4 ms·

The Open Source Bikeshed

33 points by lukaseder 13y ago

andrewl-hn 13y ago
In Russian, a simple phrase like "Another bright student has solved the problem" (другая способная студентка решила задачу for female) carries a point to a gender in EVERY word. All the things around one like doors, tables, computers, etc. also possess a gender. Trying to convert Russian phrases to a gender-neutral is almost never possible.
- jacalata 13y ago
  That will probably seem more relevant when someone tries to translate the libuv docs to Russian, or when somebody complains that a Russian sentence should use gender neutral pronouns in some software docs. I don't really think it is relevant right now.
  - lukaseder 13y ago
    I find it relevant. For a non-native English speaker (Ben, the "offender"), Him or Them seems not as relevant as to the people trying to burn him at stake for the offence. What this comment about Russian is saying is that these things are very delicate to get right. In some languages even more than in others
    - jacalata 13y ago
      If I were a non native speaker faced with a small text edit that I didn't understand the reason for but which many people had just gotten angry about, I would probably not publicly revert it. If Ben wishes to blame his poor English skills (and I have not seen him suggest this, only people hypothesizing on his behalf) then I would suggest he become more aware of his weaknesses and not appoint himself judge of things he doesn't understand.
      - lukaseder 13y ago
        This is Ben's latest position from 5hrs ago: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... Until that moment, I don't think he was even asked what his position was and why he acted the way he did.
        jacalata 13y ago
        Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That seems quite reasonable and he admits he didn't understand the point of the request, and that he shouldn't have reverted it. Pretty classy work.
        gruntmaster9000 13y ago
        He was asked, sort of: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29539667 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29539... But the thread was immediately derailed in the next comment by some asshole saying he was glad the change didn’t go through, setting off the whole fiasco. It could have been a nice teaching moment, giving Ben a chance to explain his dismissal (which turned out to be logically reasonable if not tactful), followed by an explanation to a non-native speaker the importance of non-gendered pronouns. Instead, as it all too-often does, the situation became a complete shitstorm because some people can’t understand that “hostile” doesn’t require, or even imply, conscious intent. Mens Rights activists need to “lighten up”. Naturally, said asshole is continuing to fan the flames: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29576993 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29576...
  - rjknight 13y ago
    It's relevant because the majority of open source developers do not have English as a first language.
    - girvo 13y ago
      Interestingly, the guys I know who have English as a second language and are developers prefer to use English for all technical documentation. Some even are actively annoyed by those who use their native tongue. Of course, that's biased by the fact that those people speak English, that's why I can converse with them. I'd be curious to know if this was a majority opinion, or a minority!
      - thaumasiotes 13y ago
        The Chinese developers of my acquaintance (mostly) do not speak english, and consequently don't particularly appreciate english documentation. As in your case, the documentation preference is going to be strongly determined by language (in)capability.
  - zmk_ 13y ago
    But in Russian (as in other Slavic languages) you would use more frequently equivalents to words like 'people', 'nobody' in sentences like these, i.e., when it is not necessary to convey the sex (not grammatical gender). The fact that each noun has a grammatical gender (m/f/n) and verbs/adjectives/etc. tend to take suffixes to reflect these is a totally different thing.
    - andrewl-hn 13y ago
      In Russian, when you write "user" - "пользователь", you would definetly write "решил" - "decided (with implicit musculine gender)". That is just how the grammar work in this language. To change that one would not simply replace the pronouns but also transform about 50-60% of other words in a colloquial everyday speech. Changes like this take centuries!
      - zmk_ 13y ago
        You are missing my point that in languages with explicit grammatical gender of nouns, it is not true that \forall grammatical gender==implied sex, e.g. in Polish if you wrote zegarmistrz (watchmaker, masculin) you would use masculin suffixes for adj/v and you would not imply the sex since there is no feminin counterpart (even if you really tried). In your case, решил probably (I don't speak Russian) inherits the gender from пользователь. My broader point is that in many languages, which Slavic ones are a subgroup of (but in German as well), there exists a construct that is used when you do not want to imply sex. In English they struggle with the one/he/she/they. And, BTW, in my experience she is more popular than he (e.g. in financial literature bankers are all 'she' even though female bankers are as common as female coders most likely).
- the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
  It's the same in german, even to the point where obvious female words do not have a female gender. People have tried for the last 40 years to make the language gender neutral with absolute appalling results. Some gender neutral versions are almost entirely being used for satiric purposes only. As an example "This is the girl, she is beautiful" in german is "Das ist das Mädchen, es ist wunderschön" usually uses a neutrum pronoun (object). "es" == it because Mädchen is neutrum. That's just how the language works and forcefully changing it results in terrible sentences.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    A lot of people have not the slightest idea how languages work, but they FEEL very strongly about the subject. I think the all-time stupidest such idea I've heard is that it's morally wrong for a man to refer to "my wife" because "my" denotes ownership. If you take more than a second to think about that claim (it's not even necessary to look at other languages...), you'll quickly notice that "my" does nothing of the kind; it denotes some sort of relationship (of almost any kind) between you and the specified noun. In the case of "my wife", the relationship is a marriage; in the case of "my picture", it could be ownership... or it could be the fact that you appear in the picture, regardless of who owns it.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  In Chinese, pronouns are not distinguished by gender; the third-person pronoun is 他[ta]. In modern written Chinese, however, they are spelled differently by gender. At some point in the recent past, some person of authority innovated the characters 她 and 它 (both, obviously, pronounced ta) to refer to females and nonhumans, in order to more easily translate European literature into Chinese. For whatever reason, they are now considered standard spelling. The twist is that it turns out to be useful sometimes to use gender-neutral language, so when a chinese text is specifically trying to be gender-neutral, instead of using 他, it will often use "TA" (the actual roman characters). I can't help but feel that it's a long, pointless rigmarole to go through in order to arrive where you started from. (There's also a character 妳, the female equivalent of the second-person pronoun 你, but owing to the inscrutable whims of politics it hasn't caught on in the mainland.)
- _delirium 13y ago
  Spanish also has grammatical gender, but it's nowadays fairly common to use gender-neutral constructions, especially in writing and especially for things like occupations. There are different approaches: "profesoras y profesores", "profesores/as", etc. This seems particularly common in the Americas, more than in Spain. In Spain left-wing newspapers will write that way, but in Mexico even non-ideological mass-market papers like El Universal do.
- nzp 13y ago
  It's a common situation in a lot of inflected languages--words get suffixed to agree in number, gender, etc. and it's hard to escape "gendering". What I usually do is construct the sentence to say that a person [has done something, for example], where possible. The word "person" is gender neutral by meaning, so the whole sentence comes out gender neutral in meaning regardless or grammatical gender of words. Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.
  - the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
    > Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral. It's the same in German and the pronoun for "Person" is consequently "sie" which is the female pronoun. Yet everybody thinks of a person as being genderless. Language gender has very little to do with real gender.
    - nzp 13y ago
      Yep. When I said it's interesting, I meant in the context of this controversy, it's gender neutral in meaning and it's grammatically female so it satisfies PC rigour from two sides.
jsnk 13y ago
Ben Noordhuis (https://github.com/bnoordhuis https://github.com/bnoordhuis) is the #3 contributor to Node.js making 1,315 commits since 2010. Now he is openly called an asshole by a Joyent employee not over introducing critical bugs, but rejecting doc change that has no impact on how people use Nodejs whatsoever.
- konstruktor 13y ago
  If someone doesn't like being called an asshole, they should not act like one. While the documentation pull request may have been trivial, it was also risk-free. Ben Noordhuis chose to reject a risk free pull request because he doesn't like gender neutral language (instead of ignoring it and let someone else handle it).
  - lukaseder 13y ago
    Have you read Ben's reply? https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...
    - konstruktor 13y ago
      I have read the original comment before the shit hit the fan, which clearly shows his attitude: "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." Your lik is nothing but personal crisis PR, written after the shit hit the fan.
      - deleted 13y ago
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      - nailer 13y ago
        It's trivial in that's it's small. Ben doesn't say that the matter of gender in computing is trivial. Personally, I would have clicked the button because documentation is important to me. However a lot of people don't like smaller fixes like that. I don't agree but that doesn't make them bad people.
konstruktor 13y ago
Writing gender neutral texts is much easier in English than in my native language. So please, don't hide your dislike for gender neutral language behind a pseudo-concern for non-native speakers. I find that quite patronising.
- deleted 13y ago
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- jballanc 13y ago
  ...and what of languages that have no gendered pronouns? For native speakers, constructing a gender neutral sentence in English is considerably more difficult. Your experience does not invalidate the experience of others.
  - andrewl-hn 13y ago
    Yes! Besides, the idea of "gender neutrality in speech" might not be as widely spread and heavily discussed in Netherlands as in the US society.
    - danieldk 13y ago
      It is certainly not a frequent topic in The Netherlands. Some people will say hij/zij ('he/she') or explicitly use 'zij'. But both feel a bit awkward, because 'hij' (he) has been used in a gender-specific and neutral sense.
jballanc 13y ago
It seems that with any cause, advocates typically break down into two camps: militant and inclusive. The militant camp feels the only way to right the wrong they perceive is through positive action and active repression of the repressors. The inclusive camp feels that incremental change that improves the injustice they see will, given enough time, right the wrong without the need for punitive actions. This has been the case with civil rights (MLK vs Black Panthers), environmentalism (WWF vs GreenPeace), animal rights (ASPCA vs PETA), and on, and on... If I had to guess, I'd suppose that activists tend to break down along these lines because those they oppose break down in a similar fashion. There will be those who embrace the injustice and actively defend its existence. Then there will be those who don't perceive the injustice, or don't recognize its severity, but are open minded and willing to change. I point this out, because I think it's useful to recognize these camps and to which you belong. I'm not willing to say one is right and the other is wrong. I suspect both are necessary to some degree. But if you look at the whole discourse in question here, some of the most disheartening exchanges are between individuals on the same side of the issue, but in different camps.
- lukaseder 13y ago
  That's a very interesting point of view. I had never thought of the fact that disheartening exchanges are performed between individuals on the same side, but I guess that's true in many similar discussions...
- Edvik 13y ago
  My impression was that the problem with the original post was a denial accepting a change, which the author took to mean a militant exclusion of gender neutral language. The author wasn't taking a militant stand against someone who simply writes gendered language, but against someone who made a decision to exclude gender-neutral language specifically.
  - jballanc 13y ago
    I think the other feature of these two camps is that they tend to see the opposition through the mirror of their own preconceptions. I took the pull request rejection at face value: "trivial change; denied". I don't agree with the policy, but I did not sense any overt anti-gender-parity agenda in the action. That the author of the pull request viewed this action as a militant attack tells me, with some measure of certainty, to which camp they belong.
rurounijones 13y ago
"to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent." I, uh, what?! maybe a quick chat first?
- lukaseder 13y ago
  Precisely! :-)
chris_wot 13y ago
So let me just understand something - Bryan Cantrill, oh he of the "Ever kissed a girl" fame [1], is now lecturing someone about gendered pronouns? And now we are all up in arms? Remarkable. 1. http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
- jacalata 13y ago
  He must have grown up a little in the last 16 years, good for him.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    16 years, no apology. Willing to "fire" someone over a misunderstanding over a documentation update. Who doesn't work for his company. That's quite some stunted growing up going on there!
    - deleted 13y ago
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  - reidrac 13y ago
    He's now VP of Engineering at Joyent, but reading his post* makes me think he may have not. * The Power of a Pronoun
- deleted 13y ago
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- nailer 13y ago
  Sorry, I downmodded you, mistakenly thinking you thought Ben was Bryan. For anyone else who missed it: Bryan Cantrill wrote the Joyent piece about theoretically firing Ben for not accepting the documentation change.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    It's OK :-) no big deal. But thanks for clarifying for others, I should have noted this!
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Wow, the response from Joyent seems ridiculous. Saying you would fire someone (who doesn't even work for you) when you haven't even asked them why they did what they did is stupid. You're overreacting, doing it without full information, and doing it publicly. It seems even worse when you read the response from Ben: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... NB: I don't know much/anything about Joyent/Ben so my perspective is just from what I've read on GitHub and this post.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Even more ridiculous when you realise that the one threatening the "firing" is Bryan Cantrill, who once wrote this (scroll to the bottom): http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - girvo 13y ago
    People can change their opinions on "gender equality", especially after 17 years...
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      Sure they can. But they can also learn maturity and to privately inquire as to whether there were any misunderstandings. Certainly, they can refrain from threatening to fire someone - who doesn't even work at their company! It shows that it's the same old Cantrill.
    - nailer 13y ago
      I don't think Cantrill's "have you ever kissed a girl" had much to do with gender equality [1]. It was just a low, personal attack on someone commenting in explicit, researched detail on Solaris performance, made by someone who was responsible for Solaris's (poor) performance. [1] Some folk would argue heteronormativity, but that's also a different topic from gender equality.
nkuttler 13y ago
Almost everybody seems to forget that simply merging the pull request is only a temporary solution. It places an additional burden on the developer, who is neither a native English speaker nor necessarily interested in learning a politically correct lingo. Anybody who comes with such changes should already have proven that they are willing and able to contribute long term to the documentation. This doesn't seem to be the case here.
frobozz 13y ago
> “Him” or “They”? English language aficionados haven’t yet decided what to do with a singular pronoun of unknown (or irrelevant) sex. Since this usage of _they_ has been around for at least 600 years, they're clearly taking their own sweet time over this decision.
- qbrass 13y ago
  They is, not they are. Oh wait, you meant they as a group. It would be better if one could use a pronoun that is gender neutral and unambiguously singular.
  - frobozz 13y ago
    How often have you seen a "they" whose antecedent might have been either?
static_typed 13y ago
Wow - just read a more recent comment from Ben here: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... The sad part of it all this: "I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. " Joyent - well done - you have shown potential customers to now be wary of becoming too entangled in your products or ecospace, lest they get bitten by the effects of your blog space comments and the ramifications of these. Joyent - well done - you have shown open source developers you would fire them (how?) before you would establish the facts. Developers - be wary here before you selflessly give your time and effort to these projects. The lynch mob on the internet - shame on you all. There was no issue here for you to shout and scream about, let alone bring out your virtual portable gallows. What ever happened to benefit of the doubt? For shame. The sad part is that there are real gender issues out there, but instead of spending the time and effort on those, where they do actually exist, you spent it on here, on this, which was more a poor communication at best, a minor issue of lack of respect amongst fellow developers at a stretch, but not, and never a sexism or gender issue.
- danieldk 13y ago
  In fact, Joyent practically did was character assassination. Every time potential future employers will Google Ben Noordhuis' name, they will be wary. In such cases, the best thing to do first is to talk to the person for clarification. You know, sending an e-mail or giving a phone call. But, apparently it's easier, more beneficial or more fun to destroy a person's reputation. Ps. I am all in for gender equality and restoring the balance in our field. But I heavily dislike the lynching these days, before even talking to the person and giving him/her the opportunity to apologize if there was indeed a misstep.
  - catwell 13y ago
    I think you should all read this article again: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-node-from-joyent-vcs-bet-8m-on-it/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod... The reason this escalated so quickly is not gender issues. This is a power play between the two largest corporate contributors of NodeJS...
skore 13y ago
Reinforces one of my golden rules for internet discussions: Gender Discussions on the Internet - Not even once.

33 points by lukaseder 13y ago

In Russian, a simple phrase like "Another bright student has solved the problem" (другая способная студентка решила задачу for female) carries a point to a gender in EVERY word. All the things around one like doors, tables, computers, etc. also possess a gender. Trying to convert Russian phrases to a gender-neutral is almost never possible.

jacalata 13y ago
That will probably seem more relevant when someone tries to translate the libuv docs to Russian, or when somebody complains that a Russian sentence should use gender neutral pronouns in some software docs. I don't really think it is relevant right now.
- lukaseder 13y ago
  I find it relevant. For a non-native English speaker (Ben, the "offender"), Him or Them seems not as relevant as to the people trying to burn him at stake for the offence. What this comment about Russian is saying is that these things are very delicate to get right. In some languages even more than in others
  - jacalata 13y ago
    If I were a non native speaker faced with a small text edit that I didn't understand the reason for but which many people had just gotten angry about, I would probably not publicly revert it. If Ben wishes to blame his poor English skills (and I have not seen him suggest this, only people hypothesizing on his behalf) then I would suggest he become more aware of his weaknesses and not appoint himself judge of things he doesn't understand.
    - lukaseder 13y ago
      This is Ben's latest position from 5hrs ago: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... Until that moment, I don't think he was even asked what his position was and why he acted the way he did.
      - jacalata 13y ago
        Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That seems quite reasonable and he admits he didn't understand the point of the request, and that he shouldn't have reverted it. Pretty classy work.
      - gruntmaster9000 13y ago
        He was asked, sort of: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29539667 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29539... But the thread was immediately derailed in the next comment by some asshole saying he was glad the change didn’t go through, setting off the whole fiasco. It could have been a nice teaching moment, giving Ben a chance to explain his dismissal (which turned out to be logically reasonable if not tactful), followed by an explanation to a non-native speaker the importance of non-gendered pronouns. Instead, as it all too-often does, the situation became a complete shitstorm because some people can’t understand that “hostile” doesn’t require, or even imply, conscious intent. Mens Rights activists need to “lighten up”. Naturally, said asshole is continuing to fan the flames: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29576993 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29576...
- rjknight 13y ago
  It's relevant because the majority of open source developers do not have English as a first language.
  - girvo 13y ago
    Interestingly, the guys I know who have English as a second language and are developers prefer to use English for all technical documentation. Some even are actively annoyed by those who use their native tongue. Of course, that's biased by the fact that those people speak English, that's why I can converse with them. I'd be curious to know if this was a majority opinion, or a minority!
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      The Chinese developers of my acquaintance (mostly) do not speak english, and consequently don't particularly appreciate english documentation. As in your case, the documentation preference is going to be strongly determined by language (in)capability.
- zmk_ 13y ago
  But in Russian (as in other Slavic languages) you would use more frequently equivalents to words like 'people', 'nobody' in sentences like these, i.e., when it is not necessary to convey the sex (not grammatical gender). The fact that each noun has a grammatical gender (m/f/n) and verbs/adjectives/etc. tend to take suffixes to reflect these is a totally different thing.
  - andrewl-hn 13y ago
    In Russian, when you write "user" - "пользователь", you would definetly write "решил" - "decided (with implicit musculine gender)". That is just how the grammar work in this language. To change that one would not simply replace the pronouns but also transform about 50-60% of other words in a colloquial everyday speech. Changes like this take centuries!
    - zmk_ 13y ago
      You are missing my point that in languages with explicit grammatical gender of nouns, it is not true that \forall grammatical gender==implied sex, e.g. in Polish if you wrote zegarmistrz (watchmaker, masculin) you would use masculin suffixes for adj/v and you would not imply the sex since there is no feminin counterpart (even if you really tried). In your case, решил probably (I don't speak Russian) inherits the gender from пользователь. My broader point is that in many languages, which Slavic ones are a subgroup of (but in German as well), there exists a construct that is used when you do not want to imply sex. In English they struggle with the one/he/she/they. And, BTW, in my experience she is more popular than he (e.g. in financial literature bankers are all 'she' even though female bankers are as common as female coders most likely).
the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
It's the same in german, even to the point where obvious female words do not have a female gender. People have tried for the last 40 years to make the language gender neutral with absolute appalling results. Some gender neutral versions are almost entirely being used for satiric purposes only. As an example "This is the girl, she is beautiful" in german is "Das ist das Mädchen, es ist wunderschön" usually uses a neutrum pronoun (object). "es" == it because Mädchen is neutrum. That's just how the language works and forcefully changing it results in terrible sentences.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  A lot of people have not the slightest idea how languages work, but they FEEL very strongly about the subject. I think the all-time stupidest such idea I've heard is that it's morally wrong for a man to refer to "my wife" because "my" denotes ownership. If you take more than a second to think about that claim (it's not even necessary to look at other languages...), you'll quickly notice that "my" does nothing of the kind; it denotes some sort of relationship (of almost any kind) between you and the specified noun. In the case of "my wife", the relationship is a marriage; in the case of "my picture", it could be ownership... or it could be the fact that you appear in the picture, regardless of who owns it.
thaumasiotes 13y ago
In Chinese, pronouns are not distinguished by gender; the third-person pronoun is 他[ta]. In modern written Chinese, however, they are spelled differently by gender. At some point in the recent past, some person of authority innovated the characters 她 and 它 (both, obviously, pronounced ta) to refer to females and nonhumans, in order to more easily translate European literature into Chinese. For whatever reason, they are now considered standard spelling. The twist is that it turns out to be useful sometimes to use gender-neutral language, so when a chinese text is specifically trying to be gender-neutral, instead of using 他, it will often use "TA" (the actual roman characters). I can't help but feel that it's a long, pointless rigmarole to go through in order to arrive where you started from. (There's also a character 妳, the female equivalent of the second-person pronoun 你, but owing to the inscrutable whims of politics it hasn't caught on in the mainland.)
_delirium 13y ago
Spanish also has grammatical gender, but it's nowadays fairly common to use gender-neutral constructions, especially in writing and especially for things like occupations. There are different approaches: "profesoras y profesores", "profesores/as", etc. This seems particularly common in the Americas, more than in Spain. In Spain left-wing newspapers will write that way, but in Mexico even non-ideological mass-market papers like El Universal do.
nzp 13y ago
It's a common situation in a lot of inflected languages--words get suffixed to agree in number, gender, etc. and it's hard to escape "gendering". What I usually do is construct the sentence to say that a person [has done something, for example], where possible. The word "person" is gender neutral by meaning, so the whole sentence comes out gender neutral in meaning regardless or grammatical gender of words. Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.
- the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
  > Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral. It's the same in German and the pronoun for "Person" is consequently "sie" which is the female pronoun. Yet everybody thinks of a person as being genderless. Language gender has very little to do with real gender.
  - nzp 13y ago
    Yep. When I said it's interesting, I meant in the context of this controversy, it's gender neutral in meaning and it's grammatically female so it satisfies PC rigour from two sides.

jsnk 13y ago

Ben Noordhuis (https://github.com/bnoordhuis https://github.com/bnoordhuis) is the #3 contributor to Node.js making 1,315 commits since 2010. Now he is openly called an asshole by a Joyent employee not over introducing critical bugs, but rejecting doc change that has no impact on how people use Nodejs whatsoever.

konstruktor 13y ago
If someone doesn't like being called an asshole, they should not act like one. While the documentation pull request may have been trivial, it was also risk-free. Ben Noordhuis chose to reject a risk free pull request because he doesn't like gender neutral language (instead of ignoring it and let someone else handle it).
- lukaseder 13y ago
  Have you read Ben's reply? https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...
  - konstruktor 13y ago
    I have read the original comment before the shit hit the fan, which clearly shows his attitude: "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." Your lik is nothing but personal crisis PR, written after the shit hit the fan.
    - deleted 13y ago
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    - nailer 13y ago
      It's trivial in that's it's small. Ben doesn't say that the matter of gender in computing is trivial. Personally, I would have clicked the button because documentation is important to me. However a lot of people don't like smaller fixes like that. I don't agree but that doesn't make them bad people.

konstruktor 13y ago

Writing gender neutral texts is much easier in English than in my native language. So please, don't hide your dislike for gender neutral language behind a pseudo-concern for non-native speakers. I find that quite patronising.

deleted 13y ago
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jballanc 13y ago
...and what of languages that have no gendered pronouns? For native speakers, constructing a gender neutral sentence in English is considerably more difficult. Your experience does not invalidate the experience of others.
- andrewl-hn 13y ago
  Yes! Besides, the idea of "gender neutrality in speech" might not be as widely spread and heavily discussed in Netherlands as in the US society.
  - danieldk 13y ago
    It is certainly not a frequent topic in The Netherlands. Some people will say hij/zij ('he/she') or explicitly use 'zij'. But both feel a bit awkward, because 'hij' (he) has been used in a gender-specific and neutral sense.

jballanc 13y ago

It seems that with any cause, advocates typically break down into two camps: militant and inclusive. The militant camp feels the only way to right the wrong they perceive is through positive action and active repression of the repressors. The inclusive camp feels that incremental change that improves the injustice they see will, given enough time, right the wrong without the need for punitive actions. This has been the case with civil rights (MLK vs Black Panthers), environmentalism (WWF vs GreenPeace), animal rights (ASPCA vs PETA), and on, and on... If I had to guess, I'd suppose that activists tend to break down along these lines because those they oppose break down in a similar fashion. There will be those who embrace the injustice and actively defend its existence. Then there will be those who don't perceive the injustice, or don't recognize its severity, but are open minded and willing to change. I point this out, because I think it's useful to recognize these camps and to which you belong. I'm not willing to say one is right and the other is wrong. I suspect both are necessary to some degree. But if you look at the whole discourse in question here, some of the most disheartening exchanges are between individuals on the same side of the issue, but in different camps.

lukaseder 13y ago
That's a very interesting point of view. I had never thought of the fact that disheartening exchanges are performed between individuals on the same side, but I guess that's true in many similar discussions...
Edvik 13y ago
My impression was that the problem with the original post was a denial accepting a change, which the author took to mean a militant exclusion of gender neutral language. The author wasn't taking a militant stand against someone who simply writes gendered language, but against someone who made a decision to exclude gender-neutral language specifically.
- jballanc 13y ago
  I think the other feature of these two camps is that they tend to see the opposition through the mirror of their own preconceptions. I took the pull request rejection at face value: "trivial change; denied". I don't agree with the policy, but I did not sense any overt anti-gender-parity agenda in the action. That the author of the pull request viewed this action as a militant attack tells me, with some measure of certainty, to which camp they belong.

rurounijones 13y ago

"to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent." I, uh, what?! maybe a quick chat first?

lukaseder 13y ago
Precisely! :-)

chris_wot 13y ago

So let me just understand something - Bryan Cantrill, oh he of the "Ever kissed a girl" fame [1], is now lecturing someone about gendered pronouns? And now we are all up in arms? Remarkable. 1. http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html

jacalata 13y ago
He must have grown up a little in the last 16 years, good for him.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  16 years, no apology. Willing to "fire" someone over a misunderstanding over a documentation update. Who doesn't work for his company. That's quite some stunted growing up going on there!
  - deleted 13y ago
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- reidrac 13y ago
  He's now VP of Engineering at Joyent, but reading his post* makes me think he may have not. * The Power of a Pronoun
deleted 13y ago
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nailer 13y ago
Sorry, I downmodded you, mistakenly thinking you thought Ben was Bryan. For anyone else who missed it: Bryan Cantrill wrote the Joyent piece about theoretically firing Ben for not accepting the documentation change.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  It's OK :-) no big deal. But thanks for clarifying for others, I should have noted this!

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Wow, the response from Joyent seems ridiculous. Saying you would fire someone (who doesn't even work for you) when you haven't even asked them why they did what they did is stupid. You're overreacting, doing it without full information, and doing it publicly. It seems even worse when you read the response from Ben: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... NB: I don't know much/anything about Joyent/Ben so my perspective is just from what I've read on GitHub and this post.

chris_wot 13y ago
Even more ridiculous when you realise that the one threatening the "firing" is Bryan Cantrill, who once wrote this (scroll to the bottom): http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
- deleted 13y ago
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- girvo 13y ago
  People can change their opinions on "gender equality", especially after 17 years...
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    Sure they can. But they can also learn maturity and to privately inquire as to whether there were any misunderstandings. Certainly, they can refrain from threatening to fire someone - who doesn't even work at their company! It shows that it's the same old Cantrill.
  - nailer 13y ago
    I don't think Cantrill's "have you ever kissed a girl" had much to do with gender equality [1]. It was just a low, personal attack on someone commenting in explicit, researched detail on Solaris performance, made by someone who was responsible for Solaris's (poor) performance. [1] Some folk would argue heteronormativity, but that's also a different topic from gender equality.

nkuttler 13y ago

Almost everybody seems to forget that simply merging the pull request is only a temporary solution. It places an additional burden on the developer, who is neither a native English speaker nor necessarily interested in learning a politically correct lingo. Anybody who comes with such changes should already have proven that they are willing and able to contribute long term to the documentation. This doesn't seem to be the case here.

frobozz 13y ago

> “Him” or “They”? English language aficionados haven’t yet decided what to do with a singular pronoun of unknown (or irrelevant) sex. Since this usage of _they_ has been around for at least 600 years, they're clearly taking their own sweet time over this decision.

qbrass 13y ago
They is, not they are. Oh wait, you meant they as a group. It would be better if one could use a pronoun that is gender neutral and unambiguously singular.
- frobozz 13y ago
  How often have you seen a "they" whose antecedent might have been either?

static_typed 13y ago

Wow - just read a more recent comment from Ben here: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... The sad part of it all this: "I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. " Joyent - well done - you have shown potential customers to now be wary of becoming too entangled in your products or ecospace, lest they get bitten by the effects of your blog space comments and the ramifications of these. Joyent - well done - you have shown open source developers you would fire them (how?) before you would establish the facts. Developers - be wary here before you selflessly give your time and effort to these projects. The lynch mob on the internet - shame on you all. There was no issue here for you to shout and scream about, let alone bring out your virtual portable gallows. What ever happened to benefit of the doubt? For shame. The sad part is that there are real gender issues out there, but instead of spending the time and effort on those, where they do actually exist, you spent it on here, on this, which was more a poor communication at best, a minor issue of lack of respect amongst fellow developers at a stretch, but not, and never a sexism or gender issue.

danieldk 13y ago
In fact, Joyent practically did was character assassination. Every time potential future employers will Google Ben Noordhuis' name, they will be wary. In such cases, the best thing to do first is to talk to the person for clarification. You know, sending an e-mail or giving a phone call. But, apparently it's easier, more beneficial or more fun to destroy a person's reputation. Ps. I am all in for gender equality and restoring the balance in our field. But I heavily dislike the lynching these days, before even talking to the person and giving him/her the opportunity to apologize if there was indeed a misstep.
- catwell 13y ago
  I think you should all read this article again: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-node-from-joyent-vcs-bet-8m-on-it/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod... The reason this escalated so quickly is not gender issues. This is a power play between the two largest corporate contributors of NodeJS...

skore 13y ago

Reinforces one of my golden rules for internet discussions: Gender Discussions on the Internet - Not even once.