A big difference is that there is consensus that slavery is altogether a bad idea (at least among the people using the term master/slave in the current context), while there is no such consensus concerning sex.
At first I thought this commit was a joke, then I felt a slight annoyance at this political correctness, only to finally realize that it's not really such a bad idea, since we all agree slavery is bad, and it can be quite awkward to use the terminology around people that don't hear it often.
If we don't want our jargon to sound awkward to laymen, we've got to replace a lot more words than master and slave.
Industry terms are valuable, though, aren't they? They allow expressing complex concepts unambiguously, and can be expected to be used consistently across given field. Personally I think that trying to control jargon and have it conform ever-changing politics and common language is detrimental to the industry and hinders knowledge transfer.
I suspect (or hope) it's just trolling on the part of Alex.
(Disclaimer: English is not my native language, I wonder if saw this differently if it were.)
My point wasn't that it's awkward primarily. I agree with you that the whole point of jargon is for 'insiders' to be able to communicate quickly and unambiguously.
The point is that it could be sensitive and just isn't a nice term to use day to day. I've had moments myself where using the master and slave terms felt a bit... odd. It very well might be that I was the only one feeling a bit awkward, but that itself is a reason to consider using less loaded terms.
Second, though I agree that industry terms are valuable, I can't think of that many terms that have connotations similar to slavery (but by all means jog my memory!). And even if there are, I don't see why we can't incrementally change our terminology and phase out anachronistic (and/or loaded) ones.
Finally though, I don't find this a big issue. I see it as relatively easy to slowly change this term, and I like that, but I don't feel like I should actively argue for changing the terms 'master' and 'slave'. But I do enjoy discussing it :).
You're right—I can't think of any more terms that have connotations of comparable negativity (though quite a few plainly odd-sounding ones). I will blame my indifference to this question on my English non-nativity. :)
The only remaining argument against the change is searchability—hopefully Google knows or will learn soon that these are interchangeable terms.
That's a good point. Google has been doing a decent job at that so far, though, and I suspect if such a change in terminology were ever to become mainstream, it will be a gradual process, and generally specific to 'newer' systems.
