Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community
strongloop.com
strongloop.com
> But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
For comparison, here is bnoordhuis's comment from the pull request thread [2] that the post is referencing:
> Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.
Honestly, Joyent's post strikes me as a horrible overreaction and attempt at character assassination over what should have been a small matter. Rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments has been standard practice for the Node.js project for a long time now--this isn't the first one to be closed for being too small of a change, a fact that Joyent, as the main driver of the project, should be aware of.
bnoordhuis followed standard procedure, yet Joyent tries to cast him as being intentionally sexist and a terrible person. Seeing such immature behavior coming from their corporate blog--calling him an "asshole", saying he should be fired, insinuating that they wish they could kick him out of the project--has pretty much destroyed the respect I had for the company.
For the record, I support using gender-neutral pronouns; I actually support the original pull request. But it seems inarguable that:
1. It's a minor change
2. Node.js, like many projects, rejects minor changes
3. It was rejected for being a minor change
4. Joyent reacted amazingly unprofessionally
I use Node.js professionally, and I will continue to do so for now. My opinion of Joyent, however, is dropping rapidly. Node.js will either grow beyond them or die.
Edit: Rephrased the language to better reflect my opinion. Had too much hyperbole in the first draft.
Ben should have been more explicit in his initial post about his reason for denying the commit. Isaac shouldn't have merged the pull, which violated the guidelines. The community shouldn't have raised their pitchforks without first seeking an explanation.
Everyone involved could use a dose of professionalism.
An invalid but well-meaning pull request? Better give it a cryptic rejection. A rejected by politically sensitive pull request? Better pull rank and force its acceptance in violation of project guidelines. Main project backers violating project guidelines? Better reverse their commits with a passive aggressive commit message. Project lead reversing commits? Better post a vitriolic blog post about how he is a terrible asshole who should be fired!
Would it have been that hard to bounce a couple of emails back and forth, and sort it all out in private? Christ.
(Add good point about the CLA. Although needing a CLA to change a pronoun in the docs seems silly, I think it highlights that a pull request was the wrong tool for this.)
I was just thinking that this could have been handled better via an email to a committer who already had a signed CLA. Would have sidestepped a lot of drama. Oh well.
Maybe he was insensitive or tone-deaf, maybe he should have made an exception (because perhaps commits like these have some sort of special significance that goes beyond simply fixing spacing issues in comments), maybe people should have talked to him and explained why others might have found his actions questionable - and, some of this did happen - but the hysterical response is really sort of scary. Wikipedia has an "assume good faith" principle - maybe something similar would be a good idea for open-source communities, so that problems and differences in opinion could be resolved before escalation into a screaming match?
After this all-smoke-no-flame shitstorm, one big company carrying out a character assassination and publicly wishing they could fire him and his current employer dangling a Damocles' sword over his job...I really can't blame him.
I sense some subtle irony in that statement.
This is sort of like the "but my best friend is black" defense, but in this case I think it demonstrates that defense is not always invalid.
"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."
Refers to a procedural matter, kind of snarky. Hardly 'threatening'. Does not discuss the pronoun, content of the revert, or any content related to gender issues at all.
By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist, but asked for evidence and clarification instead. Food for thought.
It appears that some people are attempting to lower the bar for something to be a "threat" to be any statement made by someone they don't like (or they've been told not to like).
bnoordhuis> isaacs: ^ don't ever fucking pull a stunt like that
> By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist
I described it as spin because it focused on the initial commit & the grammar issues rather than the way Ben chose to escalate it. Your choice of quotes and commentary focused on the beginning rather than what happened afterwards, neatly omitting the actual focus of the discussion. Perhaps that was accidental but it sure looks like an attempt to minimize the offense before criticizing the response.
I'm not saying he's necessarily sexist, but he clearly doesn't care about combating sexism. Is it really that hard to say "we're not accepting this because a typo is not a significant enough change." Calling the change trivial is literally calling out using ungendered language as trivial. I promise you it is not trivial to a lot of people.
Well, that is his job, of course.
No, it's not simply the original rejection of the PR, it was the subsequent reversion of the PR's acceptance
But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. This is from top to down -- companies sponsoring it (Joyent) and many of its vocal proponents. I see plenty of energy, enthusiasm, but mixed with immaturity. "We don't know what are doing, but darn it! we will be very vocal and do it with lots of enthusiasm".
One guy doesn't want to commit a trivial change. It blows up into a media shitstorm. Reverted commits. Joyent's reaction is what surprised me -- "While we would fire Ben over this". This guy doesn't even work for them. Hypothetically firing people, hmm, so committed to Women's Rights, they are hypothetically hiring and firing this person. Have they talked to him in private? StrongLoop, a company I never heard of until this point, is a bit more mature, that's good to see, but even they couldn't resist the veiled threat.
What is sad, as a whole this episode just reinforced the (hopefully wrong) stereotype I have of the community. Joyent instead of helping the community (which I think they thought they did by writing that blog post), are hurting it.
Buying into and spending time and money learning a platform/language is also an implicit buy in/participation in the community. So far it screams to me "stay away". Hopefully it will grow up at some point.
Whatever the technical merits, I think this incident will do significant damage to the perception of Node.js as a serious platform to build on.
Most people using it will never come across this little storm.
That statement feels a little to intimate for an outsider to the company. Ben made a mistake but to single out and threaten him like that in public would surely alienate him further.
This entire situation has gotten extremely out of hand. It shows how activists can turn into extremists when faced with an adversary. I'm in no way advocating what Ben did but it's despicable how everyone jumped onto the bandwagon to exacerbate and publicize what should have been a minor event dealt with on employer-employee basis, not a public shaming.
Otherwise, how will people know who holds the power - straight White non-Jewish men, that is.
Wow, Isaac (the post author) has quote the ego.
Isaac (of Nodejs) broke the commit rules by not getting his patch signed off. Ben was quite right in rejecting it and reversing it.
Imagine this was a code patch which sneaks it way through into production. Who would be "fired" then?
This is making both Joyent and Node.js look like a joke. Who the hell wants to work with these reactionary fools?
Then you shouldn't have wrote it because most people and every reporter are going to take it literally.
Since pronouns are an issue that you want the node.js community to be correct about, would words with significance in certain cultures also be high on your priority list?
> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]
Your correction doesn't make the statement much better. This whole debate is about how words matter, and yet your words put him on notice in a public place. All of Ben's friends now know his employer will fire him if he "can't learn." Is he so stubbornly misogynistic that that should be in question?
You could have conveyed the same message by saying "he was following the commit rules, no offense intended, won't happen again" and left it at that.
And please don't tell me you didn't mean it literally. If you're joking or bluffing about firing someone, it's going to make you look even worse.
Don't you remember how everyone viewed that AOL CEO who fired someone in public a few months back? Well, please understand that people view this public threatening of firing in exactly the same way.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with the pull request. But you all couldn't have possibly handled this any worse.
That's how the English language works. "He" is used as both neuter and masculine. There is no "it" pronoun.
Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop fighting about this. Unless someone actually did something sexist, this is a linguistic bikeshed to end all bikesheds.
Childish community behavior aside, the entire argument is a moot point. There is NOTHING sexist about using "he".
If you feel otherwise, please, please educate me.
The pronoun itself isn't sexist it's the reason behind it's use. Beyond indicating (possible) differences in biological sex, what purpose does using a gendered pronoun serve? It doesn't add information, it merely reinforces gender norms.
> Yeah for sure the english language couldn't possibly itself be influenced by sexism. That's just how it works. We should just accept it.
That was not my point, nor do I believe I implied that. I acknowledge that the original reason why English's nonspecific/neuter pronoun is the same as the masculine is almost certainly because of ages-old sexism and masculo-normativity.
> The pronoun itself isn't sexist it's the reason behind it's use.
I completely agree. Do you think sexism was intended in the original code comment? If not, then by your logic there was nothing sexist about using "he" and "him".
> Beyond indicating (possible) differences in biological sex, what purpose does using a gendered pronoun serve? It doesn't add information, it merely reinforces gender norms.
I agree, from a 21st century perspective it seems absurd to not have a neutral/neuter/nonspecific pronoun. But it is an established point of English grammar and language that the masculine pronoun is because there does not exist a neutral/neuter/nonspecific one. Using "they" and "them" and those forms is a relatively recent development of modern language. Personally, I tend to use them very often because I don't want to offend anyone, and I think their usage as an "official unofficial" neutral/neuter/nonspecific pronoun is well on its way to becoming the de-facto way of referring to non-gender-specific people.
My point was, and still is, that it is neither wrong nor sexist to use "he" or "his". Unless of course, the sentence you are writing is incorrect or sexist.
I don't think sexism was intended, but that doesn't mean it can't be sexist. I'll be the first to admit it, I say sexist shit all the time, most of the time it's unintended. Fact of the matter is I'm constantly surrounded by sexism, I was raised on it, and it is what was taught to me. Even though I make a conscious effort to think outside the perspective of what I was taught, it's impossible not to internalize the sexism all around me.
(This was largely intended as hyperbole, I don't know why "it" is not the answer. Distancing and dehumanizing language seems appropriate when talking about function calls.)
You'll find many sources on all this if you plug "singular they" into HNSearch (or Google for that matter), but this article is good on Fisher: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-....
The point is that singular "they" is actually more authentic and more historical English than generic "he" is. That's why I said you were wrong in a good way: there's no conflict at all between inclusive language and good English, and never has been. The language has had an answer for this all along; it was generic "he" that was the interloper, and this was at least partly for ideological reasons—the British parliament even passed a bill in 1850 mandating it! So the ideologues and outrage addicts have been at this for a long time. They just switched sides at some point.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a good piece of satire explaining why it's oppressive by s/man/white, etc: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Contrary to what you say, "they" was used as the singular neuter pronoun for a long time, until a concentrated effort to force it out of use in the 1800s. Some examples from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824352. Some history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Given it's possibly (likely) ostracizing and there's nothing categorically wrong about using "they" as a singular neuter pronoun, I think you're on the wrong side of this.
People should certainly stop fighting; the answer is to just roll with "they".
I will agree that I was on the wrong side of this in the sense that "he" is more or equally preferable to "they", but I made another point too — that this entire topic is a giant bikeshed.
You say "people should certainly stop fighting", but do you then imply that fighting for "they" is justified? Personally, I don't think it is.
If a policy (or lack thereof) is correlated with women feeling excluded or intimidated, it doesn't necessarily mean that the policy (or lack thereof) is a bad thing.
If women tend to feel intimidated by eye contact with men with whom they are in competition, it doesn't mean such eye contact should be banned. If women tend to feel feel excluded if the founding members of an organization or club are all men, it doesn't mean men should be forced to find a woman before founding an organization or club.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Some object to the usage because:
> Proponents of gender-neutral language argue that the use of gender-specific language often implies male superiority or reflects an unequal state of society. According to The Handbook of English Linguistics, generic masculine pronouns and gender-specific job titles are instances "where English linguistic convention has historically treated men as prototypical of the human species." Words that refer to women often devolve in meaning, frequently taking on sexual overtones.
> These differences in usage are criticized on two grounds: one, that they reflect a biased state of society, and two, that they help to uphold that state. Studies of children, for instance, indicate that the words children hear affect their perceptions of the gender-appropriateness of certain careers. Other research has demonstrated that men and women apply for jobs in more equal proportions when gender-neutral language is used in the advertisement, as opposed to the generic he or man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language_in_Eng...
Many years ago, I would have agreed with you that using "he" as neuter was correct and therefore preferable to singular "they". I no longer feel that way. I'd attribute that change in opinion to two causes:
One, I'm less concerned with by-the-book "correctness" and pedantry, and more concerned with the real-world effect my words have on people.
Two, I now realize that English is a living, evolving language, and there is no one authority on what is or is not correct usage. What is widely held to be proper English at a given time is a product of who happened to have influence in society at that time, no more, no less.
Also, although this is not what changed my opinion, I find it interesting to note that many of the same people who call the matter trivial will also expend considerable time and effort defending generic "he". If you find it so trivial, why not humor the people who think gender-neutral language is important?
I also totally agree with your point about humoring people who actually care passionately about this — that's precisely my issue with this whole debacle. I wasn't taking the position that "he" is the only correct option, and other phrasings must be attacked. Rather, that the entire matter is a bikeshed, and that people should not assume that just because someone used "he" as neuter that he (see what I did there?) is sexist.
> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him.
Reforming the use of English pronouns has nothing to do with the employee's professional activities.
No one should be threatened for either supporting or not supporting a political cause or brand of activism.
There is no consensus in society about how pronouns should be used or their cultural significance [1]. No one should have their livelihood threatened for either agreeing or not agreeing with one position or another or not having an opinion on the topic, or applying their professional, technical judgement.
Without commenting on the details of the kerfuffle, from a broader perspective, the workplace should not be a place for political coercion.
One editorial recently suggested that:
"[E]mployers coercing employees to express their employers’ political views is “the most undercovered story of the year.” [2]
"Already, American employers are increasingly using the captive audience technique to force their employees to learn about the employer’s political and religious views. During these sessions, employees may be forced, at the risk of losing their jobs, to listen to their employer’s perspective on the latest political and religious issues of the day." [3]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-...
[2] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_12/...
[3] http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-part/v...
[4] Efforts to keep politics out of the workplace: http://votesmart.org/bill/1711/
You should read before commenting: the problem wasn't his choice of wording but rather how he turned a trivial change into an argument and reverted another committer's action complete with a threat.
If he didn't want to get involved, simply ignoring it was by far the easiest course of action. Instead, he twice chose to escalate to an unnecessary level of confrontation.
bnoordhuis> isaacs: ^ don't ever fucking pull a stunt like that"Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...
"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
"Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.
Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.
That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?
Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.
To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks."
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...
+* When documenting APIs and/or source code, don't make assumptions or make
+ implications about race, gender, religion, political orientation or anything
+ else that isn't relevant to the project.
That said, this is a tempest in a teacup. bnoordhuis upsets someone again, news at 11.
All the great developers I've worked with have been fantastic people too. Maybe I've just been lucky.
As a counterpoint in the node community: isaacs is pleasant, amazingly patient, and an excellent developer.
As an aside, while Joyent has exposed itself as being extremely unprofessional and prone to jumping on the gun, I'm saddened that Strongloop is quick to say things like "If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him" too ... and this is just after all of this happened. My goodness people, stop sitting on your high chairs and speculating firings, it's not a fucking game.
It's a general observation I've developed watching node development on occasion. I don't even follow it that closely, but a disproportionate amount of negativity seems to stem from bnoordhuis; that's why I remember him specifically.
Okay, it could be just me, but I've heard other people subsequently complain about his behaviour too.
I think you guys are maybe confusing the tough Dutch culture as being insensitive to some hot issues.
The Netherlands isn't the world, and only a tiny percentage of developers come from there. As the blog post says, bnoordhuis needs to learn, but so far he has not. Furthermore, regardless of the origins of his behaviour, it's still negative.
I've read that the Netherlands have a racist Santa Claus tradition and even some politicians are defending it against change. :/
Edit: found the article http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/protests-sparked-...
It is somewhat widely accepted that he/him/his is only gender-neutral in situations where the gender is ambiguous though. For example, in writing documentation.
Personally, I think it sounds weird and prefer they/one.
Not in the English language. It's debated by some whether this might have a subliminal effect and reinforce social gender stereotypes (though no evidence for that hypothesis as far as I'm aware) and therefore whether masculine prepositions _should_ be treated as neutral but that's in the same category as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform.
There's nothing wrong with that of course and it can be an interesting hypothesis to pursue - but I find it depressing that a self-proclaimed educated and science-based open source tech community so easily engages on a witch hunt based on pure speculation.
Pause, reflect, forgive... nobody here is a monster.
But Bryan Cantrill's, and Joyent's behaviour seems very cynical, manipulative, and childish. He used deliberately inflammatory language, and would have, at the very least, been aware of the fact that it might not be so black and white. He will have known that he started a witch-hunt and did nothing, as far as I can tell, to try and quell it.
No-one is a monster, but some people are either playing games or have spectacularly poor judgment. Not the kind of company you want to work with either way.
Joyent has severely blotted its copy-book. For that reason if I'm ever in a position to make purchasing decisions I will exclude Joyent.
Replacing "him" with "the user" might seem inconsequential, but it's a tiny step in the right direction. A few million more like that and we'll be getting somewhere.
Those two may not seem like much (at least I don't think so), but this kind of passive-aggressive behaviour isn't atypical for bnoordhuis. Eventually it'll cause a bad backlash. Like this.
bnoordhuis is an example of a problem that many popular OSS projects will face in their lifetime: is keeping a highly-productive jerk around worth it? On the one hand they produce good code, but on the other they help drag the community's ethos into the tank.
Also, I don't know if it's very smart calling somebody a jerk whom you've never met, or had any significant dealings with.
It's very easy to do it from the comfort of your couch at home, but I suspect it'd be a different story if they were right in front of you.
In fact, it's basically bullying.
This is the sort of thing you get from reading tabloids or gossip mags - "OMG, Kim Kardashian is like, such a <xyz>, because I read that, like, <xyz> said <xyz> to <xyz>. She is like, a total <xyz>! I mean, if I were her, I'd <xyz>".
Seriously, I would have thought that HN as a community is better than that.
Real classy.
Yes the guy was being thick, but he was virtually fired by someone not at his own company.
That decision was reversed by Isaac Schlueter (another committer) and committed[3]. Noordhuis reverted that commit[4], chiding Schlueter for not following procedure, but that revert was quickly reverted itself.
Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, one of the sponsors of the project and Schleuter's employer, wrote a blog post[5] indicating that had Noordhuis been a Joyent employee, he would've been fired. This post here is a response to that post. Strongloop is Noordhuis's employer.
[1]: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015
[2]: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...
[3]: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/47d98b64c45db8335bf7e...
[4]: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
Luckily you won't be fired for this post, but be warned for the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they
(There are example quotes in the link from Shakespeare, Austen, Twain, and Bernard-Shaw)
As an aside, do you mind if I ask, is there a narrative in India about protecting the Indian dialect of English, like you might get in Britain about vulgur Americanization, or in America about pretentious Britishisms?
However, there's a deleted GitHub comment from Noordhuis that nevertheless still appears on his public activity stream[1]. I starts with:
> For the record, I reverted the merge in 804d40e. Isaac may be a committer but that does not mean he is free to land patches at will. Patches have t…
Perhaps it was stated there?
Ultimately, it looks like Ben was fairly impartial about the whole thing - he didn't accept it because it wasn't a significant enough change to merit accepting. He tried to revert the acceptance because the acceptance had been done without approval.
Politically, reverting Isaac's commit (and especially doing so with a passive aggressive "Isaac, consider yourself chided." commit message) was clearly a mistake.
I'm shocked that such an unprofessional blog post made it to the Joyent company blog. It's destroyed what respect I had for them.
Wait a min. I remember something about Lifelong Free Hosting drama not long ago. ( Correct me if i am wrong. )
A Company to look at what NOT to do and how NOT to run.
And of course, Strongloop could not help but make another half way claim that they are the ones "in charge" of node. This current stuff aside, I just cannot believe their lack of shame when trying to take commercial credit for a community project.
I guess putting node in a foundation would make the most sense.