Back in my English classes, <i>The Elements Of Style</i> was our bible. It says that singular-they is not correct, and that "he" is the correct pronoun for a subject that could be of either gender.<p>So, if someone were to argue, "we should switch to singular-they because 'he' is old-fashioned", then sure, I would totally be on board with that. Something I didn't know until today, is that singular-they is actually a pretty old idea with a lot of precedent.<p>But some people (like Joyent) seem to be saying, "anyone who uses 'he' instead of 'they' is being sexist," which is just going totally overboard. Lots of well-regarded style guidelines say the opposite, so quit with your witch-hunt logic.
I was taught it was good grammar to use gender-neutral pronouns. On the other hand, people who use open-source projects as platforms for their favourite cause are annoying.
Dear everyone,<p>Get back to making world changing products that serve your customers and stop spending time arguing about this stupid shit.<p>Sincerely,<p>lolwutf
Let's look at the numbers:<p>99% of open source developers are men (<a href="http://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/2011-04-05_JHU.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/2011-04-05_JHU.pdf</a>). It appears that women just seem to have better use of their time than writing code for free :) (free seems to be the operative word - not use of gendered pronouns in open-source vs commercial software world)<p>So let's mutilate english language (which is what referring to one user as 'they' really is - let's be honest) for the sake of some percentage of 1% (and probably larger number of men who feel bad for these individuals) who are unhappy to see a gender pronoun.<p>Now - I am not saying that one way is better than the other. I merely want to frame the argument honestly.