50 Lies Programmers Believe
tommorris.org
tommorris.org
Reformulating an understandable bug report (“the Froobnicator class throws an
uncaught exception when the input contains UTF-8”) into a long-winded user story
(“as a developer, I want to be able to run this software without seeing a 500 line
stack trace when…”) will magically make it easier to plan work.
Everybody should just use MacPorts to install npm to install bower.
:P
Joking aside, I have mixed feelings about #3. On the one hand, the current version of Unicode certainly doesn't cover every character in every known language yet. On the other hand, it's about the best darn effort the world has mustered towards a universal encoding.
As far as encoding goes, I don't think it's wrong to rely on Unicode as the solution. In any case, it's better than every country rolling their own incompatible encoding. Programmers just need to keep in mind that Unicode is an evolving standard - it's at version 7 as we speak. Besides, Unicode has a lot of spare code points and all of human civilised history probably hasn't invented enough glyphs and characters to use them up. If you want to talk about possible outerspace alien languages, well, you'll have other problems, and character encoding won't be your first problem.
And if you're worried about the (in)equivalence between, say ß and ss, then that's a collation problem, and encoding seems the wrong place to solve it because collation is context-dependent.
Even English is starting to adopt a gender-neutral "they" in preference to the more clinical "it". This is a product of situations where the gender of the subject is not known or not relevant to the discussion.
Incidentally, I'm also confused about why so many folks seem to take offense to "it". Is it because it's impersonal? Or perhaps because it represents implicit objectification (which I also don't understand, seeing how everything representable by a concrete noun - and even by most abstract nouns - is inherently an object)? Or perhaps because it's slightly cacophonous? Or because it implies a lack of gender rather than a non-binary gender? Would using "it" as a personal pronoun for someone who lacks any gender identity be appropriate?
Basically, not only is "they" wrong grammatically, but it also fails at it's job and makes little sense semantically. If both genders of a traditionally-binary gender system are expressed, then a new pronoun (like "xe") seems appropriate. If neither gender is expressed, then a neuter pronoun like "it" seems appropriate. If some third gender is expressed, then - like with dual-gender pronouning - creating a new pronoun to represent this seems to be necessary (how about "ve" or "fe" or "te" or something else that looks like "he" or "she" or "xe"?).
In other words, extending the English language to account for a more modern representation of gender needs to be consistent with the rest of the language. "They" breaks language parsing too significantly to be a worthwhile long-term solution.
Personally I kind of bristle at the idea of someone being called "it", even when they've insisted on being androgynous. Lacking a better option, "they" steps in to fill the gap.
I also can't stand the idea of "xe" catching on. Is that "che" or "ze" or chay?" It seems like the very sort of thing Tumblr's hive mind might churn out.
I bristle more at the use of a plural pronoun for a singular entity, which would be the case by adopting "they" as such a pronoun. To me, it implies even more impersonality by lumping folks whose gender is indeterminate or non-binary into a plural group, as if only people in the male/female binary deserve a singular, personal pronoun. That, to me, seems more wrong than "it".
Once upon a time, "he" was usable in gender-neutral contexts in the same way that "man" was equated to "human" rather than "male" (i.e. the "generic he"). If the words "she" and "woman" hadn't been introduced (and if certain lawyers had taken "he" and "man" by their intended, original meanings rather than those in common vernacular), we'd be avoiding all sorts of problems, but seeing as that cat's already out of the bag, we now need a proper neuter singular third-person pronoun to replace "he". I don't particularly care for "xe" either (though I can see where the precedent comes from; some countries - like Australia - have formally recognized an 'X' gender for those who fall outside the male/female binary system), but so far it's the best we've come up with that doesn't make English even less grammatically consistent than it already is.
I personally use "one" in a lot of these circumstances, however; while it, too, lacks perfection, one could use it for a lot of situations where one's writing would normally include a more typical pronoun.
However, there's still at least one gender-neutral third-person pronoun: "it" (AFAIK, all modern English first-person and second-person pronouns are neuter). There's also a proposed "xe" that represents a true third gender (or a neuter gender, depending on who you ask), but its adoption isn't exactly widespread.