this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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It’s weird seeing language shift away from “master” as we become more politically correct in the US. I’d never even considered the connotation until recently.
The point of political correctness is that it's always things you'd never consider... but someone else does. I'm not here to say whether things are right or wrong or if "master" is good or bad. but you perfectly highlight the reasoning behind it.
To you, the only thing that comes up is the technology context. And that's perfectly reasonable. To someone else, the unrelated slave owning context may just be tightly coupled with that word, and that immediately comes to mind when they hear the word regardless of context. And someone in that scenario is probably not having a positive correlation with the word.
So a group of people have a very understandable reason to have a negative correlation with the word, and it's super easy to use a different word, so it seems to make sense to just use the other word.
All my git scripts these days have a
$(git remote show origin | sed -n '/HEAD branch/s/.*: //p')in them, which just fetches whatever origin calls the head branch. so if I want to rebase from main/master/prod/lead/front/etc ... the command will figure out which one to use for me.What weirded me out is that (IIRC) most who advocated the use of main weren't who would have a negative correlation with the word master.
Not that I have a problem with avoiding the use of master (I don't use master for my branches), but this felt virtue signal-y to me at the time.
Yeah. theres a fine line between advocating for positive change because it's the right thing to do vs because it makes you look good. Theres a fine line between being an ally and empty virtue signalling, and those things may not look different within the scope of a single interaction. It can sometimes take a bit to understand if someone is genuine or just performing.
There's also the possibility of having genuinely good intent, but still speaking entirely from your own conjecture of what might make others uncomfortable.
Ultimately, you should always talk to the people actually affected and take action based on that. But anyone can and should start the initiative when they think something is harmful.
For me I pictured "master" as perfecting something. So when I asked someone as a noob why things were being switched from master to main I was surprised at the possibility that it could be related to master/slave, but completely understood why from that point.
I wonder if you could think of another word besides slave terminology that might mean that.
Like maybe the "perfect" version?
"It's not the master branch, it's the perfect branch. The superior branch!"
I believe it was more because in database terminology there were masters and slaves for replication. Version control came under fire soon after.
Apparently master / slave goes back more than 100 years. An example is "slave jib", which was a sail on a sailboat that was permanently set to catch the wind, and was almost always working. Or slave clocks and master clocks, where one primary clock is used to set other dependent clocks.
Things like SPI bus in electronics, too.
That’s funny, I’m guessing they thought they were being original and edgy when they merely looped back to the older use. In any case, I’m glad programming lingo doesn’t sound like a klan rally
It doesn't have to be edgy, it just explains what happens. In db replication, a master holds the truth and slaves repeat it/follow orders. The US has a unique and relatively recent relationship with chattel slavery so people are more sensitive to it now. Doesn't make it right or wrong, the words mean certain things that describe what the system does.
Your description actually illustrates how terribly inaccurate the metaphor was. If enslaved people imitated the people who enslaved them, they'd be sitting in a rocking chair on a porch sipping lemonade.
The earliest record of the master/slave terminology being used in engineering is 1904 by which point slavery was already outlawed in almost every country, including the US. You're right to say that chattel slavery in the US was a uniquely grotesque form of slavery, but there is no system of slavery in history where slaves are primarily imitating their masters. No matter what anyone's sensitivity to the topic is, it's a bad fit for what's being described.
Slavery was not outlawed in the US. It is the only western country where it remains legal.
I assume you're referring to the technicality that the thirteenth amendment allows unpaid labor to be legally compelled out of prisoners, and that's a valid thing to be outraged about, but your statement is wildly misleading to anyone who isn't already aware of that technicality.
The existence of the loophole is terrible and should be amended, but it's nowhere near the humanitarian crisis that widespread chattel slavery was. Ironically that will probably make it that much harder to be fixed since it's more difficult to draw pubic outage towards it.
It sounds precisely as edgy as I thought. Supervisor/grunt. Yodel/echo. I offered one with whimsy and another without as much edge.
There's a lot of really well-fitting words to accurately describe the relations. Master/Slave is honestly not one of them.
My thoughts exactly. The only positive to the deprecated name might have been its memorability, but that’s hardly worth using slave/master
Next up, we'll have to change terminology for "parents" and "children" once they find out how we use those terms with memory management.
So I killed the parent and the children became zombies.
Master was just always a bad name for it.