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they

I use 'xie', but 'they' works too.

Alternatively, just write 'the author' or 'the writer'

English will be a pro drop language sooner or later, may as well get used to it. Will not be much of a loss (not lack of it). When spoken, inhale during "pronoun break time" and nobody skips a beat.

"At first glance I thought meant it was the C++ of the web by popularity"

Oh god no!

I wonder if this is a reanalysis of initial clipping. English lets you do some pretty aggressive deletion of initial segments of an utterance, and in many many cases that ends up being just a pronoun.. hmm