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Comment by the_laka | Hacker News Reader

That was it? 3 instances of singular they?

Shows how little effort it is to be a bit more inclusive, doesn't it? :)

OpenSSH used his/her, so already better than others that always assume the programmer is male.

I often encounter documentation where the user is always referred to as just "she", even though most users are presumably male. In my experience it's a lot more common than the user being referred to as just "he", but that may be observation bias on my part.

As a male, I would be comfortable with using 'she' as a default. Just do it once and get the signalling over with.

I'm not a fan of "default she" or the even more awkward he/she - it just strikes me as weird pandering or over correcting.

So often the gender is completely irrelevant to the discussion, so just don't mention it. Use "they" or even avoid the pronoun completely and use "the user" or whatever.

> or even avoid the pronoun completely and use "the user" or whatever.

The problem is in practice it doesn't work and you would end up with monstrosities like "the user should define the user's own preferences in the user's preferences file located in the user's home directory."

No, because we're pragmatic people who (generally) know to not write shit like that? No matter what pronouns (or lack of) you use in that sentence, it's still bad.

I never said "avoid pronouns at all costs", but rather that there are alternatives you can use if it makes sense.

> I often encounter documentation where the user is always referred to as just "she"

As far as I know, no man has ever complained about this. Whenever I read "she" I don't feel excluded as the documentation is just giving an example. Why are the pronoun-warriors so focused on these issues?

Totally. I much prefer that we bring everyone in line with English, we should start doing PRs with other languages next. They must really be suffering without "they/them" pronouns :3