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Things that are obvious: 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. 2. The changes would have been incredibly easy to implement, the wo

Things that are obvious: 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. 2. The changes would have been incredibly easy to implement, the work was already done. I can't think of a good reason not to accept the pull request. It all seems like such a simple problem getting blown way out of proportion.

yeukhon 13y ago
> 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. To be honest, you'd find a huge discrepancy on this. If this were true, the pull request would not have been rejected.
overgard 13y ago
There's a more subtle issue at play: accepting the pull request could be seen as "admitting" that the original phrasing was offensive. Perhaps they didn't want to do so because they disagreed with the premise. Accepting the patch isn't a neutral action, it also means implicitly accepting a certain world view. The patch itself comes across almost as bullying: accept our view, or be publicly shamed as a misogynist.
- trekky1700 13y ago
  I wouldn't even call it offensive. I don't get where that's even coming from. It's not offensive, it's just simply incorrect phrasing. It's poor English if you will.
rdtsc 13y ago
One reason I can think of -- some people make small grammar and spelling changes just to get their name in the commit authors lists and in the THANKS file. Hey look, "contributer to the famous Node.JS project" on the resume. It is of course good that they want to contribute but some requests generate more traffic around the request than the request itself. Not if this was a bigger improvement to docs, a project wide spelling fix, I would probably be better. Anyway the reason this go blown up is because of the gender aspect. Ask yourself this, what if this was not influence by the gender and was instead a basic spelling mistake, how would this played out?
thescribe 13y ago
Regarding point 1, is it really obvious that Gender neutral language is preferable?
- trekky1700 13y ago
  Obvious in that it is obviously poor English, if you want to ignore the gender issue altogether. "He" has a specific definition as a pronoun, versus using "one".
  - thescribe 13y ago
    Good point, I hadn't considered that.

yeukhon 13y ago

> 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. To be honest, you'd find a huge discrepancy on this. If this were true, the pull request would not have been rejected.

overgard 13y ago

There's a more subtle issue at play: accepting the pull request could be seen as "admitting" that the original phrasing was offensive. Perhaps they didn't want to do so because they disagreed with the premise. Accepting the patch isn't a neutral action, it also means implicitly accepting a certain world view. The patch itself comes across almost as bullying: accept our view, or be publicly shamed as a misogynist.

trekky1700 13y ago
I wouldn't even call it offensive. I don't get where that's even coming from. It's not offensive, it's just simply incorrect phrasing. It's poor English if you will.

rdtsc 13y ago

One reason I can think of -- some people make small grammar and spelling changes just to get their name in the commit authors lists and in the THANKS file. Hey look, "contributer to the famous Node.JS project" on the resume. It is of course good that they want to contribute but some requests generate more traffic around the request than the request itself. Not if this was a bigger improvement to docs, a project wide spelling fix, I would probably be better. Anyway the reason this go blown up is because of the gender aspect. Ask yourself this, what if this was not influence by the gender and was instead a basic spelling mistake, how would this played out?

thescribe 13y ago

Regarding point 1, is it really obvious that Gender neutral language is preferable?

trekky1700 13y ago
Obvious in that it is obviously poor English, if you want to ignore the gender issue altogether. "He" has a specific definition as a pronoun, versus using "one".
- thescribe 13y ago
  Good point, I hadn't considered that.