The Open Source Bikeshed
blog.jooq.org
blog.jooq.org
The militant camp feels the only way to right the wrong they perceive is through positive action and active repression of the repressors. The inclusive camp feels that incremental change that improves the injustice they see will, given enough time, right the wrong without the need for punitive actions.
This has been the case with civil rights (MLK vs Black Panthers), environmentalism (WWF vs GreenPeace), animal rights (ASPCA vs PETA), and on, and on...
If I had to guess, I'd suppose that activists tend to break down along these lines because those they oppose break down in a similar fashion. There will be those who embrace the injustice and actively defend its existence. Then there will be those who don't perceive the injustice, or don't recognize its severity, but are open minded and willing to change.
I point this out, because I think it's useful to recognize these camps and to which you belong. I'm not willing to say one is right and the other is wrong. I suspect both are necessary to some degree. But if you look at the whole discourse in question here, some of the most disheartening exchanges are between individuals on the same side of the issue, but in different camps.
The author wasn't taking a militant stand against someone who simply writes gendered language, but against someone who made a decision to exclude gender-neutral language specifically.
That the author of the pull request viewed this action as a militant attack tells me, with some measure of certainty, to which camp they belong.
Rejecting (multiple times) work that has already been done for you leans much more in the direction of some sort of agenda.
The pull request reviewer made a decision against small commits that don't fix errors in the code.
NB: I don't know much/anything about Joyent/Ben so my perspective is just from what I've read on GitHub and this post.
It shows that it's the same old Cantrill.
[1] Some folk would argue heteronormativity, but that's also a different topic from gender equality.
While the documentation pull request may have been trivial, it was also risk-free. Ben Noordhuis chose to reject a risk free pull request because he doesn't like gender neutral language (instead of ignoring it and let someone else handle it).
https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...
Personally, I would have clicked the button because documentation is important to me. However a lot of people don't like smaller fixes like that. I don't agree but that doesn't make them bad people.
Gender neutral language(especially for non-native English speakers) is quite simply not viewed as an important enough issue to warrant retroactive application.
Should it be? Certainly; and while I think it's important that the change be made, and the developer informed about the importance of gender-neutral language in future documentation, I personally think that labeling a core developer of an awesome piece of OSS as a misogynistic asshole without even giving him time to respond publicly is an over-reaction.
It's a sensitive issue that should have been resolved privately.
If the developer actively continued to include gender specific grammar and denied future pull-requests retroactively applying gender neutral language then I think the title of misogynistic asshole would be much more applicable.
One denied pull-request and a revert does not a misogynistic asshole make.(imo)
Do you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
What's crazy is that this particular Joyent employee is a VP of Engineering at Joyent. A person in such a position should have a better feel for PR, in my opinion. By claiming that Ben would be fired at Joyent and by publicly calling him an asshole without even hearing his position, he might've just have his own firing signed.
Unless, Joyent is the new Inquisition in this matter.
... except people who actually read the code and documentation ...
(for the record, I would have merged the request, as I like small fixes and think it's a good change, but I think Joyent's lynching of Ben is disgraceful)
And now we are all up in arms?
Remarkable.
That's quite some stunted growing up going on there!
* The Power of a Pronoun
For anyone else who missed it: Bryan Cantrill wrote the Joyent piece about theoretically firing Ben for not accepting the documentation change.
What this comment about Russian is saying is that these things are very delicate to get right. In some languages even more than in others
https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...
Until that moment, I don't think he was even asked what his position was and why he acted the way he did.
But the thread was immediately derailed in the next comment by some asshole saying he was glad the change didn’t go through, setting off the whole fiasco. It could have been a nice teaching moment, giving Ben a chance to explain his dismissal (which turned out to be logically reasonable if not tactful), followed by an explanation to a non-native speaker the importance of non-gendered pronouns. Instead, as it all too-often does, the situation became a complete shitstorm because some people can’t understand that “hostile” doesn’t require, or even imply, conscious intent. Mens Rights activists need to “lighten up”.
Naturally, said asshole is continuing to fan the flames: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29576...
Of course, that's biased by the fact that those people speak English, that's why I can converse with them. I'd be curious to know if this was a majority opinion, or a minority!
My broader point is that in many languages, which Slavic ones are a subgroup of (but in German as well), there exists a construct that is used when you do not want to imply sex. In English they struggle with the one/he/she/they. And, BTW, in my experience she is more popular than he (e.g. in financial literature bankers are all 'she' even though female bankers are as common as female coders most likely).
As an example "This is the girl, she is beautiful" in german is "Das ist das Mädchen, es ist wunderschön" usually uses a neutrum pronoun (object). "es" == it because Mädchen is neutrum. That's just how the language works and forcefully changing it results in terrible sentences.
(There's also a character 妳, the female equivalent of the second-person pronoun 你, but owing to the inscrutable whims of politics it hasn't caught on in the mainland.)
What I usually do is construct the sentence to say that a person [has done something, for example], where possible. The word "person" is gender neutral by meaning, so the whole sentence comes out gender neutral in meaning regardless or grammatical gender of words. Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.
It's the same in German and the pronoun for "Person" is consequently "sie" which is the female pronoun. Yet everybody thinks of a person as being genderless. Language gender has very little to do with real gender.
I, uh, what?! maybe a quick chat first?
Anybody who comes with such changes should already have proven that they are willing and able to contribute long term to the documentation. This doesn't seem to be the case here.
Since this usage of _they_ has been around for at least 600 years, they're clearly taking their own sweet time over this decision.
It would be better if one could use a pronoun that is gender neutral and unambiguously singular.
Gender Discussions on the Internet - Not even once.
The sad part of it all this: "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. "
Joyent - well done - you have shown potential customers to now be wary of becoming too entangled in your products or ecospace, lest they get bitten by the effects of your blog space comments and the ramifications of these.
Joyent - well done - you have shown open source developers you would fire them (how?) before you would establish the facts. Developers - be wary here before you selflessly give your time and effort to these projects.
The lynch mob on the internet - shame on you all. There was no issue here for you to shout and scream about, let alone bring out your virtual portable gallows. What ever happened to benefit of the doubt? For shame. The sad part is that there are real gender issues out there, but instead of spending the time and effort on those, where they do actually exist, you spent it on here, on this, which was more a poor communication at best, a minor issue of lack of respect amongst fellow developers at a stretch, but not, and never a sexism or gender issue.
In such cases, the best thing to do first is to talk to the person for clarification. You know, sending an e-mail or giving a phone call. But, apparently it's easier, more beneficial or more fun to destroy a person's reputation.
Ps. I am all in for gender equality and restoring the balance in our field. But I heavily dislike the lynching these days, before even talking to the person and giving him/her the opportunity to apologize if there was indeed a misstep.
The reason this escalated so quickly is not gender issues. This is a power play between the two largest corporate contributors of NodeJS...
Tthat link is probably the most interesting insight so far in this discussion!