Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub
github.com
github.com
Edit: I think this might be a terrible attempt at satire, e.g. the website is: https://inclusivecoding.wixsite.com/home
I will say that the repo that the bot is using is absolutely whack, https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/gender-inclusive-lang...
replaces 'mother' with 'parent', 'boyfriend' with 'consort', 'maiden voyage' with 'first voyage'. What a strange world.
Maybe not though and you and I are just that "unwoke" lol
If the bot replaced "man" with "comrade" it would be accused of being Russian propaganda.
shipmaster -> shipmaker
headmaster -> headmaker
I can understand wanting to coin a new gender neutral suffix to replace “-master” but why would they include a literal counterexample. Very strange.
It's hosted on Wix, which screams "boomer."
I think this is likely some near-retirement-age back-end programmer who is threatened by social justice movements, trying to manufacture outrage/blowback.
thrown together on a quick'n'dirty templating site (Wix)
their blog https://inclusivecoding.wixsite.com/home/blog gives 5 tips, but then lists '4' twice
> For example, instead of using using the term "Bachelor" or "Bachelorette", this term can be replaced with the word gender-neutral word "Baccalaureate".
This is a substitution that only makes sense in the context of college degrees and even then only barely. (One would not describe a Bachelor of Science degree as a gendered thing, and say that a woman has a Bachelorette of Science degree or so.) A serious website would have recommended a plain word like “unmarried” or “single,” rather than such a strange construct.
like 'trans' and 'cis' from.. chemistry? or taking the botanical definition of fruit and trying to apply it to 'fruits and vegetables'
My college literally had an option for having the "gender neutral" Baccalaureate in your degree, and I think it's becoming even more common.
If it is indeed satire, I think it's actually pretty good. It demonstrates the absurdity of the situation with minimal exaggeration.
University student looking for easy side project to create and put on resume decides to go with "inclusive language bot", doesn't actually put in effort beyond wix site and ridiculously simple bot, boom. That's all this is.
:)
Eh... I think that part is explained by "University student" ...
The fact that the "university student" doesn't even care about basic syntax (e.g. the word 'man' for manual), and repeatedly spams repos, tells you that this is a really carelessly-designed bot and that the writer of the bot is incompetent and disruptive.
It's working. Look at all the comments here full of outrage at how "PC" everything has gotten etc...by people who clearly have no idea what the actual majority of people pushing for inclusive language are typically suggesting and shy.
You see this a lot from conservative/right-wing types, because it's a lot easier to strawman and ad-hominem someone pushing for inclusiveness based on empathy than it is to present a legitimate argument.
There really isn't a legitimate counter-argument to "can we please work to discontinue using 'master' and 'slave' to describe things in computer science and electronics" so people just run to "THIS IS ABSURD!"
This is not an argument, thus it does not require a counter argument. This is a silly request, with no justification. Nothing more.
Imagine if one were to insist on referring to “male” and “female” connectors as “cocks” and “fuckholes”.
This is not a hill worth dying on.
I wouldn’t use “genocide” to describe a technical concept even though it’s been over a century since the US has taken part in one.
Why not error on the side of decency?
I have my own set of words that I need to be careful with if I want to err on the side of decency. You almost assuredly use some of them as if there was nothing offensive about them. To you, there isn't. I accept that. I'd be grateful if you reciprocated, instead of trying to impose your own cultural norms on me, thank you in advance.
If you actually want to be decent, then that means taking global perspectives into account if your communication is to a global audience.
If I posted a tweet saying that my company is looking for “refugees from big tech”, that would be insensitive even though there aren’t refugees fleeing the US. Saying that the issue of refugees is not sensitive in my local cultural scope is not an excuse if the audience for my communication was larger than that.
Given the burnout rate and the pace of the tech world, it's an apt (and even meaningful) description of the state of working in that industry.
To presume/take offence at every single word is absolutely silly.
"servus" historically meant servant as well as slave though, iirc. imo etymology is less important than the current emotional valence of words, though. nobody's thinking of Slavic people being slurred by the word "slave" unless they dive into Merriam-Webster.
Yet! Nobody thought about "master" being offensive either. But with enough activism, anything is possible. I eagerly await people trying to cancel "Masters" degree because it implies less credentialed people should be slaves to more credentialed ones.
Would you get behind a movement to remove the term 'beat' from our lexicon?
As in 'Tampa beats Kansas 31-9'
https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/o4h1fq/using_go...
What irks people is the presumption that the entire world (or at least the entire Anglosphere) should learn American history and then alter their use of language to conform to it. And that it ends up being a kind of linguistic annexation of the Internet where everybody has to make an effort to not offend Americans but Americans make little effort to not offend the rest of the world.
But there is! The BDSM community has a right not to be discriminated against! If we're going to be inclusive, we should hear them out, too...
It does not seem to matter what any majority wants. I have never seen a request to rename something because a majority of black/trans/female/... people considered a term offensive, or the majority of staff, or - as you say - the majority of people who are pushing for inclusive language. (Who gets to define this group? Do I count if I make sure to use singular they, but don't care about master branches?)
The way it works is that a person or institution high up declares a term offensive, and then it takes only one or two people to suggest a change in a company Slack or other public space. Nobody wants to be racist/sexist, so the path of least resistance is to go along and make the change. That's why it feels like power games - if things were decided by anonymous polls instead, then I think acceptance of either outcome would be much higher.
personally, as a trans woman, all I do is use "she" instead of "he" when giving examples about users. I don't mind when people say "he." I don't have anything against "they," I just like using "she" so that's what I do.
Well, about that ... Sep 2020:
https://www.distractify.com/p/kill-all-men-tiktok
or, Feb 14th 2022:
https://srhsoffleash.org/2171/showcase/kill-all-men-is-only-...
Which has some useful history:
"SCUM, or the Society for Cutting Up Men was an idea based on the manifesto of the same name that was released in 1967. At the time, it had been described as satire or parody, until the author attempted to murder Andy Warhol a year later"
Maybe that's they were running around saying that about feminists in the 60s?
Let's just be clear: that's pure speculation on your part, and not facts.
And to entertain your speculation, it's also possible that the disruptive bot is instead the genuine work of a coloured/female/young social justice warrior who was trying to police the language of professional repos on the internet, right? Since you are speculating, that's just as much a legitimate speculation as well, if we go by the actual user history of the profile.
This reeks of artificial engagement. HN should avoid buying into it.
This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police and the author should be sternly reprimanded.
It represents the thought police in exactly the same way that anyone having any opinion represents that.
And you are asking us to treat this as a representation of a real threat to free thought, and not only to respond, but to respond as it were an emergency or natural disaster.
Do you hear how absurd that sounds to my ears?
But this is part of a cultural phenomenon, unless you want to argue that wokism doesn't exist.
Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok.
It's not vague at all.
> Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok.
Lol, I had to look up what a wok is. Blessings of learning English as a second language.
What I really want to know is how whoever is trying to force it deals with languages with grammatical genders.
But we do have another similar phenomenon going on. Feminitives. It's when some people assign the female gender to words that don't have a female form, or that do have one but it's not cringy enough. So автор becomes авторка, врач becomes врачка (instead of врачиха), учитель becomes учителька (instead of учительница), and so on.
On the other hand, "autor" and "autorka" are normal forms; same for "lekarz" and "lekarka", "nauczyciel" and "nauczycielka". These seem to be equivalent to the shorter forms you list. I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word.
Interesting to see that different languages can have perfectly opposite grammar rules, even if the words are similar and the grammar also shares some similarities in other areas :)
Nope, no equivalent to "sibling" at all, not even plural. If you want to say "siblings", you say "братья и сёстры".
edit: "родня" might be kinda like "rodzeństwo", but it's not just siblings, it's relatives in general.
> I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word.
"Учительница" (or short slang form "училка") is the correct feminine form found in dictionaries. "Учителька" is the cringy one coined by feminists. They both mean "female teacher", but apparently the correct one is somehow worse or not modern enough? I don't know.
What about дитя? Isn't that a neuter in Russian? I know the equivalent "dítě" is a neuter in Czech. (For obvious reasons this is why the neuter is not being used in Czech either for referring to adult people -- it's completely infantilizing.)
What I found interesting about this particular bot is that it wants to replace "actress" by "actor". (Yes please!! You don't know how good you have it in English, where most occupations are gender-neutral.)
In contrast, the current progressive push in German is to replace generic/masculine Schauspieler (actor) with der*die Schauspieler*in (think "actr*ess"; male, female, and everything in between, a bit like latinx). Maybe it makes sense that German has a tendency to become ever more complicated like C++, while English becomes simpler? But it shows how fad-driven this whole thing is: Either gendered nouns are good or bad, why would it depend on the language?
How could you have one? You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those if you could use neither masculine nor feminine ones (not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German). And teach everyone to use them.
English is in this weird place where pretty much the only morphological remnant of gender is in the third person singular personal pronouns. Even if someone felt that to be a problem in general (not everyone obviously does), in other languages, this is either a non-existent issue (say, in Finnish), or an outright unsolvable issue (say, in Slavic languages). So basically English speakers get the benefit of even being able to virtue signal just with tiny language changes that cost you very little. Pretty much nobody else has this option to begin with - either lacking opportunity (like in Finnish) or the ability (like in Slavic languages).
Two proposals that I've seen replace all endings with either -x or -ens.
German source - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie...
Now one might think that these are outlandish ideas that will never fly, but...
> And teach everyone to use them.
...that's easy, because languages changes are implemented top-down. Considering how unpopular the neutral forms using : and * are in polls, it is absolutely fascinating to see them spread so quickly from academia, to tech (macOS, Spotify), to local governments, to normie coworkers. Nonbinary people wouldn't have to do the teaching themselves.
Edit:
> ...not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German...
My first intuition was that using the neutral gender would indeed be offensive. But children (das Kind) and girls (das Mädchen) are neutral - and it doesn't feel rude to refer to them as "it"? I think it could work.
Whitelist may be a bit different. I understand that language shapes how we think, but master seems like it would trigger people who have a but of a victim mentality. It's like the word dick, it has a meaning outside of genitals, and if all we can think about is genitals when the word is spoken maybe the problem lies a bit deeper than the word itself.
I don't know.. with whitelist and blacklist I could see how unconsciously that could cause people to see black as bad and white as good. But still.
Everything has tradeoffs and I also believe that Obama led to Trump. Too much change too quickly leads to backlash and the pendulum swinging violently in the other direction.
This increases polarization.
I think the solution is more likely not in trying to force our language to change, but is to change our technologies and culture into one that promotes empathy, listening and understanding, and for us to count our blessings instead of running around seeing who can be the better victim, which as a non-american, is what USA looks like to me.
If anything the language is more of a symptom of culture than the other way around, even though I agree there is a bidirectional relationship.
Hormones change our thoughts more than our thoughts change our hormones, even though there is a bidirection there as well. But to me, to attempt to change culture through language is going to be as effective as trying to will ourselves out of anxiety and depression.
I wouldn't be surprised if our generation simply feels powerless in this world. We face a lot of issues ranging from inequality to climate change, and since those issues seem so depressing and insurmountable instead we go on a war against what we feel like we can change, for example words, and then justify to ourselves that this is actually making enough of a difference to steer the ship. But is there any proof of that? All I see is feelings-based decision making without any actual evidence.
Again, aside from blacklist vs whitelist which might actually have some substance to its argument.
It literally wants to replace gender specific language with gender neutral language it’s literally like 1930s Germany… jfc
Reminds me of when they changed the factory_girl gem to factory_bot.
Many, many, many hours wasted in service to the idea that women found factory_girl to be offensive, which had less than 0 evidence to it.
Seems that Apple realized that they can't win with either of those as the default, so now the default voice is one that's intended to be ambiguous.
I guess if code needs to be gender inclusive there's a few spoken languages in the world that need to get rid of their gender specific grammar. I say that as a monolingual Scot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
Watching who is using Latinx, Hispanic, or Latino/Latina in political discourse in the United States has been interesting.
> As of 2018 the term Latinx was used nearly exclusively in the United States.
> A 2019 poll (with a 5% margin of error) found that 2% of US residents of Latin American descent in the US use Latinx, including 3% of 18–34-year-olds; the rest preferred other terms. "No respondents over [age] 50 selected the term", while overall "3% of women and 1% of men selected the term as their preferred ethnic identifier".
> Supporters say it promotes greater acceptance of non-binary Latinos by being gender-neutral and thus inclusive of all genders. Critics say the term does not follow traditional grammar, is difficult to pronounce, and is disrespectful toward conventional Spanish; the Royal Spanish Academy style guide does not recognize the suffix -x. Both supporters and opponents have cited linguistic imperialism as a reason for supporting or opposing the use of the term.
Is this worth our time to complain about this and upvote to number ONE article on HN?
If you do think language is an important topic, I think you should do some reflection on why that is, and how similar motivations might be driving people to feel it's important to argue against this kind of bot. It's easy to accidentally fall into an attitude where whatever things I personally don't mind are implicitly "neutral", and so anyone who argues against them must be looking for things to get mad about.
This doesn't follow from anything I've said.
> it's important to argue against this kind of bot.
But is it? What's the magnitude of this problem?
I've worked in SF and this is the first one I've seen.
> I don't know how to quantify that into a "magnitude", but I don't think that's a precondition for discussing the issues of the day.
Sure! You go ahead and prioritize your brainspace the way you want - but I'm frustrated that I keep having to see culture war crap because people dug up the one twitter user or github user with a bad take. And I'm frustrated that otherwise reasonable people turn into moralizing frenzy-bots as arbitrary and poorly conceived as a bot that changes "man page" into "person page", when they see that tiny sliver of takes.
As above, if it did sound like a topic you want to talk about, I think you should reflect on why that is and why people who aren't "moralizing frenzy-bots" might nevertheless want to talk about how they don't like it. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I've seen a lot of people say "I can't believe we're arguing about this nonsense" with the strong expectation that the result shouldn't be no conversation but a conversation where everyone agrees.
This article was, albeit briefly, number one on hackernews.
> I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I've seen a lot of people say "I can't believe we're arguing about this nonsense" with the strong expectation that the result shouldn't be no conversation but a conversation where everyone agrees.
Except, what you're effectively saying is you want a conversation where everyone agrees, because you don't want the people that think this is vacuous nonsense, to engage.
Why are new hires allowed to make bots on a company Slack server. Take away their privileges. Problem solved.
How widespread and impactful is this problem?
Not every article/submission needs to be some big, serious new thing.
struct Simba {
int father;
int mother;
};
struct Simba {
int parent;
int parent;
};
Edit: I just remembered: dogs are man's best friend :D
EDIT: Damn, the PRs did not go up today.
Why would it be an obvious April Fools joke if the timestamps in the referenced github thread are March 30 and March 31 ?
I'm not sure who is responsible for it.
Also, don't forget time zone skew: Your March 31, 22:00 can be April 1 somewhere else.
It replaces "helps" with "theylps" and "many" with "persony". Yes really.
I mean if you are going to virtue signal, at least you could bother to check out decades of accumulated experience on the topic. It's not like the first time such things are discussed. If it's a satire, it's lazy. If it's for real, inexcusable as anything beyond elementary school "first coding exercise" level.
It's up to repo owner to opt-in PRs, issues, comments, etc made by bots. Maaybe also add whitelists.
“helps” → “theylps”
“Un manuel de Metapos” → “Un personuel de Metapost”
(And I’m definitely not posting this comment to help this HN post getting kicked out of the front page thanks to the flameware filter).
Obviously whoever made this didn’t intend for it to replace a reference to “manual.” This is a silly bug.
But the idea behind the project is not silly. Defaulting to male pronouns and references happens all the time in our industry, and it has an impact.
And using gender-neutral language costs nothing.
> Click on these badges to see how you might be able to theylp
> help with theylp
> many with persony
breaks working code
And no, its not an April fools joke-- some of the PRS were sent 2-3 days ago
Think you’d need something more sophisticated to do it properly. It might actually be intractable to do this (limiting to just man/woman and she/he replacement) in a way they introduces no false positives.
On that note these sorts of bots should be opt-in not opt-out.
Saussure would absolutely be on the side of questioning our use of language because the effects it has, he is probably the biggest early intellectual source for these discussions.
Saussure would laugh quite a bit at everyone's extreme defensiveness in this thread. So many people scared of losing their signifieds that never really existed in the first place. Consider precisely what everyone is so angry about, such that GP is being downvoted so much, it is a faith in a ground that is only a illusion, at the cost of discussions and progress that only aspire to help people. Sad!
"So many people scared of losing their signifieds"
Are you saying that someone is about to steal my computer?
Also more historically: structuralism is very much the intellectual tradition from which this kind of discourse ultimately comes from, whether you like it or not. And Saussure is widely considered the "founder" of it.
People arent trying to steal your computer, but people on here are very worried about someone stealing their manhood or whatever, and that is silly.
It's also unclear if it's an April Fool's joke, or a glib protest at gender neutral language initiatives, or if it's just a well-intentioned bot with a poor implementation.
I don’t remember if it was automated PRs lime this though, or if it was copy/paste PR templates with real people submitting them.
Note that "man page" is an abbreviation of "manual," which etymologically derives from 'manus' (Latin for "hand") and "al" (roughly, "pertaining to"). Arguendo, one could object to 'manual' being the de facto implementation as it is gendered male. Manumal could be a workable neuter representation, but "man page" avoids the Latin gender preference altogether.
The question isn’t whether the bot in OP is good, it’s not, it’s whether or not switching to gender neutral language is useful or not.
Fascinatingly enough w.r.t driving nearly 80 percent of drivers were men in the 60s (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2012.7...).
You see similar things where she is used as the “gender neutral” pronoun for situations in which a woman was historically over represented
So my point was that "irrespective of the inherent goodness of gender neutral language, this bot is flawed" which was neither implied nor inferred by your original submission, but which is relevant to the discussion of both gender neutral language's adoption and also but more specifically to this submission.
That said, I believe your original comment was just `Is switching to gender neutral pronouns bad?`
Yes, it is bad (and of course that's not the only thing the bot is doing). Many of us find this kind of manipulative browbeating distasteful.