4 ms·

Actually they had. From the video: "One of the major things we use gender information for on Google+ is for picking gender pronouns - her, his, theirs - when

by jdp23 15y ago

Actually they had. From the video: "One of the major things we use gender information for on Google+ is for picking gender pronouns - her, his, theirs - when we refer to you. Google is committed to building products that people all over the world use, and in some languages gender is much more deeply part of how sentences are formed than in say, English. Having gender information helps to make Google+ more conversational. If you decide to make your gender private on Google+, we'll to use gender-neutral language to describe you whenever someone else encounters gender-related information about you but doesn't have permission to see your gender. For example, instead of saying 'Greg added you to his circles' or 'Frances added you to her circles', we'll say 'Greg added you to their circles' or 'Frances added you to their circles'. Yes, I know this is grammatically questionable. You don't need to message me about it. We value helping people control their privacy as being much more important than being grammatically perfectly."

jmadsen 15y ago
yeah, "being grammatically perfectly." is obviously of lesser importance to them :-) I know, I know..troll
- adriand 15y ago
  > I know, I know..troll Actually, I think you just missed the joke, that's all.
hammock 15y ago
Ctrl-H Find and Replace doesn't seem all that hard.
- jarek 15y ago
  Not all languages will be as simple as s/his/their/ and s/her/their/.
  - sheffield 15y ago
    But in English it is. It's acceptable to develop faster for certain (popular) languages.
    - jarek 15y ago
      Absolutely, but I would be surprised if they didn't have some code in the production version right now to support doubtlessly upcoming translated versions - perhaps not a full blown declension engine, but it seems unlikely they'd go English only at the start and retrofit everything later. The code might not be optimized to just let them do a simple find/replace for English.
      - sheffield 15y ago
        The problem of translation should not affect the writing of the original text.
        jarek 15y ago
        For all you know, the "original text" is a mix of "foo bar" and lolspeak.
  - afterburner 15y ago
    I read somewhere that other languages had more neutral gender splits, or simply all-masculine ones, to make things easier for now. So it could be in other languages they had nothing to reverse yet.
- jerf 15y ago
  http://search.cpan.org/~toddr/Locale-Maketext-1.19/lib/Locale/Maketext/TPJ13.pod http://search.cpan.org/~toddr/Locale-Maketext-1.19/lib/Local... - which is an article, not a CPAN module, despite its hosting. Localization isn't "find and replace" easy, it's a nightmare.

by jdp23 15y ago

jmadsen 15y ago

yeah, "being grammatically perfectly." is obviously of lesser importance to them :-) I know, I know..troll

adriand 15y ago
> I know, I know..troll Actually, I think you just missed the joke, that's all.

hammock 15y ago

Ctrl-H Find and Replace doesn't seem all that hard.

jarek 15y ago
Not all languages will be as simple as s/his/their/ and s/her/their/.
- sheffield 15y ago
  But in English it is. It's acceptable to develop faster for certain (popular) languages.
  - jarek 15y ago
    Absolutely, but I would be surprised if they didn't have some code in the production version right now to support doubtlessly upcoming translated versions - perhaps not a full blown declension engine, but it seems unlikely they'd go English only at the start and retrofit everything later. The code might not be optimized to just let them do a simple find/replace for English.
    - sheffield 15y ago
      The problem of translation should not affect the writing of the original text.
      - jarek 15y ago
        For all you know, the "original text" is a mix of "foo bar" and lolspeak.
- afterburner 15y ago
  I read somewhere that other languages had more neutral gender splits, or simply all-masculine ones, to make things easier for now. So it could be in other languages they had nothing to reverse yet.
jerf 15y ago
http://search.cpan.org/~toddr/Locale-Maketext-1.19/lib/Locale/Maketext/TPJ13.pod http://search.cpan.org/~toddr/Locale-Maketext-1.19/lib/Local... - which is an article, not a CPAN module, despite its hosting. Localization isn't "find and replace" easy, it's a nightmare.