© 2025 Iowa Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Coders Push To Remove 'Master' And 'Slave' From Computer Terminology

As employees at tech companies join the movement against racial injustice, some are calling attention to the language of the industry itself.

The head of Microsoft’s GitHub, the web’s biggest site for software developers, says they will retire the decades-old coding terms “master” and “slave” after a group of coders called out the terminology for its racist connotation.

Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd speaks with Shirin Ghaffary, a reporter for Recode.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tags