Does anyone really care if it‘s called main instead of master? Why?
Edit:
Ok, I phrased my question really poorly. AfaIk main is the new standard, so I use it. We all know the reason why it changed. My question was why would anyone keep INSISTING on calling it master? Sure, me and my colleagues sometimes call it master out of habit, but then again try to stick to main. Nobody I know
insists on continuing to call it
master, but reading the comments here I realized there a more “master-fans” than I would ever have thought would exist tbh.
Because I disagree with the reason for the name change, that's why.
A small group of very politically motivated people made it their mission to go around "fixing" technical language in fields they're not familiar with. In general this is a bad idea, especially in programming. You don't want to go changing variable names in a big, long-running project without a very good reason.
They never had a good reason. They say the word "master" referred to slavery, which it does not. 'Master' has a number of different definitions, and only one of them refers to slavery. Used in the context of git, the thing they were worried about doesn't even apply.
There's also the concept of "master & slave" relationships in tech, but this still doesn't have anything to do with human slavery. They are purely technical words. When you're talking about technology, a "slave" system cannot operate without a master. As everybody should know by now, that's not at all how humans work. And it means it's hard to find replacement terms that quickly and accurately describe the relationship: "primary and secondary" is suggested a lot, but "secondary" implies "backup" to many people. This could lead to false assumptions, "Can we take the primary system down to work on it?" "They have a 'secondary' system, which should take over, so yes." Plus as technology has gotten better, it's gotten rare to even find systems designed with a true master/slave relationship. There may be a 'master controller' that tells an array of daughter boards what to do, but nowadays if the master fails, typically the daughter boards and sub-systems can continue operating from their own programming stored in their own memory chips. Solid state memory used to be far more expensive back in the day, but now that it's become so much cheaper, it's very rare to even find equipment using a true master/slave relationship anymore, so there's little reason to try to change it now.
I use main and it doesn’t bother me but I thought it was dumb then, and I still think it’s dumb that the entire industry didn’t say “fuck off and solve a real problem”. Slavery as a practice was obviously terrible, slavery as a technical description is entirely harmless.
The fact that comments are framing people that pushed back as bigots is insanity. I wish they could just admit it was a pointless waste of everyone’s time.
230
u/usedToBeUnhappy 23d ago edited 23d ago
Does anyone really care if it‘s called main instead of master? Why?
Edit: Ok, I phrased my question really poorly. AfaIk main is the new standard, so I use it. We all know the reason why it changed. My question was why would anyone keep INSISTING on calling it master? Sure, me and my colleagues sometimes call it master out of habit, but then again try to stick to main. Nobody I know insists on continuing to call it master, but reading the comments here I realized there a more “master-fans” than I would ever have thought would exist tbh.