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Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

ChrisC Silver badge

As someone who, on a daily basis, writes firmware and designs PCBs to make use of devices which have master/slave type connections, and who's read more datasheets for such devices over the years than I'd care to recall, I'd say it very much does affect how I do my job.

As soon as some of those devices start to change how they refer to their connections, it means I now have to memorise another bit of terminology to go along with all of the other crap that currently fills the part of my brain that keeps track of all the technical details I need to remember to do my job effectively, in order that I can continue to interact with these devices successfully.

And if, as is almost certain to happen, different device manufacturers decide to pick different alternatives to describe the same thing as has historically been described using the same terms by everyone, then the amount of new crap I have to memorise goes up even further, as does the risk of fucking up designs just because there's no longer any consensus on what stuff is called. It was bad enough when Atmel decided to refer to I2C as TWI just (IIRC) to avoid licencing fees, but if every manufacturer of SPI devices feels compelled to change master/slave to something else, without there being a single new pair of terms that is agreed on in advance for everyone to start using instead, then working out whether any two devices can be interconnected successfully if they're using different terms for the same thing is going to add an additional challenge to the design process that doesn't need to be there.

For the stuff under my own control, once it's decided that we need to purge our designs of these terms, it means someone needs to spend time replacing these terms in the design data (carefully, so as not to inadvertently change something that shouldn't have been changed just because it happens to have been caught up in a simplistic keyword-match-like approach to the process), which is time that isn't being spent on them doing the work they'd normally have been doing. We can't simply wait for the design to become obsolete and replaced by a completely new thing where we could avoid using these terms from the outset, because the industry we work in has product lifespans which are somewhat longer than the typical consumer gizmo that'll be obsoleted within a year - I'm still maintaining the very first product I worked on when I started here 11 years ago...

Now sure, this is a one-off cost per design, but it's still a cost that has to be borne by us without any discernable payback - as these terms are used by us only within the design files and don't appear anywhere in product literature, on PCB silkscreens or anywhere else that an end user would see them, the only benefit removing them would have is in our own satisfaction of knowing that all our design files were now badword-free. But then see above for a reason why this isn't necessarily a good thing from a technical perspective...

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