1) Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal.
2) The committer didn't sign a CLA yet.
" To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey (...)"
The difference here is not so much in language as in culture. The Dutch language has similar gender distinctions as English. Subtle differences are that: - Our nouns are male/neutral or female, similar to French 'le' or 'la' - We cannot make neutral possessive ('its') and are limited to 'his' or 'her'
For the rest it is pretty much like English, including 'him', 'her', 'they' and 'them'. Also Ben should have good knowledge of English as any young and educated dutchman.
The difference is more likely cultural. Americans seem much to be much more easily triggered by signs of potential gender inequality or racism. The Dutch are more tolerant/rude and the humor often flirts with political incorrectness. In short Ben (and I) would not have sensed this as a potential agitator.
But is it an actually big deal for native speakers? I realize that some people think it's important, but then some people also think that you can't swear in comments and can't use "retard" as a summary opinion about someone else. In live, non-corporate language would any native speaker in fact routinely use "they" instead of "he" when referring to a user?
The entire time that nerd rage battle was occurring I wanted nothing more than to be able to magically erase both the original commit and reversion from history, since it had nothing to do with the project, wasn't productive and was a distraction of many people's valuable time from things that actually matter for Node.js.
Seriously, if you want to bikeshed over pronouns instead of contribute working code, GTFO and go blag about it somewhere else.
What got me going on this was Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on the Purity of Language" [2], which I read long ago in college. For me it's been a very gradual change; I don't like language forcing me in directions I don't want. Similarly, I've experimented with E-Prime [3] over the years.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
[2] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
I thought it a brilliant hack.
Yes, lots of people choose to use words like "the user" rather than "he". Or they use "he" and "she" throughout the documentation. Or they'll use singular "they".
> But is it an actually big deal for native speakers?
For some people it is a big deal because they are that type of person. For other people it's not a big deal but they do it anyway, just because.
Also: not passing any judgement on Ben's actions here, just talking about the gender politics.
In terms of comments in a source code or even documentation, I've read plenty of times where it's "she" or "he" and honestly don't care too much... "they" imho is a bit too generic and would rather see "the user" or just "user" as the generic.
I think it's mostly bullshit. Even more so given that some words in many languages have a gender leaning... is it "le user" or "la user"? Given that, one would probably be more appropriate.
Everyone has his own reason for choosing a particular pronoun. Some people do it because they think it is less sexist. Some people do it because they want to be part of the in-group, and they see others doing it. Some people are personally offended by the generic "he" and want to refer to both genders so they use the singular "they" or the awkward "he/she".
2) Ben rejected the change over 40 minutes after the submitter stated he had submitted a CLA.
I am the only full-time monolingual employee of the company I work for, the only one who does not speak Mandarin, the only one whose mother tongue is English, the only one who grew up in a primarily English-speaking country, and one of maybe four who would be classified as fluent in English (and that count is probably high).
You can't imagine the things that pass through my inbox every day. I've worked for this company for years. This would be impossible were I not understanding of the failings of non-native speakers.
But when I need to correct their formal English (not often, because it only occasionally matters, since our target market is mostly Chinese), not one of my co-workers dismisses it out-of-hand. They know their limits, and immediately seek to understand what is going on, rather than ignoring the issue.
This has been my (much more limited) experience with non-native speakers from other parts of Asia and Europe, as well. Encountering a non-native speaker who does not behave this way is rare, I can think of only twice that I've personally run into it, and both times it involved people who had severe interpersonal issues well beyond language.
