Sigh, we’ve had this discussion before. Also in the Linux kernel.
Primary and secondary are not the same as master and slave. Not even close.
Master and slave is a very specific division of roles that is just words and has nothing to do with glorifying the historical context.
[rant] What really makes me so angry is that people are mentioning the colonial past once again, when there is currently much more slave labor in contemporary society than there was then.I think it’s really hypocritical that we can’t use these terms anymore because of the history of slavery (which was really bad, and that’s not what I’m discussing), when we never talk about contemporary slavery. Slaves are so cheap these days that it’s not even funny anymore. The circumstances and “working relationship” have never been worse than they are now.
Just go to the BBC and see what’s going on, it’s not actually about anything. It was equivalent to 50-60 thousand dollars. Nowadays it’s not much more than $50-60, which is a thousand times cheaper. You try to be “economical” by “investing” a lot of money. For less than $100, no more. This is really a big problem.
[/rant]
good. The reason why these other terms cannot be used as alternatives is that they have a different division of roles.
In a primary/secondary setup, you have two identical things, one of which exists primarily as a backup. Think DNS. If the primary DNS does not work, we request the secondary. It is a redundant setting.
In a master-slave situation, you have one thing delegating to one or more other things that do the actual work. If the master disappears, the slaves will not have anything new to do, but your entire belongings will also be unusable.
This is a big difference between primary and secondary education, where you hardly notice anything if one thing fails.
The point is. Master and slave as a term is 1 on 1 compared to what people don’t want to talk about, because it’s loaded (but we actually take it too far), but in the context of IT it’s also quite the division of roles from architecture.
Now in IT we have to come up with all kinds of vague constructions that do not cover the contents and do not describe the design as it actually is.
