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I just don't understand how a company the size of Joyent would waste time writing blog posts about pronouns in a code comment. This would be the equivalent of Microsoft blogging about some engineer's code comment in the Windows source code. Nobody cares about that stuff.

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As others have pointed out in different comments, Joyent's participation in the whole affair looks like strategic maneuvering against a direct competitor. And if Ben is out at Strongloop (a co-founder of the company as well as being a Node/libuv contributor) then it worked like a charm.

To paraphrase the saying: "don't let a perfectly good crisis go to waste."

There was a lot of activity on Twitter around the commit.

The issue wasn't the pronouns; they were there for a long time without a problem. The issue was that somebody trying to fix them got their pull request closed with "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." It was a jerky move, and a lot of people brought it to Joyent's attention since their name was at the top of the page.

It wasn't a jerky move at all. Ben simply struck down a 100% bikeshed commit that didn't even follow the commit policy.

Making that trivial bikeshed commit in the first place is a jerk move.

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