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Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

He deliberately made the pronoun masculine for no apparent reason other than to stick it in women's eyes.

Why not assume the best of your fellow developers, instead of assuming the worst? Here is an interpretation that has nothing to do with "sticking it in women's eyes": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825193

And can we please put this into perspective? The language you use reminds me of another GitHub comment suggesting that reverting a commit from they -> him is 'erasing women from the community'.

This is from a commit he did over a year ago:

https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/3977d1b36c689767cc0db50...

Had nothing to do with using a masculine pronoun, it was to document how the code works.

Hes not a native english speaker either, so you should be glad that he wrote the comment in english for us that don't speak dutch :)

So here's the problem. English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun that refers to a single person. So you have to pick "he" or "she". If you switch it around every sentence, the text is hard to follow. If you pick one and use it for the entire text, you're sexist.

What's your solution to this beyond trolling HN?

Singular 'they' has been a thing for centuries.

And it's sucked for centuries. If it were clearly better, the gender-specific pronouns would be gone, right?

Just-world fallacy much?

Gender-specific pronouns are fine for gender-specific use cases. They're not fine if they serve to exclude people using other pronouns for no reason.

No, not right, because sometimes when people try to use it they get resistance like you see in the commit.

You should probably go back and read his commit message before making assumptions.

No he didn't. He reversed a commit that didn't follow standard procedures.

Except it did, he just didn't know, and this whole thing could have been avoided if he had signed it off himself in the first place instead of calling it trivial.

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