
To my friends in the Node community - kingkilr
http://jacobian.org/writing/dear-node-community/
======
undoware
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.

------
spamizbad
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
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
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
There's a discussion on Stack exchange here:
[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-
he...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he-for-a-
gender-neutral-third-person-correct)

But I would still class the late 1800s as relatively "historical" compared
with tech documentation.

~~~
tptacek
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.

------
joshguthrie
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
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
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.

------
rjknight
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)

~~~
jaegerpicker
It's not really about the They VS. He issue. No one got worked up about the
original commits/documentation. What people are strongly objecting to,
correctly in my opinion, is the divisive and condescending way in which the
commits were reverted and the reason why they were reverted. Simply put he
said that making the project feel more welcoming for women was a trivial and
unimportant. It's basically the same as actively promoting the myth that open
source is a white male only thing, not cool IMO.

~~~
rjknight
I dunno. He said that the pull request was trivial, which could have been
meant in the sense that the _change_ is trivial - a one-word change to a code
comment that does not affect the program's operation. Commit history space is
a _somewhat_ scarce resource, and I can see the point in rejecting the commit
on the grounds that it doesn't really change _enough_ to be worth a commit.
For example, did the commit fix all instances of masculine pronouns or just
one? Was it intended to fix the whole problem, or just to "make a point"? I
can see why the committer might not have seen much value in the PR. I don't
think that he deserves to be totally excoriated for his rejection of the PR
just yet, as it would be good to hear his side of the story first.

Comment threads are rarely conducive to positive discussion, especially once
people start tweeting about them, and I think a lot of assumptions were made
on the basis of fairly scant evidence. I'm enough of an optimist to believe
that the committer didn't meant to suggest that open source is a white male
only thing, and if we're concerned about that view becoming widespread then we
might want to be cautious about suggesting that as his motive.

~~~
oakwhiz
That's definitely the real reason behind this situation: The people behind
large projects tend to have to manage tons of releases, branches, and commits
along with the code itself. The solution that many projects use is to appoint
a few people with The Power to Approve Commits, so that all this meta-
information can be managed more effectively. Every commit that you create is a
set of extra objects that need to be downloaded, examined, and discussed
separately. If you have people to manage this, then the amount of meta-noise
goes down. Otherwise, you have some people trying to merge branches with tons
of tiny commits with names like "Argh why doesn't this work" instead of
squashing them together, increasing the amount of noise that you must look
through.

So it is understandable that anyone in such a position would reject a change
which amounts to editing a word to a synonym, in terms of the meaning of the
documentation. What really matters with documentation is the question "Does
this commit improve the ability of the documentation to teach users how the
product works?" Rarely do I see a pull request and think "Is this commit
offensive or discriminatory?" because people submitting code that is offensive
is a pretty rare occurrence, rare enough that it almost seems impossible. But
here's the issue: In this case, there were at least two Commit Approvers
involved. When the commit was rejected, the committer obtained permission from
another Commit Approver. When the commit was pushed through, then to the first
Commit Approver, the committer appeared to be breaking the golden rule: Only
the appointed Commit Approver may approve commits. Which is why there was a
chiding comment left by that first Commit Approver. Now of course, looking at
one side of the evidence, it is very easy for some people to jump to the
conclusion that misogyny is involved.

It just so happened that the commit in question contained so-called Colored
Bits [1] - it carried gender equality connotations that some people found to
be objectionable. What people don't seem to realize is that maybe not that
much attention was paid to what kind of meta-meta-information was associated
with this commit (itself being a piece of meta-information about the
documentation, a piece of information.) Maybe the person in charge of
approving commits had a lot of work on his plate that day and only wanted to
focus on what a lot of developers say is the Part That Matters - the code. So
he acted bureaucratically on this pull request. It is possible to act in an
entirely robotic manner and still get accused of things like gender bias.
Looking at the backstory of this commit, it doesn't seem like there was any
malicious intent by any party at all.

What could have been done to mitigate this situation? Maybe if there was a
single person in charge of managing updates to the documentation, who curated
the incoming commits in large batches before creating pull requests to the
Commit Approver, then there would be less friction in getting documentation
updated. Maybe if the executive people at Joyent were more understanding of
the situation, then they would not have fired one of their employees over
trivial circumstances.

[1]: [http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

------
daleharvey
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
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?

------
semiel
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
Did you _read_ the github issue? It seems to be an angry free-for-all.

------
__pThrow
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.

~~~
tptacek
Once again, the gender-neutral singular "they" isn't inaccurate; it's been
used by everyone from Shakespeare to CS Lewis.

~~~
__pThrow
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
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.

~~~
ams6110
I think that's fine. There is nothing gender-specific in the antecedent "the
user" so either "he" or "she" can be used in reference (though don't switch
back and forth, I've actually seen writers try this and it gets _really_
confusing).

~~~
tptacek
The fact that it's confusing should clue you in to the fact that needlessly
gender-specific pronouns are treacherous: you're not even actively aware of
the gender assignment you make at the first pronoun, but are instantly aware
when the assignment is violated.

~~~
__pThrow
So my argument for her or him, he or she, rather than they, is that her or
him, he or she, in documentation humanizes the documentation. It piques my
interest. There is an active person here.

It's not boring, dead trees, produced for some deadline documentation, Sally
is doing something with this code! Bob needs to stop sending data!

He or she are far better to see in code comments for the same reason it's fun
to encounter latin, or star trek quotes, or even curses.

They doesn't have that effect on me. They tells me the documentation was done
grudgingly, likely by a prig. It is likely formally correct and will still say
nothing, or be completely obtuse and thick.

~~~
tptacek
If you want to humanize the documentation, introduce actual characters.
"Here's Bob. Bob wants to update his widgets." Don't pretend that stereo
instructions can be made to read like Elmore Leonard stories simply by
changing pronouns.

At the point where you start synthesizing vibrant life stories out of gendered
pronouns with "the user" as antecedent, you might consider instead just
conceding the argument.

------
thenerdfiles

        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
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
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
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> You're telling me that "it" or "they" riddled more often than otherwise does
> not negatively affect search results?

Basically. More specifically, I would say that using definite pronouns
improves search results.

> Pronouns increase the chance irrelevant results.

No, because there is no reason to search for definite pronouns, you search for
the nouns that are the antecedents of definite pronouns (since using a
definite pronoun _requires_ using a noun as an antecedent in writing -- this
can be substituted by gesture or other non-verbal cues in oral communication.)
And if you use pronouns, you get less result clutter for those searches for
the same reasons that you get better readability, you have less close-
proximity repetition of the key nouns.

~~~
thenerdfiles
I just want to state that I think we have an interesting sub-discussion/set of
theories here, even if mine is radically false. It's true or false on account
of testability, in the end, I genuinely believe.

------
dmourati
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.

------
sergiotapia
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)

------
woah
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/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48)

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-29538...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615),
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
The very first comment says that it was signed off on
[https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48#commitcomment-4736897)

------
voidr
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.

------
rlt
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
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
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
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.

------
bdcravens
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
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
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.

------
shawnz
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
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.

------
mahyarm
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.

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

------
mikesmullin3
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.

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

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

