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Comment by daveslash | Hacker News Reader

" Not to mention the recent brouhaha in which Joyent facilitated forcing out one of the biggest nodejs contributors, an individual who incidentally happened to be an employee of their biggest competitor."

Who was that?

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Ben Noordhuis. See [1] for Joyent's opinion on the matter.

1 - http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

Wow, that is actually disgusting. How far up their own asses are Joyent?

>> "an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well."

If this had been written by The Onion, and not Joyent, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash.

Someone also raised the point that Noordhuis is not a native English speaker, and his native tongue uses gendered nouns to begin with. Someone with that experience is probably less likely to see a problem with the concept of gendered nouns. While it's common for the Dutch to speak several languages, English is the only one I am aware of that doesn't gender nouns.

The irony is that if Joyent had've shown the empathy they demand, they might have allowed some leeway for error, and strove to have done better next time. I was significantly disappointed in that Joyent blog post. Hopefully Cantrill has learned his lesson and next time will seek to heal rifts rather than exacerbate them. It's actually still not too late to use the same channel - the commercial blog - to do a mea culpa apology and promise to be more reserved in future.

Interesting point. The plot thickens further, to the point where in one day I've gone from respecting Joyent (for their support of node contributors and thus node itself) to; I really fucking dislike this company, their people and the way they think. Equating lack of empathy (as quoted by your parent) to technical incompetence is just mind bogglingly infuriating.

This politically correct at all costs way of thinking needs to be bludgeoned to death.

I think that blog post is a bit hyperbolic, but I agree an employee should be punished for not accepting such a pull request.

Yes, I do know it is a "troll" account. However I also know that having non-gendered pronouns in popular open source projects helps non-men feel more welcome.

Holy shit, what a ridiculous comment and company.

As someone with a considerable amount of nodejs code in production, this kind of behavior makes me really worried about the project's long term health.

I wasn't aware of this recent nodejs drama but, boy, what a non-surprise to see it involves Bryan Cantrill of all. Only good memories from his time in the OpenSolaris project. Except not.

I guess Sun's legacy of jerks in opensource projects is yet to die off.

Ben Noordhuis: http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/12/03/bnoordhuis-departure/

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