Anthropomorphizing your code in comments is a bad idea in general.
I've always been taught and considered "he" or "him" to be gender neutral unless context indicated otherwise, in the same way that "man" can refer to any human and not just a male.
This is a tempest in a teapot if I ever saw one. Women are not underrepresented in technology because of male-gendered pronouns in code comments. As someone in the earlier discussion suggested, if you want to make a difference, quit complaining about pronouns and go help mentor some girls at your local school, Girl Scouts, Girl's Club, etc. If we had more females writing code, we would probably see more use of "her" or "she" in their comments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Women are not underrepresented in technology because of male-gendered
pronouns in code comments. As someone in the earlier discussion suggested, if you want to make a
difference, quit complaining about pronouns and go help mentor some girls at
your local school [...]But I think this gets to the root of the problem. Text with generic pronouns can get clumsy , especially so if the grammar is less than perfect.
"He" or "She" removes any ambiguity that you are referring to a singular person. Whereas "they" could mean a single person, a group of people or some inanimate object. So a gendered pronoun can make your writing clearer but of course forces you into a specific gender.
Historically "He" was often used as a pronoun which could be considered either gendered or gender neutral dependent upon context.
The gender neutral singular "they" has a long history, is correct, and should be uncontroversial.
You can't just drop a pronoun like "they" or "he" in without a previously-named referent (the way you could with "one" or "many"), so the kind of ambiguity you refer to here is almost never a problem in practice. Its only an issue which creates a difference between the two pronouns in the case where there a multiple named referents already to which the pronoun could be referring, and some are in the broader class that "they" can refer to but not in the class that "he" can refer to.
I grew up taking great pride in "correct" English usage, but I now think insisting on gendered pronouns causes harm without any tangible benefit.
I can't think of many situations where user activity won't also be automated, what's the gender of a testing script again?
There's really no good reason for gendered pronouns.
1. To indicate 'a human' as distinct from 'a machine', where 'they' is insufficiently clear
2. To refer to an actual person of known gender
3. Most European languages have a notion that inanimate objects have a gender, so they might refer to a computer or a dress as 'he' or a yacht or a book as 'her'. This makes little sense to native English speakers but can be a difficult habit to drop.
I think it's pretty clear that none of these are valid uses in this case (although I wonder if #3 might have some responsibility for the initial commit? Would be good to get some input from someone who knows more than I do about linguistics).
However, I'm not sure that 'they' is much better, because it's still anthropomorphic - it implies that the calling function is a person, which isn't true - it's a function. The correct word must be 'it' - there is no 'they' in one function calling another function.
The original complaint was a about using "he" when the antecedent was "the user."
[1] A gender-neutral pronoun!
[2] If you're fortunate enough to not know what the Daily Mail is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
Comment threads are rarely conducive to positive discussion, especially once people start tweeting about them, and I think a lot of assumptions were made on the basis of fairly scant evidence. I'm enough of an optimist to believe that the committer didn't meant to suggest that open source is a white male only thing, and if we're concerned about that view becoming widespread then we might want to be cautious about suggesting that as his motive.
If you are describing a transaction between two people, make one male and one female. If you have an odd number then distribute gender at random.
This can work, and it's certainly good practice when one is talking about social situations, and is one of the reason that "Alice and Bob" are such enduring characters. It's probably less good when one is talking about computations, where gender (and, indeed, personhood) is just a distraction, unless we really do believe in feminine functions and masculine monads.
It also wouldn't have helped much in the original Github issue, where a single instance of 'he' was being corrected. Git's patch-oriented workflow is great for correcting local bugs but not so great for global things like "do we have the correct balance of pronoun genders across our codebase?". I think if you ever end up having to ask that question, something has gone badly wrong.
The then reverted the commit when procedures weren't followed (he had already rejected it).
However, if a rejected pull request can be overridden, then that pretty much rules out having PRs anyways. Perhaps Isaac should be able to merge his own PRs. If that's not the procedure, then it's not procedure.
Again, maybe I'm totally missing something here. I believe people are pissed because of the content of the commit that was rejected/reverted, but you have to separate that from what seems to be a run around the established policy.
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" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism)
But I'm not a woman so I have no idea.
It makes me think the author either 1.) does not have a strong enough command of the english language to use "they", or 2.) is trying to accomplish something by picking a gender explicitly.
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.
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.
You should hit the "unflag" button now. Or don't, but then don't complain when, after gratifying this bad habit of yours for a few more months, you lose the flag button.
This is not even "news" and the "I-am-picky-about-my-comments" bit prevents it from being discussion, escalation of discussion or anything else that could be relevant in this place. Also, the appeal to "the node community" when the issue at hands is just tangentially linked to it makes it linkbait.
"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.
How about instead of "him" and certainly not the terrible but feel good choice of "them", how about "the writer"?
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.
Better to write documentation as you might write code:
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others
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 [...]
Explicit is better than implicit.
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.
Using "it/they/them" decreases findability and grep-ability of the Documentation.
Generally pronouns increase the signal-to-noise ratio. "The User" or less noise increases the visibility and viability of search hooks.
We should find a way to (a) drop pronouns all together, which ultimately involves (b) rewriting the sentence, or (c) writing with explicitness.
And, given the need for explicit referents preceding uses of pronouns (other than "one"/"many", which aren't the kind of pronouns at issue here), using them properly doesn't negatively impact searching.
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.
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.
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.
From that commit it looks like someone simply didn't follow commit protocol and had the commit reverted because of that.
But if we look at the original https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538..., 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.
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'm trans -- and that means I've done time as a female developer, and as a male developer.
When I was a guy, I used to laugh in the face of women that complained about things like gendered pronouns in source comments.
Now, with different ears to hear, it has gone from (say) this:
The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop him from sending it twice
The POTENTIALLY-YOU needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop NOT-POSSIBLY-YOU from sending it twice
Sexism comes in at the level of parsing.
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.
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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6802203 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.
Edit: Just reading that entire github thread makes me want to throw up. http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2838/spfart3vo.jpg
This is not news, this is just jumping on the "male-dominated industry" bandwagon.
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.
One commit rejection does not represent the whole "Node community", stop labelling a large group of people based on actions of single individuals.
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.
And if by chance you do happen to spot sexist individuals, call them out individually and don't label everyone in the community sexist.
Especially if someone's commit is only about that and it only corrects one persons comments over something they feel is a casual happenstance.
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.
