Anthropomorphizing your code in comments is a bad idea in general.
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.
Henry Fielding: "Every Body fell a laughing, as how could they help it."
Thackeray: "A person can't help their birth." (spoken by Becky Sharp, the main character, with reference to her own social climbing)
George Eliot: "I shouldn't like to punish anyone, even if they'd done me wrong."
Lewis Carroll: "'Whoever lives there,' thought Alice, 'it'll never do to come upon them this size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!'"
I don't see how anyone could read such examples of singular "they" and not immediately be relieved of any objection they may have been entertaining. The extraordinary thing is how modern it sounds, even when the rest of the language is archaic:
"Every one Sacrifices a Cow or more, according to their different Degrees of Wealth or Devotion" (Dr. Johnson)
"Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves." (King James Bible)
Sometimes the formulation seems deliberately mischievous:
C. S. Lewis: "She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes."
Doris Lessing: "And how easy the way a man or woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves."
E.B. White: "But somebody taught you, didn’t they?”
That last one (from Charlotte's Web) is delicious because White put the White in Strunk and White and knew full well when a writer should break his own rules.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
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 [...]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.
The gender neutral singular "they" has a long history, is correct, and should be uncontroversial.
But I would still class the late 1800s as relatively "historical" compared with tech documentation.
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.
I grew up taking great pride in "correct" English usage, but I now think insisting on gendered pronouns causes harm without any tangible benefit.
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.
Rather than the shorter and better flowing: "The user switches on her computer and types her name"
We have the concept of "user stories" the idea of which is that they read like stories. Since stories tend to have gendered characters (even when not necessary) this is just the sort of writing that tends to work best in english.
User stories a tiny portion of product development, not the sort of writing that works best for technical applications.
Also, "her" is "still" better? "Still"?
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.
The original complaint was a about using "he" when the antecedent was "the user."