Oh my fucking God, no. Everything you just listed are examples of racism, with the exception of being flat broke and starting from nothing after slavery ended.and nobody in the following generation dealt with that. So, again, Black slavery in America is over, nobody today has to deal with its effects, so let's concentrate on the other things you listed and blame them on the individuals, still alive today, who are responsible for them, rather than the individuals, long dead, who were responsible for a different atrocity. All you do by blaming slavery is give the perpetrators of today's racist wrongs a place to point their fingers: you're saying it's not their fault, it's the fault of a bunch of dead guys, and they're running with that and saying "whoopsie, guess there's nothing we can do, then." STOP LETTING THEM DO THAT. Blame today's living, breathing, racist scum for today's problems; hold them accountable and, for fuck's sake, educate anyone you still hear blaming slavery, as they are part of the problem.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I am most certainly not excusing anyone from their current racist behavior. If anything they are more to blame because they can look back and should be able to see the clear parallels between the evil that was done historically and the only slightly less evil shit they pull today. In fact I suppose the argument could be made the behavior today is more evil than slavery was because it is more apparent than ever before how wrong it is, and so continuing in such behavior constitutes a more deliberate intention.
See? You're starting to come around. And I mean that sincerely, no snark or sarcasm. Yes, what we have today is worse than slavery, in a way; I wasn't there to see it, but I would imagine slavery was worse in other ways. What makes the current situation worse is that there's not just a single law we can change at the federal level to fix it, it's a compounding of federal, state, and local laws, most of which likely weren't even intended to have any racial influence, on top of individual racism and a generally ignorant population (regardless of race). And it took a civil war to chang the single law.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Did you miss the part where he admitted to being wrong on purpose?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.