This is one of the few things that my unique and unfortunate biology give me some authority to speak about.<p>I'm trans -- and that means I've done time as a female developer, and as a male developer.<p>When I was a guy, I used to laugh in the face of women that complained about things like gendered pronouns in source comments.<p>Now, with different ears to hear, it has gone from (say) this:<p><pre><code> The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop him from sending it twice
</code></pre>
To this:<p><pre><code> The POTENTIALLY-YOU needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop NOT-POSSIBLY-YOU from sending it twice
</code></pre>
It is jarring because while the syntactic form of the sentence remains static, changing the reader alters the semantic form of the sentence to one with an inconsistent grammar. Even more than the (obvious, probably unavoidable) implied suggestion that the typical user is male, it is this post-parse grammatical inconsistency which makes the text itself weirdly difficult to read.<p>Sexism comes in at the level of parsing.<p>If this doesn't make sense to you, please google 'indexicals' (in the advanced-logic sense) and read what the grey eminences have to say about pronoun resolution in sentential signification.
Beyond just political correctness, there are practical reasons to use it/they/them instead of him/her/he/she. As a native English speaker, using gendered pronouns to talk about the <i>code</i> is confusing. If I were just scanning a commment, I'd assume those gendered pronouns were referring to an author of the code or some other individual being cited.<p>Anthropomorphizing your code in comments is a bad idea in general.
Flagging.<p>Seriously, this is getting tiring. Actually seeing these issues happen is one thing: it's real, it's happening, it's life and our community, etc... Now having to bear with every blogger jumping the band wagon for the same copypasta of "Dear community of <%= @LANGUAGE %>, I love you, but you screwed up about <%= @ISSUE %>, now we need to do better"? I'm done with it.<p>As for all the name-calling on both sides of the argument, this is ridiculous. Fine, we're moving away from a "male-dominated culture" by becoming an "idiots-from-all-genders-dominated culture". Today, I'm ashamed to call myself a member of this community.
I'm surprised by the disproportionate level of angst from the people who are upset about the use of 'they' in place of 'he'. I can see the point of eliminating both and using 'it' instead, but some of the comments on that Github issue sounded like the kind of 'political correctness gone mad!' drivel that one[1] reads in the Daily Mail[2], for goodness' sake.<p>[1] A gender-neutral pronoun!<p>[2] If you're fortunate enough to not know what the Daily Mail is: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI</a>
The original conversation about this was buried @ <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823279" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823279</a> the fact that the majority of comments were in support of rejecting this rather obvious improvement was shocking.<p>Its also extremely worrying that the thread was buried (as I half expect this will be) and having a discussion about this topic is somewhere between censored and frowned upon on Hacker News.<p>I have always avoided commenting around the topic of lack of diversity in tech and tried to quietly 'do the right thing', however this is a problem that is becoming visibly worse over the time and one that makes me pretty ashamed of the industry I work in.<p>The upside is that something as public as this helps remind people that this is a big problem and can hopefully be a catalyst for positive changes.
It's encouraging that all of the comments on the Github issue are supportive of the inclusive language. Sexism in tech is far from a solved problem, but it's nice that we're finally at a point where a large number of people are taking it seriously.
I dislike both "him" and "them" in this example, but of the two, "him" is more accurate since the code is referring only to a single writer, and not to a collection of writers.<p>"them" may feel to Alex like a #SMASHPATRIARCHY moment enabling a world of joy and rainbow unicorns by subverting the domination of white men, but in this example, in a possible multiple writer environment, it seems a poor choice of words.<p>How about instead of "him" and certainly not the terrible but feel good choice of "them", how about "the writer"?<p>Also, I am not sure why Alex felt it necessary to describe the dialog as "shit like this". It's a group of developers holding a discussion. I don't see much in it that I would characterize as 'shit'. I see dialog. Attitudes expressed as Alex has here are what holds a lot of progress back by raising defenses and mischaracterizing the honest and sincere efforts of others.
<p><pre><code> The user needs to know that some data has already been sent,
to stop [the user] from sending it twice.
[...] is our only way to signal to the user that [the user]
should stop writing [...]
</code></pre>
When considering pronouns at all, take recourse to The Zen of Python:<p><pre><code> Explicit is better than implicit.
</code></pre>
It is not about non-gendered/gendered. Pronouns shouldn't be used at all. This improves documentation.<p>Using "they", regardless of the "gendered pronoun" debate is incorrect. The "user" might be transgendered, or might identify as Third Gender. Source Code and Documentation should contain no gender leanings what-so-ever, in preference for explicitness.
Wow bnoordhuis, way to be a dick! Reject the pull request, then try to have it reverted?<p>I've had nothing but trouble with the node.js community from the get go, including isaac. This whole donate hardware so we can run our crappy npm repository also rubbed me the wrong way. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6802203" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6802203</a> Bnoordhuis needs to be cut loose. You can't have poisonous people like this in charge of a project and expect to accomplish anything. Sounds like they all need to grow the heck up.
This whole gender correctness thing is getting out of hand.<p>Edit: Just reading that entire github thread makes me want to throw up. <a href="http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2838/spfart3vo.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2838/spfart3vo.jpg</a>
I just deleted a sarcastic comment on here making light of the situation- I had judged it from this PR: <a href="https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...</a><p>From that commit it looks like someone simply didn't follow commit protocol and had the commit reverted because of that.<p>But if we look at the original <a href="https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...</a>, we see that that it already had been rejected once, which is, IMO, wrong. After seeing that, it looks like it was right for someone to merge it against protocol.
Dear everyone who likes to post sensationalist posts that rehash the same "sexist" whining.<p>This is not news, this is just jumping on the "male-dominated industry" bandwagon.<p>I get it: tech is mostly composed of white males.
I don't have to be reminded of this every day. I, like many others wish this wouldn't be the case, but posting bitchy articles every day won't solve it.<p>One commit rejection does not represent the whole "Node community", stop labelling a large group of people based on actions of single individuals.<p>Instead of wasting time writing posts like this, go and tell women how awesome the tech industry is and get them to be excited about it and help them.<p>And if by chance you do happen to spot sexist individuals, call them out individually and don't label everyone in the community sexist.
Question for the women: does the use of non-gendered pronouns do anything to make you feel more accepted by the programming community?<p>It seems to me like there are much bigger issues to worry about, and changing some docs here and there is nothing more than feel-good measures (along the lines of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism</a>)<p>But I'm not a woman so I have no idea.
I think the reaction here is a little bit absurd. At first glance what I see is a revert due to a policy issue. Now, it certainly is a petty one, but having said that, I don't see any reason to believe that it is a result of the sexism issue in our industry. Of course there IS a sexism issue in our industry and I am happy to discuss it, but I just don't think that this one revert has any place as the centrepiece of that conversation. Rather, it seems like it is being used as an excuse to get angry.<p>EDIT: Likewise, I don't think this one commit can be used to make such sweeping generalizations about the node community as the OP is doing. Maybe the commit IS driven by sexism. There is still no evidence that it is the whole community that is responsible and that this is not an isolated incident.
I don't like this kind of stuff because it just creates huge amounts of interpersonal drama, hurt feelings and divisiveness over identity politics and minutiae.<p>Especially if someone's commit is only about that and it only corrects one persons comments over something they feel is a casual happenstance.<p>A social test I would put for this, would you feel absolutely comfortable about making a commit just about this one thing at work as a non-senior developer? Would you do this in person too? Probably not, because you know it's a socially antagonistic thing to do.