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He deliberately made the pronoun masculine for no apparent reason other than to stick it in women's eyes.
by KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
He deliberately made the pronoun masculine for no apparent reason other than to stick it in women's eyes.
- jrockway 13y agoSo here's the problem. English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun that refers to a single person. So you have to pick "he" or "she". If you switch it around every sentence, the text is hard to follow. If you pick one and use it for the entire text, you're sexist. What's your solution to this beyond trolling HN?
- ben0x539 13y agoSingular 'they' has been a thing for centuries.
- jrockway 13y agoAnd it's sucked for centuries. If it were clearly better, the gender-specific pronouns would be gone, right?
- ben0x539 13y agoJust-world fallacy much? Gender-specific pronouns are fine for gender-specific use cases. They're not fine if they serve to exclude people using other pronouns for no reason.
- tree_of_item 13y agoNo, not right, because sometimes when people try to use it they get resistance like you see in the commit.
- chrismonsanto 13y agoWhy not assume the best of your fellow developers, instead of assuming the worst? Here is an interpretation that has nothing to do with "sticking it in women's eyes": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825193 And can we please put this into perspective? The language you use reminds me of another GitHub comment suggesting that reverting a commit from they -> him is 'erasing women from the community'.
- ars_technician 13y agoNo he didn't. He reversed a commit that didn't follow standard procedures.
- ben0x539 13y agoExcept it did, he just didn't know, and this whole thing could have been avoided if he had signed it off himself in the first place instead of calling it trivial.
- natrius 13y agoYou should probably go back and read his commit message before making assumptions.
- sontek 13y agoThis is from a commit he did over a year ago: https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/3977d1b36c689767cc0db50089ec774143795341#diff-6a16903c26af4b4035eda9922a73ecc9 https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/3977d1b36c689767cc0db50... Had nothing to do with using a masculine pronoun, it was to document how the code works. Hes not a native english speaker either, so you should be glad that he wrote the comment in english for us that don't speak dutch :)