Friday, July 3, 2020

Replacing Racially Loaded Terms

I was here 22 years ago.  My office had discussion about replacing the "master/slave" terminology for our compute farm.  The Boss didn't see any problem with the words, saying they had long technical history.

I felt that "slave" was not an accurate description of what our compute servers were actually doing.  But I had trouble making any other word stick.  For quite awhile, hand waving replaced the words rather than better words.  Then we were back to Master/Slave because everyone knew what it meant.

But I'm glad to see Twitter Engineers fixing this, and they have some good word choices.
  • Whitelist becomes allowlist.
  • Blacklist becomes denylist.
  • Master/slave becomes leader/follower, primary/replica or primary/standby.
  • Grandfathered becomes legacy status.
  • Gendered pronouns (for example "guys") become folks, people, you all, y'all.
  • Gendered pronouns (for example "he" or "his") become they or their.
  • Man hours becomes person hours or engineer hours.
  • Sanity check becomes quick check, confidence check or coherence check.
  • Dummy value becomes placeholder value or sample value.

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