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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Women are not underrepresented in technology because of male-gendered
pronouns in code comments.
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that.
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 [...]
I believe promoting more inclusive language does make a positive difference. Regardless, can't one do both of these things? I don't see how they're incompatible.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
You can't just drop a pronoun like "they" or "he" in without a previously-named referent (the way you could with "one" or "many"), so the kind of ambiguity you refer to here is almost never a problem in practice. Its only an issue which creates a difference between the two pronouns in the case where there a multiple named referents already to which the pronoun could be referring, and some are in the broader class that "they" can refer to but not in the class that "he" can refer to.
We're used to looking at a pronoun's antecedent to determine its subject. In the sentence, "Jacob finally published a post he'd been mulling for a long time," we don't object that it's unclear whether "he" refers to Jacob. I don't understand why "The user receives the data they requested" is so fundamentally different. You still look to the antecedent; it's still clear.
I grew up taking great pride in "correct" English usage, but I now think insisting on gendered pronouns causes harm without any tangible benefit.
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.
I don't understand how. Is the user female? Must she be? Why did the author choose a gendered pronoun when they had a gender-neutral one available to them? There must have been a reason; the author isn't assumed to be ignorant of basic English.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Forget political correctness. Using needlessly gender-bound pronouns is simply bad writing, as is ostentatiously randomizing pronouns. You are not a better writer than Conrad, or Jane Austen. Both would tell you: English has a singular gender-neutral pronoun; it's "they".
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.
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.
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".
The original conversation about this was buried @ 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
It's not ambiguous. When used with a plural it means a plural ("the users, they did this"); when used with a singular it means a singular ("the user, they did that").
Nor has it changed since Shakespeare's time. It had exactly the same dual use back then.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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..., 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
To this: 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.