Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

Based on the examples on the page it doesn't look like they are doing that. They are talking about the "user" which depending on context might be the programmer using the API or the end user using the application.

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.

View on HN

That is the opposite of my understanding of the history here; my understanding is that "they" has, for most of the history of written english, been used a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and that it was a prescriptivist movement in the late 1800s that attempted to away with that practice.

The gender neutral singular "they" has a long history, is correct, and should be uncontroversial.

There's a discussion on Stack exchange here: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he...

But I would still class the late 1800s as relatively "historical" compared with tech documentation.

You misread me. The effort to eradicate singular "they" is a late 1800's movement, and, I agree, that movement is archaic. The singular "they" has been a feature of English since Chaucer and remains current; Conrad used it, as did CS Lewis.

> "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.

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.

We're used to looking at a pronoun's antecedent to determine its subject. In the sentence, "Jacob finally published a post he'd been mulling for a long time," we don't object that it's unclear whether "he" refers to Jacob. I don't understand why "The user receives the data they requested" is so fundamentally different. You still look to the antecedent; it's still clear.

I grew up taking great pride in "correct" English usage, but I now think insisting on gendered pronouns causes harm without any tangible benefit.

"The User" solves that ambiguity, and temporal information like "The current user" is more precise.

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.

But that's also clumsy because you end up with sentences like: "The user switches on the user's computer and types the user's name".

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.

her is still better than them!

I don't understand how. Is the user female? Must she be? Why did the author choose a gendered pronoun when they had a gender-neutral one available to them? There must have been a reason; the author isn't assumed to be ignorant of basic English.

Also, "her" is "still" better? "Still"?

"The user switches on their computer and types their name"?

More like "the user switches on the computer and types a username."

User stories a tiny portion of product development, not the sort of writing that works best for technical applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com