To my friends in the Node community

http://jacobian.org/writing/dear-node-community/

by kingkilr • 13 years ago

72 77 13 years ago

semiel2• 13 years ago

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.

theorique2• 13 years ago

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

spamizbad• 13 years ago

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.

jiggy20114• 13 years ago

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.

tptacek10• 13 years ago

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.

r0s2• 13 years ago

"The User" solves that ambiguity, and temporal information like "The current user" is more precise.

I can't think of many situations where user activity won't also be automated, what's the gender of a testing script again?

There's really no good reason for gendered pronouns.

ispivey• 13 years ago

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.

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

"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.

rjknight5• 13 years ago

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.

ams61104• 13 years ago

"It" is correct when talking about a function.

The original complaint was a about using "he" when the antecedent was "the user."

ams61104• 13 years ago

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.

tptacek10• 13 years ago

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.

rodrodrod• 13 years ago

"They" can be either singular or plural.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

  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.

woah• 13 years ago

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...

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.

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

The very first comment says that it was signed off on https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

peterdelahaye• 13 years ago

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

__pThrow4• 13 years ago

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.

tptacek10• 13 years ago

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

__pThrow4• 13 years ago

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

dmourati3• 13 years ago

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.

bdcravens3• 13 years ago

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)

ams61104• 13 years ago

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).

jaegerpicker3• 13 years ago

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.

dmourati3• 13 years ago

Disagree. The fact that he initially rejected the PR then subsequently tried to revert another commit shows he was upset at being overruled.

bdcravens3• 13 years ago

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.

rlt• 13 years ago

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)

But I'm not a woman so I have no idea.

jaredmcateer• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

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.

daleharvey• 13 years ago

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.

gdwatson• 13 years ago

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?

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

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

rjknight5• 13 years ago

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

jiggy20114• 13 years ago

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.

rjknight5• 13 years ago

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.

tptacek10• 13 years ago

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".

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Or many writers would tell you that English has always had a default unmarked third-person singular pronoun, namely "he" for animate referents.

jaegerpicker3• 13 years ago

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.

rjknight5• 13 years ago

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.

undoware• 13 years ago

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.

centrinoblue• 13 years ago

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

shawnz• 13 years ago

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.

jaegerpicker3• 13 years ago

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.

eeemmm• 13 years ago

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

thenerdfiles4• 13 years ago

    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.

thenerdfiles4• 13 years ago

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.

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

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.

joshguthrie2• 13 years ago

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.

tptacek10• 13 years ago

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.

joshguthrie2• 13 years ago

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.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

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.

mikesmullin3• 13 years ago

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.

voidr• 13 years ago

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.

To my friends in the Node community

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