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During my physics undergrad, several of my lecturers were German speaking and would refer to algebraic objects as "this guy". e.g. "We take the derivative of this guy and we get blah". Any language which is gendered would probably have this issue when translated to English.

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I don't think that's all too uncommon for native English speakers. While pairing, I pretty regularly refer to chunks of code as "this guy" or "that guy".

Maybe they picked it up from someone while learning English and it stuck with them.

This is true, I definitely anthropomorphise my code, but it's usually to abuse it when it doesn't do what I want.

e.g. "What the f'ing hell are you doing, function, you're not supposed to do that!"

Yep.

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