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Comment by Sweyla | Hacker News Reader

With not a single mention of a female programmer (but many he's and him's), I can't get behind this. Let's be an inclusive community, please.

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You're looking at an old text here (even though it was just posted on HN). From the mention of DOS, I'm guessing it was written in the 1980s. Inclusive language was not yet common at the time.

You'd like it to be re-written with inclusive language. It's OK to want that, I guess, but... when faced with a pre-inclusive-language text, what will you do? Accept it for what it is (old, written by people not yet aware of this issue)? Or will you reject it because of what it is not?

Perhaps the best answer is to find the author and gently suggest an inclusive re-write. (And perhaps that's what you were trying to do, but I suspect that the poster is not the author. Finding the author may unfortunately take a bit more digging.)

I see. I had the impression it was newly written in a retro style. This makes a lot more sense now and I can appreciate it as a historical document.

The ToP was written in 1986, published in 1987. Many strides have been made since then, with many strides to go.

This is more akin to literature. Many stories are full of men, but this doesn't mean they are irrelevant to women. No one is purposely trying to exclude you.

I realize now that this is a historical document and not newly written, so I understand it was a different time back then. However, just for the sake of argument, let's say that it had been newly written. In that case the point isn't that it's irrelevant to women (it's not, since none of the characters had to be male for the story to work), but that women might feel left out of the programming subculture. (Disclosure: I'm a man)

Some of them are gender-neutral (e.g. "the Programmer" in 3.3).

That's great in isolation, but the overall score is extremely low here. The ones where the programmer is explicitly male are 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.3, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.2, 8.3. In many of the ones where the programmer is gender-neutral, there are often other characters that are referred to as male, such as a manager, a farmer, a prince, a warlord, a corporate executive, a magician and a father.

The only mention of a woman I found was a hostess (!!) in 2.1.

The problem with this sort of thinking is that when i see a title with "inclusiveness" baked into it, i auto assume more time was spent to make it inclusive than to put a point across and i ignore it.

Why don't you write some up yourselves to improve the situation.

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