[marbletiles]

First: yes, this is about you. But you were trying to present it as if there was a contingent with you. There doesn't appear to be.

Second: "political correctness" is easily semantically replaced with "trying to avoid excluding people". Trying to avoid excluding people is a basic way to improve the world, and should be applied across all fields, including software engineering.

Third, I am pointing out that your point about language is without merit. There are all sorts of words which were considered one way by reasonable people at one time which no longer are. No matter how in the right you feel you are about the purity of using master/slave, the tide is against you. Just like analogously it was with those who thought certain racial slurs were purely descriptive.

[scrollaway]

In the country I currently live in, the "tide" is to close all borders and consider all muslims terrorists. How's that for excluding people? Should I hop on to that tide too?

If you think the tide is always right, you got another think coming. Your mentality seems to be "I'll be part of the tide to make sure I'm not racist". That is the mentality of someone who cannot form opinions of their own.

I'll make a sidenote here and remind you that that tide you're going on about is extreme american culture. In Europe, you bring this idiocy up and you will be laughed out of the front door. Amusingly, if you look at the upvote/downvote history on the posts here, you'll find that they coincide with active hours in the US. As a night owl, this is something I see a lot on HN and Reddit alike.

[marbletiles]

Sorry, I'm in Europe and disagree. This sort of thing is even less contentious here — this particular change went through a number of offices I know with barely a murmur.

You shouldn't surf blindly. Naturally you choose the tide you want to surf. Do you want to ride the waves toward hatred, oppression and exclusion, or do you want to swim towards inclusion and togetherness? I choose the latter, even if it means seeming precious to some.

[scrollaway]

You forgot option 3: Ride a wave of pretend inclusivity. Which is exactly what's happening here. You'll note that the one thing you can't find here (and you'd be lucky to find it anywhere) is "I'm part of a marginalized group and the word "slave" is deeply offending to me, removing it is a great step towards being more inclusive".

But I'm quite tired of this; there's clearly no way to explain to you that this is a fabricated issue which is damaging to both the minority group and the community. So by all means, keep riding the pretend wave - don't be surprised when it just makes things worse.

[marbletiles]

Look at your GitHub link. The thread has plenty of people of colour on it thanking them for the change. Also, this trend started with a complaint from a black man. In 2003. http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/master.asp

By the way, I didn't address it, but your idea that changing it could be damaging to a minority group is flatly idiotic. Even if you were right and this was terminology that wasn't truly offensive, it wouldn't render it offensive and thus create exclusion in other unchanged places where none had existed before. People understand that changes take time to propagate. The only theoretical danger would be the sort of devs who Take A Stand and wilfully continue to use the old language to make a point, regardless of who they offend. And, yes, those men would then be exclusionary. As you want to be.