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Comment by pkd | Hacker News Reader

I liked it much more when open source was about the code and not the people behind it. Nowadays I worry that I might be called out for using a piece of code (however good it might be) just because the person who wrote it does not use "inclusive" language.

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This is a straw man. No one is going to call you our for using a piece of code because it lacks "inclusive" language, unless you decide to use a library with a name like `libniggerjew`. Or something that maybe includes variable names like "theHolocaustIsALie". At some point, you would have the blame the author of the software for injecting politics into their software.

That said, open source has been shaped by the people behind it. Entire forks have been created over nothing but internal politics regardless of "inclusivity." Large projects have rejected major features just because the maintainer didn't want it even though others did. Just because you have been insulated from this doesn't mean it isn't there.

This is exactly what happens. People crawl through projects on github for certain words and open pull requests to try and get them changed.

Can you quantify this? How many of these people exist?

To me this just sounds like some sort of "stranger danger" boogeyman. A problem that is much smaller than you make it out to be.

Here are a few random examples of such absurdity I found in a several minute search.

https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

https://github.com/kickstarter/rack-attack/pull/181

https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/issues/1569

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/pull/3507

https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code/pull/20

https://github.com/zendframework/zend-expressive/pull/340

https://github.com/assemble/assemble.io/issues/163

https://github.com/braydie/HowToBeAProgrammer/issues/68

https://github.com/airbnb/javascript/pull/698

https://github.com/lighthouse-labs/clock-tower/pull/87

https://github.com/smalltownheroes/bikini-girls-with-machine...

https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/27430

https://github.com/ardanlabs/gotraining/issues/75

https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/3484

https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/issues/5889

https://github.com/twolfson/sexy-bash-prompt/issues/56

http://web.archive.org/web/20151030100136/https://github.com...

https://github.com/pickhardt/betty/issues/11

The Roslyn one removing "whitelist", that's... Wow.

I've look through a few of these and you're being disingenuous. Someone suggesting "Hey, maybe we should adopt a Code of Conduct" is not:

> People crawl through projects on github for certain words and open pull requests to try and get them changed

You've also failed to demonstrate in this thread instances of people being called out for using the "wrong" libraries (where "wrong" is defined as libraries that don't conform to the complainant's views). All of these examples are of people making direct changes to software. The idea that one should be scared that they may get called out over the transgressions of their software dependencies has yet to be demonstrated.

If you look more closely, you'll note that many of those requests (some of which come with threats attached) are from people not in the community: they are activists trying to push harmful codes of conduct onto projects they have no involvement with.

I have no idea what you're talking about with regards to wrong libraries and dependencies. I made no mention of such a thing.

Up thread from @pkd:

> Nowadays I worry that I might be called out for using a piece of code (however good it might be) just because the person who wrote it does not use "inclusive" language

This is what I was originally responding to.

Can you quantify this?

Judge for yourself:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GitInaction/

If the proposed rewordings are just as good from a technical perspective, does it hurt anybody to just accept the commit?

Yes, it does - it emboldens those who expect the rest of the world to change in order to meet their arbitrary demands.

I mean, "expecting the rest of the world to change in order to meet their arbitrary demands" is pretty much the definition of a standards body.

And the majority of SJ-related requests I've seen are in effect just that; declarations that the existing society standards are suboptimal for the usecases of ethnic minorities, women, LGBTA+ people, etc., along with suggestions for revisions.

Most people I've come across that argue against this stuff have some sort of straw man SJW in mind that is offended at the drop of a hat, but these people never really materialize or if they do no one can quantify that they are anything more than some random extremist.

They are (in my mind) the same people that view Native Americans being offended at the existence of the Washington Redskins as people that are making "a bit fuss over nothing."

> but these people never really materialize or if they do no one can quantify that they are anything more than some random extremist.

It seems that we're commenting on an article where just such a person materialized, and their impact can be quantified: a well-qualified speaker was dropped from a conference.

> They are (in my mind) the same people that view Native Americans being offended at the existence of the Washington Redskins as people that are making "a bit fuss over nothing."

I admit I don't follow sports enough to know the details of that brouhaha so I don't know if someone (or many someones) of American Indian descent were the ones calling for the change or if it was a "disinterested" third party. Either way, the opinions and preferences of the community at large must be weighed against those of the dissenters. In my opinion we already have an extremely effective means of recourse for those who take offense - the free market, which can be impacted by direct means (boycott) or indirect means (convincing others to support your view).

My point was less about action, than the view point that the dissenters should just give in to the status quo. And that anyone complaining about the status quo is just a whiner.

Just FYI, when actual Native Americans are polled about the Washington Redskins, they are overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the name. That conflicts with the oppression narrative, though, which is probably why you weren't aware of it.

That's a different story than claiming that actual Native Americans that are offended by it should just "suck it up."

I can give other examples. For example, this past weekend saw an air show about downtown Toronto as part of the Canadian National Exhibition. There was talk of how the thundering of the jets flying over downtown wasn't necessarily "enjoyed" by people that have been in war-zones (e.g. Syrian refugees). I don't think that there was any suggestion that the air show should be scrapped on this basis, but still there were people claiming that the refugees should "just get over it" because they are not in a war zone anymore. This is incredibly insensitive. Someone in my own family expressed the view point that after a couple of years out of the war zone that they should "get over it."

So... we're expressing polite sympathy for someone stating they are offended, but we are declining to make any changes? That would be fine, except that in the case of the Redskins, we have had years of news media and (non-Native American) political activists freaking out over it and demanding that the name be changed. Some news outlets refuse to even speak the team's name on air.

In the case of a commit to a standards body - sure, go for it. As you said, that's the whole point for a standards body.

That aside, I don't see where in this comment chain we're discussing a standards body. This type of commit to individual projects should, in my opinion, be strongly discouraged.

On the other hand, G. B. Shaw: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-ad...

This reminds me, a few years back I was reading the code of a few different obscure libraries. One of them had a primary process that would spawn different worker processes and kill them off if certain conditions were met. No joke, the primary process was named "Hitler".

I didn't end up using the library.

There is a Scheme compiler named Stalin (slogan: "Stalin brutally optimizes") that I won't use because I find it in extremely bad taste.

What I haven't done is try to gin up a twit mob to have the author hounded from his job, no-platformed at conferences, and so on.

Sure, I am extrapolating a bit based on present trends, but this actually kind of happened with Spacemacs, which is an Emacs distribution. On the issue which was opened for including a CoC, the original maintainer was against adopting the Contributor Covenant as their CoC. This was misinterpreted by several package maintainers as being proof of his reluctance to include a CoC in the first place.

This lead to threats of boycott where the Flycheck maintainer said that he would actively discourage the contributors to his project from supporting Spacemacs because of this issue.

AFAIK, this only affects the JavaScript-based communities.

I sincerely doubt one would find anything remotely similar in C++, Linux (C lang), or Assembly-programming communities.

The "harder" the language the less non-coding politics around.

> I sincerely doubt one would find anything remotely similar in a C++, Linux (C lang), or Assembly-programming communities.

The Linux world is full of commotion surrounding (written) language.

I mentioned the "non-coding" related politics which seem to be deeply rooted in JS-based communities.

When you have two people, you have politics. Nerds just have this ridiculous social signal where they have to pretend to be above it.

Nerds try to out-nerd each other. Which could be considered helpful since it could motivate people to go way over the top when designing code, perhaps also harmful if that results in over engineered code instead of good code.

I sincerely do believe that as technology has become more accessible and more "normal" people get into the industry, this has lead to things being more about politics and less about solving problems. Sometimes I even think that ordinary people like arguing and drama and willingly misunderstands each other just to not get bored. True aspie-nerds don't need this, they have other interesting things to fill their head with.

Alternatively, is it possible that "normal" people have problems that are generally not encountered in the experience of "aspie nerds"?

The necessity of Unicode is a great example of how a seemingly-straightforward technical design can prove inadequate once it needs to serve the full set of humanity.

A lot of "nerds" are autistic, you know? Not so much "above" politics as completely incapable of it (or at least extremely stressed out by the attempt such that they avoid it wherever possible.)

Nope. Django communities have been infected with this as well.

https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692

By default Git has this thing called a 'master branch', we should change that too.

Upvote this comment if you agree.

Upvote this comment if you think it's sarcasm.

In my experience this is centered in San Francisco and is affecting any field, which is strong in that area.

r/php and php-fig has its own share of drama and toxicity

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