7 ms·

To my friends in the Node community

72 points by kingkilr 13y ago

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semiel 13y ago
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.
- theorique 13y ago
  Did you read the github issue? It seems to be an angry free-for-all.
spamizbad 13y ago
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 code 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. Anthropomorphizing your code in comments is a bad idea in general.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Based on the examples on the page it doesn't look like they are doing that. They are talking about the "user" which depending on context might be the programmer using the API or the end user using the application. 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.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    That is the opposite of my understanding of the history here; my understanding is that "they" has, for most of the history of written english, been used a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and that it was a prescriptivist movement in the late 1800s that attempted to away with that practice. The gender neutral singular "they" has a long history, is correct, and should be uncontroversial.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      There's a discussion on Stack exchange here: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he-for-a-gender-neutral-third-person-correct http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he... But I would still class the late 1800s as relatively "historical" compared with tech documentation.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        You misread me. The effort to eradicate singular "they" is a late 1800's movement, and, I agree, that movement is archaic. The singular "they" has been a feature of English since Chaucer and remains current; Conrad used it, as did CS Lewis.
  - r0s 13y ago
    "The User" solves that ambiguity, and temporal information like "The current user" is more precise. 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.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      But that's also clumsy because you end up with sentences like: "The user switches on the user's computer and types the user's name". Rather than the shorter and better flowing: "The user switches on her computer and types her name" We have the concept of "user stories" the idea of which is that they read like stories. Since stories tend to have gendered characters (even when not necessary) this is just the sort of writing that tends to work best in english.
- rjknight 13y ago
  There are a few reasons why a gendered pronoun might be used: 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.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    "It" is correct when talking about a function. The original complaint was a about using "he" when the antecedent was "the user."
    - rjknight 13y ago
      The user calls the function directly? With what, a magnetized needle and a steady hand?
- ams6110 13y ago
  I find it jarring to see a plural pronoun where a singular is correct. Reading "they" where "he" or "she" is appropriate causes a slight mental distraction and disrupts the message the writer is trying to convey. 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.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    It's only jarring if you harbor the misconception that "they" always requires a plural antecedent. But it does not. The distraction is coming from your own head, not from idiosyncratic usage. Better writers than us settled this long ago.
    - gruseom 13y ago
      Yup. This page has a host of endlessly fascinating examples: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html, plus Jane Austen has so many that they had to refactor her into her own page: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html. Henry Fielding: "Every Body fell a laughing, as how could they help it." Thackeray: "A person can't help their birth." (spoken by Becky Sharp, the main character, with reference to her own social climbing) George Eliot: "I shouldn't like to punish anyone, even if they'd done me wrong." Lewis Carroll: "'Whoever lives there,' thought Alice, 'it'll never do to come upon them this size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!'" I don't see how anyone could read such examples of singular "they" and not immediately be relieved of any objection they may have been entertaining. The extraordinary thing is how modern it sounds, even when the rest of the language is archaic: "Every one Sacrifices a Cow or more, according to their different Degrees of Wealth or Devotion" (Dr. Johnson) "Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves." (King James Bible) Sometimes the formulation seems deliberately mischievous: C. S. Lewis: "She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes." Doris Lessing: "And how easy the way a man or woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves." E.B. White: "But somebody taught you, didn’t they?” That last one (from Charlotte's Web) is delicious because White put the White in Strunk and White and knew full well when a writer should break his own rules.
woah 13y ago
I just deleted a sarcastic comment on here making light of the situation- I had judged it from this PR: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d... 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-29538615 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.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  The very first comment says that it was signed off on https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48#commitcomment-4736897 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
peterdelahaye 13y ago
Alex Gaynor is the world's biggest white knight. Does he think doing this will get him laid?
- deleted 13y ago
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__pThrow 13y ago
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. "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.
- deleted 13y ago
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- tptacek 13y ago
  Once again, the gender-neutral singular "they" isn't inaccurate; it's been used by everyone from Shakespeare to CS Lewis.
  - __pThrow 13y ago
    I do appreciate the literary history (and I really do), but it's needlessly ambiguous in an environment where it can easily be construed to mean what it commonly and currently not in Shakespeare's time means: a plethora of writers, not a single writer. Better to write documentation as you might write code: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others
    - semiel 13y ago
      How about adopting "she" as the generic pronoun, then? No chance of confusing it with a plural pronoun, and it's not subject to the gender-based critiques that "he" would be.
dmourati 13y ago
Wow bnoordhuis, way to be a dick! Reject the pull request, then try to have it reverted? 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 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.
bdcravens 13y ago
Tough situation - I don't think bnoordhuis is trying to push a sexist agenda, but trying to enforce a workflow (at least as I'm reading it)
- ams6110 13y ago
  I agree. He rejected the original pull request on the grounds that it was "trivial." It didn't add anything new, didn't improve anything, and didn't correct any problem. The then reverted the commit when procedures weren't followed (he had already rejected it).
  - jaegerpicker 13y ago
    His rejection and trivialization of the issue IS what people are upset about. Not the actual rejection. If he had rejected the commit, on grounds of procedure but offered a better neutral wording, or at least some way to improve the wording via another pr, then I don't believe anyone would have been upset. Instead he choose to make the gender inclusion matter trivial which is pretty close to just being plain divisive.
- dmourati 13y ago
  Disagree. The fact that he initially rejected the PR then subsequently tried to revert another commit shows he was upset at being overruled.
  - bdcravens 13y ago
    I'll agree that the original PR was legit, and probably should have been merged. 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.
    - 13y ago
rlt 13y ago
Question for the women: does the use of non-gendered pronouns do anything to make you feel more accepted by the programming community? 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism) But I'm not a woman so I have no idea.
- jaredmcateer 13y ago
  My girlfriend, not a programmer per say but has done a some technical documentation in her time, says that non-gendered pronouns doesn't make her feel more accepted but gendered pronouns do make her feel less accepted.
  - stefan_kendall 13y ago
    I find both "he" and "she" jarring. When there's no reason to use gender, it shouldn't be used. 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.
    - gruseom 13y ago
      That's well put, and I'm with you, but let's also note that the language norm is in the process of shifting, so it isn't necessarily obvious.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  I specifically had multiple women both on my Twitter timeline and in private communications tell me how alienated they feel by gendered language, and this reaction to fixing it in general.
daleharvey 13y ago
The original conversation about this was buried @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823279 the fact that the majority of comments were in support of rejecting this rather obvious improvement was shocking. 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.
- gdwatson 13y ago
  This is only an obvious improvement if you share certain ideas with the committer: ideas about equality and how grammatical gender relates to it. Those ideas are by no means universal; why should dissent be shocking?
sergiotapia 13y ago
This whole gender correctness thing is getting out of hand. Edit: Just reading that entire github thread makes me want to throw up. http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2838/spfart3vo.jpg http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2838/spfart3vo.jpg
rjknight 13y ago
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. [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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  I think a better solution would be to select random gendered pronouns but keep them consistent (for example don't switch mid sentence which is the worst of both worlds). 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.
  - rjknight 13y ago
    I think a better solution would be to select random gendered pronouns 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.
    - theorique 13y ago
      If the interacting entities are not persons, we have "it" as a neuter pronoun. If they are persons, we can use "he" and "she" alternately, "he/she" (somewhat cumbersome and stilted), or "they".
undoware 13y ago
This is one of the few things that my unique and unfortunate biology give me some authority to speak about. 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 To this: The POTENTIALLY-YOU needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop NOT-POSSIBLY-YOU from sending it twice 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. 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.
centrinoblue 13y ago
gender politics in tech is an increasingly polarizing issue but I don't think that was the reason for the rejection.
shawnz 13y ago
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. 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.
- jaegerpicker 13y ago
  At first glance this seems reasonable but if you look at the history of the pull request, he clearly trivializes the issue and rejects it based upon it not being important enough.
eeemmm 13y ago
Why not using it ? What is the difference between us and a tree ?
thenerdfiles 13y ago
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 [...] When considering pronouns at all, take recourse to The Zen of Python: Explicit is better than implicit. It is not about non-gendered/gendered. Pronouns shouldn't be used at all. This improves documentation. 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.
- thenerdfiles 13y ago
  I think alternating and writing sporadic genderfication into our Documentation is a bad idea. It will only further promote undisciplined writing. 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.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    Avoiding pronouns decreases readability of documentation. And readability is more fundamental to the purpose of documentation that "findability" and "grepability". 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.
    - thenerdfiles 13y ago
      Readability has a subjective basis and in this case comes with a cost. Findability and grepability have clear advantages without the cost that readability incurs (the gendered pronoun debate). If you apply a pure text search engine over such documentation, relevance and discovery is enhanced. Signal-to-noise, again. You're telling me that "it" or "they" riddled more often than otherwise does not negatively affect search results? Pronouns increase the chance irrelevant results. This is implied by your use of "properly"; which only begs the question.
joshguthrie 13y ago
Flagging. 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.
- tptacek 13y ago
  That's an abuse of the flag button. You flag a story that is off-topic for the site, or that is spam, or that deliberately trolls the site. But flags are not downvotes. I can safely count on the fact that dozens of stories I won't like will hit this site every day. I don't flag them. 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.
  - joshguthrie 13y ago
    Off-topic, not. Spam, okay, not, but close. Troll, after the flamewar we've had on two topics and two github issues, giving it more fuel is close. 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.
mahyarm 13y ago
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. 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.
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mikesmullin3 13y ago
nice comments about node but libuv is written in C and its the asynchronous i/o magic sauce for many many projects now, including Ruby.
voidr 13y ago
Dear everyone who likes to post sensationalist posts that rehash the same "sexist" whining. 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.

72 points by kingkilr 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

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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.

theorique 13y ago
Did you read the github issue? It seems to be an angry free-for-all.

spamizbad 13y ago

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 code 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. Anthropomorphizing your code in comments is a bad idea in general.

jiggy2011 13y ago
Based on the examples on the page it doesn't look like they are doing that. They are talking about the "user" which depending on context might be the programmer using the API or the end user using the application. 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.
- tptacek 13y ago
  That is the opposite of my understanding of the history here; my understanding is that "they" has, for most of the history of written english, been used a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and that it was a prescriptivist movement in the late 1800s that attempted to away with that practice. The gender neutral singular "they" has a long history, is correct, and should be uncontroversial.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    There's a discussion on Stack exchange here: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he-for-a-gender-neutral-third-person-correct http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he... But I would still class the late 1800s as relatively "historical" compared with tech documentation.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      You misread me. The effort to eradicate singular "they" is a late 1800's movement, and, I agree, that movement is archaic. The singular "they" has been a feature of English since Chaucer and remains current; Conrad used it, as did CS Lewis.
- r0s 13y ago
  "The User" solves that ambiguity, and temporal information like "The current user" is more precise. 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.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    But that's also clumsy because you end up with sentences like: "The user switches on the user's computer and types the user's name". Rather than the shorter and better flowing: "The user switches on her computer and types her name" We have the concept of "user stories" the idea of which is that they read like stories. Since stories tend to have gendered characters (even when not necessary) this is just the sort of writing that tends to work best in english.
rjknight 13y ago
There are a few reasons why a gendered pronoun might be used: 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.
- ams6110 13y ago
  "It" is correct when talking about a function. The original complaint was a about using "he" when the antecedent was "the user."
  - rjknight 13y ago
    The user calls the function directly? With what, a magnetized needle and a steady hand?
ams6110 13y ago
I find it jarring to see a plural pronoun where a singular is correct. Reading "they" where "he" or "she" is appropriate causes a slight mental distraction and disrupts the message the writer is trying to convey. 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.
- tptacek 13y ago
  It's only jarring if you harbor the misconception that "they" always requires a plural antecedent. But it does not. The distraction is coming from your own head, not from idiosyncratic usage. Better writers than us settled this long ago.
  - gruseom 13y ago
    Yup. This page has a host of endlessly fascinating examples: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html, plus Jane Austen has so many that they had to refactor her into her own page: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html. Henry Fielding: "Every Body fell a laughing, as how could they help it." Thackeray: "A person can't help their birth." (spoken by Becky Sharp, the main character, with reference to her own social climbing) George Eliot: "I shouldn't like to punish anyone, even if they'd done me wrong." Lewis Carroll: "'Whoever lives there,' thought Alice, 'it'll never do to come upon them this size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!'" I don't see how anyone could read such examples of singular "they" and not immediately be relieved of any objection they may have been entertaining. The extraordinary thing is how modern it sounds, even when the rest of the language is archaic: "Every one Sacrifices a Cow or more, according to their different Degrees of Wealth or Devotion" (Dr. Johnson) "Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves." (King James Bible) Sometimes the formulation seems deliberately mischievous: C. S. Lewis: "She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes." Doris Lessing: "And how easy the way a man or woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves." E.B. White: "But somebody taught you, didn’t they?” That last one (from Charlotte's Web) is delicious because White put the White in Strunk and White and knew full well when a writer should break his own rules.

woah 13y ago

I just deleted a sarcastic comment on here making light of the situation- I had judged it from this PR: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d... 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-29538615 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.

steveklabnik 13y ago
The very first comment says that it was signed off on https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48#commitcomment-4736897 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

peterdelahaye 13y ago

Alex Gaynor is the world's biggest white knight. Does he think doing this will get him laid?

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__pThrow 13y ago

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. "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.

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tptacek 13y ago
Once again, the gender-neutral singular "they" isn't inaccurate; it's been used by everyone from Shakespeare to CS Lewis.
- __pThrow 13y ago
  I do appreciate the literary history (and I really do), but it's needlessly ambiguous in an environment where it can easily be construed to mean what it commonly and currently not in Shakespeare's time means: a plethora of writers, not a single writer. Better to write documentation as you might write code: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others
  - semiel 13y ago
    How about adopting "she" as the generic pronoun, then? No chance of confusing it with a plural pronoun, and it's not subject to the gender-based critiques that "he" would be.

dmourati 13y ago

Wow bnoordhuis, way to be a dick! Reject the pull request, then try to have it reverted? 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 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.

bdcravens 13y ago

Tough situation - I don't think bnoordhuis is trying to push a sexist agenda, but trying to enforce a workflow (at least as I'm reading it)

ams6110 13y ago
I agree. He rejected the original pull request on the grounds that it was "trivial." It didn't add anything new, didn't improve anything, and didn't correct any problem. The then reverted the commit when procedures weren't followed (he had already rejected it).
- jaegerpicker 13y ago
  His rejection and trivialization of the issue IS what people are upset about. Not the actual rejection. If he had rejected the commit, on grounds of procedure but offered a better neutral wording, or at least some way to improve the wording via another pr, then I don't believe anyone would have been upset. Instead he choose to make the gender inclusion matter trivial which is pretty close to just being plain divisive.
dmourati 13y ago
Disagree. The fact that he initially rejected the PR then subsequently tried to revert another commit shows he was upset at being overruled.
- bdcravens 13y ago
  I'll agree that the original PR was legit, and probably should have been merged. 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.
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rlt 13y ago

Question for the women: does the use of non-gendered pronouns do anything to make you feel more accepted by the programming community? 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism) But I'm not a woman so I have no idea.

jaredmcateer 13y ago
My girlfriend, not a programmer per say but has done a some technical documentation in her time, says that non-gendered pronouns doesn't make her feel more accepted but gendered pronouns do make her feel less accepted.
- stefan_kendall 13y ago
  I find both "he" and "she" jarring. When there's no reason to use gender, it shouldn't be used. 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.
  - gruseom 13y ago
    That's well put, and I'm with you, but let's also note that the language norm is in the process of shifting, so it isn't necessarily obvious.
steveklabnik 13y ago
I specifically had multiple women both on my Twitter timeline and in private communications tell me how alienated they feel by gendered language, and this reaction to fixing it in general.

daleharvey 13y ago

The original conversation about this was buried @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823279 the fact that the majority of comments were in support of rejecting this rather obvious improvement was shocking. 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.

gdwatson 13y ago
This is only an obvious improvement if you share certain ideas with the committer: ideas about equality and how grammatical gender relates to it. Those ideas are by no means universal; why should dissent be shocking?

sergiotapia 13y ago

This whole gender correctness thing is getting out of hand. Edit: Just reading that entire github thread makes me want to throw up. http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2838/spfart3vo.jpg http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2838/spfart3vo.jpg

rjknight 13y ago

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. [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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

jiggy2011 13y ago
I think a better solution would be to select random gendered pronouns but keep them consistent (for example don't switch mid sentence which is the worst of both worlds). 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.
- rjknight 13y ago
  I think a better solution would be to select random gendered pronouns 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.
  - theorique 13y ago
    If the interacting entities are not persons, we have "it" as a neuter pronoun. If they are persons, we can use "he" and "she" alternately, "he/she" (somewhat cumbersome and stilted), or "they".

undoware 13y ago

This is one of the few things that my unique and unfortunate biology give me some authority to speak about. 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 To this: The POTENTIALLY-YOU needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop NOT-POSSIBLY-YOU from sending it twice 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. 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.

centrinoblue 13y ago

gender politics in tech is an increasingly polarizing issue but I don't think that was the reason for the rejection.

shawnz 13y ago

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. 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.

jaegerpicker 13y ago
At first glance this seems reasonable but if you look at the history of the pull request, he clearly trivializes the issue and rejects it based upon it not being important enough.

eeemmm 13y ago

Why not using it ? What is the difference between us and a tree ?

thenerdfiles 13y ago

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 [...] When considering pronouns at all, take recourse to The Zen of Python: Explicit is better than implicit. It is not about non-gendered/gendered. Pronouns shouldn't be used at all. This improves documentation. 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.

thenerdfiles 13y ago
I think alternating and writing sporadic genderfication into our Documentation is a bad idea. It will only further promote undisciplined writing. 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.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Avoiding pronouns decreases readability of documentation. And readability is more fundamental to the purpose of documentation that "findability" and "grepability". 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.
  - thenerdfiles 13y ago
    Readability has a subjective basis and in this case comes with a cost. Findability and grepability have clear advantages without the cost that readability incurs (the gendered pronoun debate). If you apply a pure text search engine over such documentation, relevance and discovery is enhanced. Signal-to-noise, again. You're telling me that "it" or "they" riddled more often than otherwise does not negatively affect search results? Pronouns increase the chance irrelevant results. This is implied by your use of "properly"; which only begs the question.

joshguthrie 13y ago

Flagging. 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.

tptacek 13y ago
That's an abuse of the flag button. You flag a story that is off-topic for the site, or that is spam, or that deliberately trolls the site. But flags are not downvotes. I can safely count on the fact that dozens of stories I won't like will hit this site every day. I don't flag them. 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.
- joshguthrie 13y ago
  Off-topic, not. Spam, okay, not, but close. Troll, after the flamewar we've had on two topics and two github issues, giving it more fuel is close. 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.

mahyarm 13y ago

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. 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.

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mikesmullin3 13y ago

nice comments about node but libuv is written in C and its the asynchronous i/o magic sauce for many many projects now, including Ruby.

voidr 13y ago

Dear everyone who likes to post sensationalist posts that rehash the same "sexist" whining. 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.