Re: Pet Peeves

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

Several people in this thread have said it's all about precise 
communication, the right word for the job, etc. Yet it seems to me 
there's more at work than cool, rational, emotion-free technical writing.

To give one example, in discussions of master/slave terminology, it's 
taken as a given that these are the best technical terms to use, and 
it's just a question of how we as individual writers weigh up the 
possibility of offending some readers against the loss of precision 
involved in using other terms.

Whatever you think about slavery (and personally, I'm totally opposed to 
it) surely it's a poor metaphor in most of the IT and engineering 
settings in which it's used. What is there about the relationship 
between disk drives that makes master/slave a fruitful or descriptive or 
precise metaphor?

I can accept that in some cases the terminology is so old that 
unilaterally changing it would cause mass confusion (e.g. master/slave 
cylinders in car engines). Yet I've seen these terms applied 
inappropriately in new products, simply because it saved 5 minutes 
compared with thinking up something more accurate and descriptive. For 
example, if one host has been designated the master, it's inevitable 
that other hosts that aren't the master will be called slave hosts, even 
though there's nothing 'slavelike' about their relationship and even if 
it's easy to think of better terms.

I've seen developers get quite impatient or defensive about retaining 
this sort of terminology. To be honest, I think the 'anti-PC' feeling is 
so strong that some people would rather choose imprecise terms than feel 
that they're backing down to Geoff's "arrogant PC bunch". This happens 
even when there's not much invested in the decision.

Stuart
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