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Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

To this day, I still think of Joyent's CTO as Bryan "Girl Kisser" Cantrill.

If you read Dave Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Miller)'s post that Cantrill responds to (http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html), it's a really well researched critique of Solaris SPARC performance, justifying the existence of a port of the Linux kernel for that platform. Cantrill's job title was 'Solaris Performance', so Sun and Cantrill looked pretty poor by responding with a personal attack.

Can we not forgive and forget a single, isolated mistake made many years ago? I'm sure bcantrill has already been punished quite enough for that one mistake.

The Internet is not especially forgiving. This is a good case study in why it's probably not ideal to quote (especially unattributed) snippets of popular culture[1] to try and convey deeper feelings -- especially frustration -- when you cannot read the room.

[1] http://www.screeninsults.com/saturday-night-live-get-a-life....

Am I the only one who doesn't read it as an insult?

I thought it was a funny way of conceding David Miller's points. A sort of not conceding but actually really conceding and putting on an ironic attempt to save face.

A mimicking of a kids retort when he/she knows they've been beaten in a game or argument.

   Oh yeah?  Yeah?  Well *you* smell!

I should clarify: I'm not hurt or offended by bcantrill's words, and the commercial success of Linux in the intervening years speaks more than any verbal response ever could.

On the other hand, even as a Linux advocate I found bcantrill's post freakin' hilarious. There are very few times when the universe gives you a perfect opportunity for a snappy retort, so I can't blame him for seizing the moment. While it's probably not bcantrill's favourite memory, I think that moment deserves to be remembered and respected for its comedic value, if nothing else.

I don't know... can Bryan stop threatening to fire employees he doesn't employ because they reverted a non-gender neutral pronoun?

And now I will too :-)

For those who don't know the reference:

https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sun.hardware/msg/24...

it was also linked to in the actual article :-)

He's also the guy who's stated that he would fire an employee for using proper English: https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

Seems like an utterly charming fellow.

That's actually worse than his "Kiss a girl" gaffe. Hard to believe anyone thinks this person should be in charge of anything. They seem to lack both professionalism and maturity. Plus they jump to all kinds of wild (frankly bonkers) conclusion just as the result of someone thinking it should be "he" and "she" rather than "they" or "it."

> To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent tolerates.

... I don't even... I hope he never discovers popular fiction, he might have some kind of mental breakdown with all the "gendered pronouns" (assuming his current state isn't already the result of some kind of mental breakdown).

Why is it hard to believe? He is a technically-skilled person, working on a tech project. Who cares about professionalism and maturity when the code works?

I know Bryan pretty well (we're both ex Sun people). He's not as bad as he can sound (coming from me that's sort of amusing, I've got a bit of a rep as being annoying :)

Bryan is a really smart guy, a lot of depth in systems, both software and hardware. He was also incredibly pro-Sun. I remember spending a day with him in San Francisco, he was still at Sun, I was elsewhere. We had a long discussion about operating systems and hardware that was a lot of fun.

Until we got to Solaris and SPARC. He just refused to hear anything negative about either. I tried to point out that Intel was ahead and he just wouldn't hear it.

I think he let loyalty to his company get ahead of the truth and that was weird.

Not that you aren't frequently a victim of the same, but you're rewriting history a bit here -- I was actually one of the most vocal proponents of x86 within Sun, especially with respect to trying to get the SPARC guys to understand just how deeply non-competitive their microprocessors had become. And to give you my decades-old Rashomon-like account of the day you're referring to, it is my recollection was that I tried to convince you that technologies that we were developing like ZFS and DTrace had technological merit, but you felt so venomous towards Solaris that you simply couldn't hear it. So perhaps we each heard what we thought we wanted to hear. ;)

Hey Bryan, you could be right, I never really got over the Solaris thing. It was such a step backwards (at the time, it had none of the Sun goodness that was in SunOS). So maybe I heard it wrong. But at the time it seemed like you had a blind spot for anything Sun. Which resonated with me on the passion part but not so much on the lets make things better part. Sounds like you got past that.

I can only imagine the fury over the stupid decision to replace SunOS with Solaris: it was corporate wrong-headedness at its absolute worst, and the company was lucky to have survived it at all. I did love Sun[1] (the good parts, anyway) -- and I'm eternally grateful that we managed to get the system open sourced before the ship went under the waves. I still use DTrace, ZFS, zones, etc. every day[2], and that is thanks in no small part to your vision -- had it only been heeded in a more timely fashion!

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/

[2] https://smartos.org/

If I'd not been able to run Sun OS 4.3 was it? for a long time, until Solaris was tolerable, a lot of future Sun purchases influenced by myself would not have happened.

What was most galling was that guinea pig advertisement, crowing about a rather broken current version of Solaris in comparison to the still not yet ruined and much less buggy Windows NT of the time. To those of us with a foot in both ecosystems ... it really rubbed us raw when struggling with Solaris.

Fine, I assume he'll apologize for the treatment of Ben Noordhuis then.

EDIT: And the ministry of truth voting is on the side of some rich silicon valley guys again.

"them/they" is also proper English, and although he and I might differ on how firm we are about the usage of pronouns, I agree with most of what he wrote there and think it's commendable that he's trying to make at least a small difference.

At least one chapter of Beautiful Code that I can recall used the random he/she pronoun strategy, and it's distracting and hard to follow.

Making software development sound less overwhelmingly masculine is probably a good idea.

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