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Discussion on: How do you feel about changing naming terms?

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Dian Fay

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